What is Satire?

A Brief Introduction

Before writing another word I will announce to the reader, the reviewer, the critic, or anyone else that might happen to glance at this page that I am not a "scholar" or some other species of "intellectual," but a mere writer that happens to enjoy a good laugh at the follies of mankind and finds that the most reliable source of such entertainment can be found in a satire. Intellectual discussions, for the most part, are to be avoided at all costs because, if they are allowed to exist longer than thirty minutes, devolve into a pretentious sermon delivered to a congregation of the equally pretentious.

With my disclaimer issued, I will now attempt to answer the question "What is Satire."

My personal definition of satire is that it is a literary device that often uses humor to provoke or prevent a change in its audience's customs or beliefs. Satire can be presented (although with variable effect) in every popular media of today: printed, broadcast, visual, television, live theater, or cinema. And satire, like any other subject, often has a number of misconceptions attached to it.

The first, and probably the most frequently encountered, is that a satire must be funny. Satire is quite often not funny but tragic by design. As an example of a "non-humorous satire" consider the 1968 movie hit Planet of the Apes. You might find a few amusing lines here and there but it slowly begins to emerge that the dialog of the apes is, with minor changes in wording, mimicking everything from our prejudices to our ideas on religion and society. As a result, the reader of the original book (which is much deeper, intellectually, than the movie) or the viewer begins to see weaknesses in beliefs or actions that were not apparent earlier.

Another misconception is that a satire must be self-apparent, that is to say that it must obviously be a satire. In rebuttal to that contention I offer, in addition to the above cited movie, Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," an essay that is still taken literally by freshmen English Lit students throughout the world.