The Brilliance of Charlie Brooker.

This is Charlie Brooker.

Many of you won't know who he is. And that's fine.

But you should. Because Brooker is one of the finest comedians working today.

His area of expertise? Satire.

Charlie Brooker wears many hats. He was a games journalist, who then became a writer for "The Guardian" who then dipped his toe into television before fully submerging himself in the medium.

Brooker is mainly known for two reasons: "Black Mirror" and his "Wipe" series. Both works deal heavily in satire, with his "Wipe" series acting as the more comedic outlet and "Mirror" leaning into its subversion. Both have received critical acclaim in Britain, yet remain frustratingly unknown on this side of the Atlantic. So, I figured I'd write something about him.

Take his most recent Wipe on the year 2015.

Brooker revels in his role as a satirist here, taking aim at the events that defined 2015 with the kind of glee one normally sees on Christmas Day, masked in his sarcasm and smarmy attitude. While he does leave those sacred cows of terrorism largely alone, Brooker's comedy, and by extension his genius, lies in his writing. From one-off gags like "How do you solve a problem like Syri-ah?" to his extended segment with Philomena Cunk on feminism, Brooker knows how to engage his audience without losing the general message on the world's awfulness. Take the segment on David Cameron and the allegations of bestiality. In the first part of the show, Brooker makes these pig puns and jokes related to Cameron as a way to foreshadow the segment as well as revitalize the event in the minds of his viewers. And yet when the time comes to actually make these jokes at Cameron's expense, Brooker uses the allegations to faintly damn the way this story was handled by the media. The general message from this piece is a warning of sorts on how the media dictates the way we view people, and its a point that gets hammered home with his segments on refugees. Through the general population representatives of Barry Shitpeas and Philomena Cunk, Brooker ruminates on the way the media has handled the refugee crisis, first damning them as insects, then sympathizing with them after a toddler dies, then immediately vilifying them for the events in Paris. I think this argument is most succinctly summed up by Cunk saying, "The clever thing was, it was the same sort of pictures you'd seen earlier but now you knew the twist about them being human, it seemed totally different." Brooker, with the Wipe series, has always been intent on damning the media and the role they play in our lives. To Brooker, the media shape our viewpoints, shape our opinions, shape our basic thoughts with the constant bombardment of opinions, facts, numbers, and whatever else. While the 2015 Wipe covers a multitude of topics over its hour run time, it continues to subtly show its audience the issues the media creates while never overtly saying it. Brooker knows his audience and he knows the audience who will watch this. He labels his show as a satirizing of the wacky hijinks of 2015 while leaving all his views on the media right there for people who wish to see it.

And its this idea of showing, not telling, while relying on the audience being smart enough to pick up the hints that make Brooker an outstanding voice in media. And there's no better example of that then "Black Mirror".

For those of you who haven't seen "Black Mirror", the show is ostensibly about three tales about the horrors of life 5 days into a future. With 2 series of 3 episodes each and a Christmas special, none of the tales in "Black Mirror" link with one another. Its anthology format allows the show to be whatever it wants to be; political thriller, survival drama, or faux reality show. The thread that links all the disparate genres together? Brooker's damnation of technology and this fanciful idea of futurism without consequences. Each episode of the show deals with some troubling aspect of technology or of our own "black mirrors" e.g. cell phones, tablets, computers, televisions, watches, etc. And each episode deals with that in its own darkly satirical way. Modern society's obsession with viral videos manifests itself in "Fifteen Million Merits". "The Waldo Moment", at its core, deals with the way dominant personalities impose their opinions on us through the media i.e. how Trump's over-exposure led to his rise in the polls or how Fox News anchors channel their viewer base into becoming walking Republican stereotypes. Even something like "White Christmas" takes ideas like the rise of Twitch, virtual assistants, and blocking people, extends it into a plausible future scenario, and runs with it. Brooker's stories centered around these complex ideas are, comparatively, rather simple. A woman trying to bring back her lover. A man trying to fight the system after he loses a loved one to it. A man paranoid about infidelity and his attempts to expose it. These aren't huge plots, filled with twists and turns, rather they are character-based tales with each arc ending as one would expect. The woman fails to bring back her love. The man loses to the system. The man is correct about his paranoia and loses everything. In my eyes, it appears that Brooker is putting his own versions of morality plays, where the principal characters all embody those most basic of human traits. In "Fifteen Million Merits", Daniel Kaluuya's character Bing represents basic human hope in the system and, by the episode's end, becomes that hope to the eyes of the various viewers. It's easy to see here, Brooker is taking society's love of reality shows and feel-good narratives and just taking it two steps too far. Bing is what we feel when we watch "American Idol" or "Cut-throat Kitchen" or "So You Think You Can Dance" and hear tales of tragedy and loss only for them to succeed against all odds. Bing is our hope and belief in a system that is very clearly rigged, and Brooker turns him into a moral parable for the audience to take away. "This is what you are", it is as if he is saying, "Nothing but fools believing in corrupt systems and fools elevated by those very systems." Each episode in "Mirror"s oeuvre does something like this, as Brooker darkly cuts through optimistic bullshit to starkly lay bare the true menace technology poses to humanity, whether it be alienating man from its own humanity or allowing dominant personalities to impose their will on others. \

To conclude, I want to present an observation. A word I see associated with "Black Mirror" quite a bit is the word "thought-provoking." And it may be one of the few series on that really does deserve the moniker. I can't think of a show so hellbent on exposing the ways technology can ruin various facets of our lives from the seemingly benevolent intentions of multinational corporations. From virtual assistants dedicated to running your life to the encroaching gamification of day to day life to even the way social media manipulates the dead for their own purposes, Brooker acts as a cynical Nostradamus, prognosticating things that have every possibility of being true.

Brooker's heart lies in satire, and through his programs, he is given a soapbox to do so under the guise of comedy and science fiction. All of his messages lay there right in front of his audience with no intention to hide or obfuscate. His grumpy misanthropic persona hides his true nature; that of a man capable of seeing the ruinous side of technological progress.

Black Mirror is available on Netflix Instant, and episodes of the various Charlie Brooker series can be found on YouTube.