Satire in RuPaul's Drag Race (week #11)

If you have never watched an episode of RuPaul's drag race, I highly recommend you stop reading now and go to logotv.com and check it out (the seventh season is currently airing). RuPaul's Drag Race is a show about, drag queens competing to be crowned America's Next Drag Superstar. The show has been on television since 2009 and right now you can catch the seventh season, which began airing on March 2, 2015. Throughout the series there are challenges so that some of the queens can be eliminated and the best queen left standing gets the title of America's Next Drag Super star.
RuPaul is the host of the show (obviously). RuPaul is an actor, drag queen, model author and recording artist.

Now that we all understand what this show is about (or have gone to logotv.com  to watch an episode) I want to focus on one of the challenges from a season. The challenge is called "Snatch Game", where contestants use their knowledge of drag to act out some famous people, like Beyonce, Tyra Banks, Amy Winehouse and Jennifer Lopez. This game is satire because it is a work that diminishes or derogates a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward attitudes of amusement. Satire is usually witty and often very funny, the purpose of satire is to criticize in order to shame someone. "Snatch Game" is a form of  indirect satire because the queens are expressing characters through narrative. In indirect satire the characters are the focus of the satire and they are not ridiculed by what is said but what they themselves say or do.

Watch the link above, it's my favorite "Snatch Game" to ever be played on the show! 

There are four techniques when it comes to satire: 

1. Exaggeration: the representation of something beyond normal bounds so that it becomes ridiculous 

2. Incongruity: present things that are out of place or are absurd in relation to their surroundings.

3. Reversal: present the opposite of the normal order

4. Parody: to imitate techniques or style of some person, place or thing.

Most of the contestants on "Snatch Game" do an excellent job at using exaggeration in their satire. For example, Raja the contestant who is playing Tyra Banks (in the clip above), does a fantastic job at exaggerating Tyra Banks' character (SPOILER ALERT!!! Raja goes on to win this season). Raja used to be a makeup artist on Tyra's show, America's Next Top Model this relationship probably helped Raja in impersonating Tyra in the game. The game also invokes the  parody technique of satire because the entire premise is to imitate techniques or styles of a person and it is also a parody of the Match Game. Yet again Raja does a fantastic job at this (It makes sense that she won!). She does so many things that Tyra does, from her hair, to her famous "smize" (smiling with your eyes) to how she presents her answer to RuPaul, as if she was getting ready to eliminate a contestant on her show America's Next Top Model.