Warhammer is not and has never been funny

This may be old news to some (a lot) of you, but I recently learned of a minor kerfuffle that took place at the end of 2021 on online spaces concerning themselves with Games Workshop-related news. A long and really, to be frank, rather histrionic essay by Tim Colwill gives all the details, but, in brief, somewhere in Spain a bloke turned up in Nazi regalia to a Warhammer 40k event and - things get a bit hazy here - the organisers of the event concluded that 'Spanish law' would not allow him to be ejected, so he was able to stay.

I find it hard to believe that this interpretation of 'Spanish law' is correct (I very much doubt it supports the position that 'because I am wearing political symbols I can't lawfully be refused entry to a private event'), but be that as it may, the whole thing worried vocal segments of the fan base, and in the end somebody at Games Workshop's PR department thought it important to issue a statement to the effect that it did not condone the behaviour of this individual (although it stated this only obliquely).

It is often the case when a company issues a statement of this kind that it tends to just draw attention to the issue while raising fresh ones, and so it was here, because whoever wrote the statement very unwisely chose to deploy the term 'satire':

The Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of Humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in. Like so many aspects of Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium of Man is satirical. 

For clarity: satire is the use of humour, irony, or exaggeration, displaying people’s vices or a system’s flaws for scorn, derision, and ridicule. Something doesn’t have to be wacky or laugh-out-loud funny to be satire. The derision is in the setting’s amplification of a tyrannical, genocidal regime, turned up to 11. The Imperium is not an aspirational state, outside of the in-universe perspectives of those who are slaves to its systems. It’s a monstrous civilisation, and its monstrousness is plain for all to see. 

That said, certain real-world hate groups – and adherents of historical ideologies better left in the past – sometimes seek to claim intellectual properties for their own enjoyment, and to co-opt them for their own agendas.

The idea here is I suppose fairly simple: don't look at us, guv, we're just holding up the Imperium of Man to ridicule ourselves, and if real-world hate groups take the wrong end of the stick, we're hardly to blame. And in one sense, of course, the spirit of the statement is impeccably correct. A company isn't to blame for the views of the people who buy its products. To claim otherwise is sheer madness, and I've never been able to understand why it is that nerds so readily fall prey to this line of thinking. As well as being into elf games, I'm also very into whisky and other fine spirits. I've often wondered quite why it is the case that, say, single malt enthusiasts don't give a monkey's whether somewhere in the world an actual honest-to-goodness Nazi is also drinking 15 year old Springbank, whereas D&D and Warhammer enthusiasts do seem to care deeply about such issues in their respective domains. But I've never been able to arrive at a satisfactory answer to that question - except perhaps to muse that bookish nerds tend not to actually understand human beings all that well on balance.

In any case, though, it was a stupid statement to make. And it was stupid for two reasons. 

The first is readily apparent: it just isn't true. Neither Warhammer nor Warhammer 40k has ever been satirical, unless by 'satire' one means the crushingly unfunny sub-Goon Show chaff that peppered early Games Workshop materials, of this kind of ilk:

To call that an attempt at humour is to err catastrophically on the side of charity; to call it 'satire' is to abuse the English language to the point of incomprehensibility (as would be the other standout examples, most of which revolve around 'hilarious' orc/ork names and speech). So whoever wrote the statement was onto a loser from the very beginning. 

But the statement was stupid for a much more important reason, which is that it undermines the very thing that makes Warhammer and Warhammer 40k interesting in the first place: their essentially tragic view of the universe (or, at least, the universes which they depict). If there is a message behind Games Workshop's two main settings - and here I am referring of course to pre-Age of Sigmar Warhammer - it is that mankind's battle against Chaos is at the same time sisyphian (one can never win), corrupting (one will be turned into the very thing against which one fights), and yet necessary (because the alternative is worse). The war against Chaos must be fought, always and everywhere, even in recognition that it will cost almost everything that one holds dear and one will be transformed in the process into something truly gruesome. One will end up sacrificing one's values, losing all regard for the good things that one hoped to protect, and descending into brutality and even savagery. And one will, even while recognising this, choose to do it all the same - because Chaos simply must not be permitted to win. And in a strange way the nobility of the struggle, indeed, can be said to derive precisely from the fact that it involves such great sacrifice, even at the level of values themselves - from the fact that to defeat great evil one knowingly damns oneself to evil in turn, and must face the consequences in eternity. 

To dismiss this as a mere assertion that 'Everything is bad', as Tim Colwill does, is a bit like dismissing King Lear, Othello or Oedipus Rex as 'Everything is bad'. The point of tragedy, and the reason why it has always been associated so closely with catharsis, is precisely that everything is bad - but that life is still worth living anyway. The great works of the literature of humanity, West and East, North and South, have always grappled with this fact, which might be considered the very crux of the human condition. And in their own small way, the Warhammer Old World and Warhammer 40k can be considered as contributions to that same, cross-civilizational interest in one of the fundamental features of our species and its existence in the universe. Life is hard, full of pain, corruption and suffering, but the act of living is good. Games Workshop should be proud about that fact that their ultimately daft fantasy setting speaks to this great truth, rather than being dismissive of it, and it certainly should not be retreating behind the cowardly artifice of it all being 'satire'.