Close Reading Response to: It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.

     Satiric works of the twenty-first century commonly use offensive and provocative content to assist the development of their central ideas and purpose. Although considered unsophisticated and vulgar, the use of this content is extremely effective when pointing out societal flaws to the public eye. Common examples of this can be found in the popular late-night program, Saturday Night Live, where absurd skits are used to portray American tendencies that are commonly criticized. In the article, "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.", Colin Nissan uses bold diction, details, and language to express his strong negative opinion toward seasonal enthusiasts in an offensive, but effective way.


     The use of words such as "fuck" and "asshole" bring across an urgent and excited atmosphere, thus making the author's sarcasm more obvious to the reader. Normally, when wording like this is used, it is in context of extreme emotion and situation. However, in the article, the narrator is simply decorating his dining room table, and because this is not normally an emotion evoking task, the contrast forces the reader to look fro deeper meaning. "Guess what season it is--- fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash." Nissan uses diction, in the form of excessive cursing, to stress how obnoxious enthusiasm towards Fall is as unnecessary as his extreme and absurd language.

     Two details are provided to indirectly characterize the narrator and help the reader compare his sanity from a literal and figurative basis. Nissan talks about "Performing an all-gourd reenactment of an episode of Diff'rent Strokes--- specifically the one ... with sexual molestation" along with the act of knocking his guests out with "zucchini-descendant bastards" and exerting a loud, stereo-typically Italian, laugh when it happens. Now, if the reader takes all of this in literally, he would come to the conclusion that the narrator is incredibly creepy and pleasures from acts of sexual molestation and assault. However, with this literal interpretation, the meaning is lost and the monologue has no purpose. If the reader successfully recognizes the sarcasm in the piece, he would also recognize that, in fact, the narrator is not insane, but is mocking the creepy, obsessive, and socially awkward people that he associates with Fall activities. Nissan probably also has the same attitude toward people who dress up as vampires and patiently wait at their front doors for children to ask for candy.

     It can also be found that the entire article is a huge hyperbole. The narrator takes part in various activities that are not only extremely uncommon, but also exaggerating in nature. For example, in the fourth paragraph he declares that he is going to "carve one of the longer gourds into a perfect replica of the Mayflower as a shout-out to [his] Pilgrim forefathers." Then goes on the say, "Then I'm going to do lines of blow off its hull with a hooker." Later in the piece, he declares his participation in an activity of equal extreme, "For now, all I plan to do is to throw on a flannel shirt, some tattered overalls, and a floppy fucking hat and stand in the middle of the cornfield for a few days. The first crow that tries to land on me is going to get his avian ass bitch-slapped all the way back to summer." Of course, doing any of these things is incredibly uncommon, and the reader can assume that he does not actually take part in any of them. The hyperbole of the narrator's enthusiasm enforces the notion towards sarcasm in the piece, and poses as mockery of the people who actively take part in Fall festivities, which in actuality are less dramatic than previously mentioned, but nevertheless annoying.

     It is clear that Nissan uses aggressive diction, alluding details, and figurative language in his article to portray his emotions towards the ever-so-excessive expression of autumn ecstasy. The profanities found in the piece certainly jump off the page and leave little room for alternative interpretation. However, there is likely a select group of people who simply believe that Colin Nissan is just a very expressive psychopath.

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