From Encyclopedia Jr, free information reference for Kids
The World According To Ronald Reagan, a
Finnish satirical poster from 1984, claimed, possibly correctly, to be a derivative, or possibly licensed by, David Horsey.
Satire is a technique used in drama and the performing arts, fiction, journalism, and occasionally in poetry and the graphic arts. Although satire is usually witty, and often very funny, this humour is more often than not tempered by passion and anger, even righteous fury.
[edit] Terminology
In fact, the primary purpose of satire is not humour as such – but social or political criticism. The target may be a person, an idea or attitude, an institution or a social practice: in any case it is held up to merciless ridicule, ideally in the hope of shaming it into reform. An essential, defining feature of satire is a strong vein of irony or sarcasm, in fact satirical writing or drama very often professes to approve values that are the diametric opposite of what the writer actually wishes to promote.
Parody, burlesque, exaggeration and double entendre are all devices frequently used in satiral speech and writing – but it is strictly a misuse of the word to describe as "satire" works without an ironic (or sarcastic) undercurrent of mock-approval, and an element at least of anger.
[edit] History of satire
[edit] Ancient Roman satire
The term satire used to be linked with the satyr, companions of Dionysos and their satyr plays, but the Roman satire is rather linked to the satira, or satura lanx, a "dish of fruits" resembling the colourful mockings.
Prominent satirists from Roman antiquity include Horace and Juvenal, who were active during the early days of the Roman Empire and are the two most influential Latin satirists. There are few examples of satire from the Early Middle Ages; with the advent of the High Middle Ages and the birth of modern vernacular literature in the 12th century, it began to make a comeback.
[edit] Early modern satire
Direct social commentary via satire returned with a vengeance in the 16th century, when farcical texts such as the works of François Rabelais tackled more serious issues (and incurred the wrath of the crown as a result). But the greatest satirists emerged with the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th century advocating rationality. Here, astute and biting satire of institutions and individuals became a popular weapon.
Jonathan Swift was one of the greatest of English satirists, and one of the first to practice modern journalistic satire. For instance, his "Modest Proposal" suggests that poor parents be encouraged to sell their own children as food. Swift creates a moral fiction, a world in which parents do not have their most obvious responsibility, which is to protect their children from harm. His purpose is of course to attack indifference to the plight of the desperately poor. John Dryden also wrote an influential essay on satire that helped fix its definition in the literary world.
[edit] American satire
Ebenezer Cooke, author of "The Sot-Weed Factor," is thought by some to be the first American satirist to write in English; Benjamin Franklin and others followed, using satire to shape an emerging nation's culture through shaping its sense of the ridiculous.
A great American satirist was Mark Twain. For example, his novel Huckleberry Finn is set in the ante-bellum South, in a world where the moral values Twain wishes to promote are completely turned on their heads. His hero, Huck, a rather simple but good-hearted lad is ashamed of the "sinful temptation" that leads him to help a runaway slave. In fact his conscience – warped by the distorted moral world he has grown up in, often bothers him when to us he is at his best. Ironically, he is prepared to do good, believing it to be wrong.
[edit] 20th century satire
In the 20th century, satire has been used by authors such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell to make serious and even frightening commentaries on the dangers of the sweeping social changes taking place throughout Europe. The film, The Great Dictator (1940) by Charlie Chaplin is a satire on Adolf Hitler and his Nazi army. A more humorous brand of satire enjoyed a renaissance in the UK in the early 1960s with the Satire Boom, led by such luminaries as Peter Cook, John Cleese, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, David Frost, Eleanor Bron and Dudley Moore and the television programme That Was The Week That Was. It continues to be a popular form of social commentary and expression today, although there is an increasing perception that satire must be explicitly humorous, which has not always been the case.
[edit] Contemporary satire
Stephen Colbert’s television program The Colbert Report is instructive in the methods of satire. Colbert impersonates an opinionated self-righteous conservative who, in his TV interviews, interrupts people, points and wags his finger at them, and unwittingly uses every logical fallacy known to man. Colbert's finger wagging character is supposedly inspired by Bill O'Reilly, who hosts a conservative news program on Fox News Channel.
Cartoonists often use satire as well as straight humour. For example, Garry Trudeau, whose comic strip Doonesbury has charted and recorded every American folly for the last generation. With his satiric comic strips dealing with Viet Nam (and now, Iraq), dumbed down education, and over-eating at "McFriendly's", Trudeau has continued to entertain the American public, while trying to instruct it. Recently one of his gay characters lamented that because he was not legally married to his partner, he was deprived of the "exquisite agony" of getting a nasty and painful divorce like the rest of us. This, of course, satirizes the claim that gay unions would denigrate the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.
On occasion, satire can cause social change. For instance, the comic strip Doonesbury satirized a Florida county that had a racist law that minorities had to have a passcard in the area; the law was soon repealed with an act nicknamed the Doonesbury Act.[citation needed] In the 2000 Canadian federal election campaign, a Canadian Alliance proposal for a mechanism to require a referendum in response to a petition of sufficient size was satirized by the television show This Hour Has 22 Minutes so effectively that it was discredited and soon dropped.
