The Discipline of Dentistry

In the first act of the macabre rock musical Little Shop of Horrors, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman inserted one of off-Broadway’s most side-splitting numbers in which the character Orin Scrivello begins by revealing the sadistic childhood thrills that led his mother to believe him uniquely suited for maybe the most contemptible of all professions, the mad science, civilization’s most abject excuse for personhood. In short, he became a dentist. Specifically, he sings of his “talent for causing things pain,” and despite his patients’ distress, they “pay him to be inhumane.” Seriously, the song is hilarity itself, and highlights a cultural aversion too common for a single ounce of the satire to be misunderstood. Somehow everyone gets the joke. And why? Because all dentists are sadists, of course. Is it even a true satire to begin with, or merely an exaggerated refraction of the truth? In light of my own blatant love of satire, let me offer that