What Do You Mean I'm Funny? Funny How?

I'm not sure I can be called a satirist, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I've only ever been paid to write at a quasi-professional level and for a very brief period of time a long time ago (over a decade past now). The content was humor-based and often verged on satire (by unimaginative default more than anything), but since then I've been a regular cubicle-shaped office hobbit, reserving my writings to this decidedly and specifically non-professional platform. So it's tough to call myself anything related to writing style or content when it's far more hobby than even avocation.

And second, even being generous with the definitions artists use, naming themselves without external affirmation or blessing as an act of self-confirming human agency, I'm not sure I'm allowed to be a satirist anymore. I am the one, after all, who very recently wrote a (mostly?) earnest multi-thousand word review of a 20-year-old boy band album embarrassingly recently. If I was able to qualify as a satirist by acclamation, I may have fatally compromised keeping the honor in a very wordy and slow-reading act of self-nullification.

I guess it's possible I could lapse into a crisis of identity and existential angst, but a) you can't lapse into a thing you never bothered leaving in the first place and b) I think all satirists are out of business anyway. I mean, the president is showing the press an obviously doctored hurricane path projection, with a black-marker-extension on a map to make it include Alabama, which the president insisted was included in the original projection. After the National Weather Service had been obligated already to issue a public statement to reassure the people in Alabama that they were not in fact in any danger. While the Bahamas were horrifically destroyed and OTHER ACTUAL STATES were being actively affected by the VERY SAME HURRICANE, the president was mad at it AND THE LYING LIBERAL MEDIA for not fucking up one bit of Alabama.

A satirist in this environment, I mean... what would even be the point? We're living in a public sphere made entirely out of... what? Self-parody? Anti-comedy? It would all be hilarious if it weren't all approaching an event horizon of nihilism threatening to spaghettify every recognizable human emotion into smaller and smaller strands until it's all reverted into atoms and dispersed into an unsentimental cosmos.

Or to put it another way, it's like being a fireman when everything is made of fire. Including your fire truck. And your fire hose. And the thing that's on fire. And your fireman's coat. And you.