The film Joe's Apartment, released by MTV in 1996, is an amalgamation of satire and burlesque, incorporating both comedic elements and social commentary. Joe's Apartment depicts an allegorical vision of New York City, a sort of exaggerated reality, with the addition of the anthropomorphic animated cockroaches that inhabit Joe's apartment. Though the movie, as with all satire, melds the comedic and the critical, Joe's Apartment is more of a playful mock than a vicious attack, and thus is Horatian in tone. The film satirizes various aspects of New York society and culture, as well as mocking the notion that "cleanliness is next to godliness" by reversing the traditional moral values assigned to man and cockroach. Using a predictable and familiar plot as a vehicle to explore this fantasy world, the movie employs the devices of caricature, incongruity, irony, and parody to accomplish its satirical aims.

The basic premise of the film, a young, inexperienced Midwesterner moving to the big city to seek his fortune, is hardly a new concept to American audiences. The story has antecedents in both literature and cinema - from Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie to films such as The Freshman, this plot and its attendant themes (e.g. the loss of innocence, the dehumanizing effect of urban life on the individual) have been repeatedly explored in American art and satire. Joe's Apartment makes no attempt to cover new ground in terms of plot; instead, the film utilizes the audience's familiarity with the story to draw attention to the satiric elements. Within the first fifteen minutes of the movie, one can divine the ending with little trouble - Joe will overcome adversity, conquer the harsh city, win the heart of the beautiful girl, and live happily ever after. Freed from suspense and speculation as to plot, the audience can concentrate on the satirical elements of the film.

The human characters in Joe's Apartment are only characters in the most literal interpretation of the word (i.e. they are persons depicted in a fictional work). Two-dimensional and unchanging, none of the characters grow, learn, or gain any depth throughout the course of the movie. In fact, the characters are more aptly described as caricatures; in most cases, they embody exaggerated stereotypes symbolic of the objects of satire. For example, the character of Walter Shit, Joe's artist friend, is a device to satirize both the postmodern art movement and the stereotypical image of postmodernists as depressed and cynical. At one point in the film, when Joe asks Walter if he is ok, Walter replies, "Of course not! I'm an artist," implying that the realms of art and health are mutually exclusive. The audience learns that Walter has reason to be cynical, however - his current "artistic work" consists of lying bloody and motionless on the pavement for over two days before a passerby (our friendly protagonist, of course) stops to check if he is alive. The coupling of common stereotypes about artists with stereotypes of unfeeling New Yorkers, both exaggerated to an extreme degree, serves to provoke laughter in the audience, while simultaneously issuing negative judgement on the deconstruction of community in New York. Another example of character turned caricature is Senator Dougherty, a conservative politician with a secret, unexplained fetish for ladies' undergarments. This representation of Dougherty makes politicians the object of satire, poking fun at the hypocrisy exhibited by those in power. Dougherty publicly condemns deviants, while simultaneously exhibiting deviation from the norm in his private life. By explicitly depicting Dougherty in activities such as rubbing his velvet corset and moaning, lusting after his daughter's earrings, and hiding a spiked wristband beneath his three-piece suit, Joe's Apartment makes the senator a comic figure while retaining the judgement against hypocrisy in politics.

Incongruity is present in many forms in Joe's Apartment, and is used to satirize New York institutions as well as the traditional cultural connection between morality and cleanliness, virtue and purity. The ghetto, represented by the East Village, is a social institution mocked and satirized throughout the film. For example, in one scene the audience is presented with two children playing in an empty lot, their backs to the camera. When the children turn around, one sees they have built a model crack house from discarded syringes, an image incongruous with stereotypical images of children constructing sandcastles, and imaginary forts. The institution of big business is also satirized in the film. P. I. Smith, urinal cake mogul and Joe's employer, measures his success in business by the fact that "20 million men piss on my name every day." Associating bodily fluid that is not only considered worthless, but vile, with material success makes a powerful satiric statement about the true worth of big business, as well as continuing the satiric tradition of obsession with the human body. Like the children building the crack house, Smith represents an inversion of traditional morality as he launches an endless barrage of questions at Joe regarding Joe's mother's sexuality (a traditionally taboo topic, associated with immorality). Smith's questions also perpetuate the incongruity in the film, as maternal images and sexual images are purposefully isolated from each other in mainstream American culture.

The incongruity and irony present in Joe's Apartment is not the exclusive domain of the human characters, however. The animated cockroaches encompass several incongruities in the movie. Primarily, the cockroaches serve as a mirror image to the humans, who are morally corrupt but physically clean (for the most part, at least), while the cockroaches revel in filth but adhere to their own morality, based principally on the importance of loyalty to friends. This mirror relationship between the roaches and humanity is reinforced in several different ways. First, and most obvious, is the anthropomorphic characteristics of the roaches: the roaches talk, have names, and often stand on their hind legs, gesticulating with their forelegs (mimicking the upright human stance). Perhaps the most important example of anthropomorphism in the film is the roaches' ability to sing, for they use this ability solely to parody human music. No musical genre is safe from the cockroaches' mock; they parody every genre from the barbershop quartet ("Be My Bug") to funk ("Funky Towel") to gospel ("Hold My Feeler"). The coarse language in some of the songs probably render them low burlesque, but the parodies closely imitate the form and conventions of the original genre, simultaneously humanizing the roaches and mocking the humans.

The cockroaches' antics fall under satire, rather than simple comedy, because the mirror relationship between human and roach deconstructs the myth that cleanliness and virtue are inextricably intertwined. In this film, the cockroach, an object of human disgust, is transformed into a paragon of human virtue (or, at least, the roaches represent a higher level of virtue than most of the human characters in the film are capable of attaining). This dichotomy of filth versus morality is epitomized in the final confrontation between Joe and the cockroaches. As Joe lies tied to the floor after an unsuccessful attempt to kill off his cockroach roommates, he tells the roaches, "God, you're disgusting." Ralph Roach's reply succinctly summarizes the driving force behind the satire: "Oh, like you humans are any kind of fucking prize. What makes you so much better than us? War, pollution, new age music - I suppose those things are our fault." Ralph not only passes judgement, but maintains the comedic element necessary for satire by including the incongruous "new age music" in his catalogue of human folly. Eventually, true to Horatian tone, Joe and his newfound girlfriend Lily learn to coexist with the cockroaches, lending an optimistic tone to the film that might have been absent otherwise.

Joe's Apartment is representative of a dying form - satire. Favorable reviews of the film categorize it as comedic, "cute," "wacky," and "silly." Negative reviews criticize the movie for its "idiotic" characters and lack of an original plot. While both critiques contain truth, the satirical elements of the film are completely ignored by fans and detractors alike. However, if one approaches Joe's Apartment as a witty (albeit at times, sophomoric) satire, one realizes that the arguments made in both the positive and the negative reviews are necessary elements to create and maintain this satire.