Many modern TV shows combine satirical and comical elements. Examples are The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy which can easily use images of public figures and generally have greater latitude than conventional shows using actors. Series 7: The Contenders satirized what might happen if reality TV shows got out of hand and ended up in people getting killed for entertainment.
Satiric parodies are common on the internet; one of the most prominent examples is the news satire site The Onion. Individuals are picking up the idea and exploiting the genre through their blogs, such as The Swift Report. Also, satirical shows like Have I Got News For You and They Think It's All Over are very popular on British television.
[edit] Appreciation of satire
Because satire often combines anger and humour it can be profoundly disturbing - because it is essentially ironic, including that heavy handed form of irony we call sarcasm, it is often misunderstood.
Common uncomprehending responses to satire include revulsion (accusations of poor taste, or that it's "just not funny" for instance), to the idea that the satirist actually does support the ideas, policies, or people he is attacking.
For instance at the time many people misunderstood Swift’s purpose – assuming it to be a serious recommendation of cannibalism.
Naïve critics of Mark Twain sometimes see Huckleberry Finn as "racist" and offensive – when of course nothing whatever could be further from the truth - it is one of the most powerful anti-racist works ever written.
Some satirists have been known to deliberately use their victim’s incomprehension to enhance the satiric effect. For example, Stephen Colbert recently aired a segment on his "Colbert Report" that purported to give Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem an opportunity to trumpet their new feminist radio program. He conducted the interview in a stage-set kitchen, at a pie-making table. Colbert played head chef and ordered the women about, while they played their parts as "sous-chefs." Both women left the set apparently unwounded by Colbert – presumably missing the point of his ironical behaviour.
[edit] Satire under fire
Because satire is stealthy criticism, it frequently escapes censorship. Every now and then, however it runs into serious opposition.
In 1599, the Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift and the Bishop of London George Abbott, whose offices had the function of licensing books for publication in England, issued a decree banning verse satire. The decree ordered the burning of certain volumes of satire by John Marston, Thomas Middleton, Joseph Hall, and others; it also required history plays to be specially approved by a member of the Queen's Privy Council, and it prohibited the future printing of satire in verse. The motives for the ban are obscure, particularly since some of the books banned had been licensed by the same authorities less than a year earlier. Various scholars have argued that the target was obscenity, libel, or sedition. It seems likely that lingering anxiety about the Martin Marprelate controversy, in which the bishops themselves had employed satirists, played a role; both Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, two of the key figures in that controversy, suffered a complete ban on all their works. In the event, though, the ban was little enforced, even by the licensing authority itself.
In Italy the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi used censorship by stopping RAI Television's satirical series, Raiot, Daniele Luttazzi's Satyricon, Enzo Biagi, Michele Santoro's Sciuscià, even a special Blob series on Berlusconi himself, by arguing that they were vulgar and full of disrespect to the government. He claimed that he would sue the RAI for 21,000,000 Euros if the show went on. RAI stopped the show. Sabina Guzzanti, creator of the show, went to court to proceed with the show and won the case. However, the government and the RAI refused to follow the court order and the show never went on air again.[citation needed]
In 2001 the British television network Channel 4 aired a special edition of the spoof current affairs series Brass Eye, which was intended to mock and satirize the fascination of modern journalism with child molesters and pedophiles. The TV network received an enormous number of complaints from members of the public, who were outraged that the show would mock a subject considered by many to be too "serious" to be the subject of humour.
[edit] Chronological list of notable satirists
- Aesop (c. 620-560 BC) - Fables
- Aristophanes (c.448-380 BC)
- Lucilius (c.180-103 BC)
- Horace (65-8 BC)
- Ovid (43 BC - AD 17) - The Art of Love
- Petronius (c. AD 27-66) - Satyricon
- Juvenal (c. 55-140) - 16 Satires
- Apuleius (c. AD 123-180 ) - The Golden Ass
- Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) - The Decameron
- Erasmus (1466-1536) - The Praise of Folly
- François Rabelais (c. 1493-1553) -- "Gargantua," "Pantagruel"
- Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) - Don Quixote
- Samuel Butler (1612-1680) - Hudibras
- Molière (1622-1673)
- John Dryden (1631-1700)
- John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647-1680)
- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) - Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal
- John Gay (1685-1732) - The Beggar's Opera
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
- Voltaire (1694-1778) - Candide
- Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) - Tristram Shandy
- Charles Dickens (1812-1870) – ‘’Hard Times’’
- Mark Twain (1835-1910) -"Huckleberry Finn", "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
- Radoje Domanovic (1873-1908)
- H.H. Munro aka *Saki (1870-1916)
- Will Rogers (1879-1935)
- James Branch Cabell (1879-1958)
- Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) - The Master and Margarita
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) - Point Counter Point, Brave New World
- Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
- George Orwell (1903-1950) - Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Kurt Vonnegut (1922-) - Breakfast of Champions
- Joseph Heller (1923-1999) - Catch-22
- Günter Grass (1927-) - The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse
- Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) - Dr. Strangelove
- Barry Humphries (1934-) "My Gorgeous Life", "The Life and Death of Sandy Stone", stage shows
- Peter Cook (1937-1995) - British Satire boom, Beyond the Fringe
- Frank Zappa (1940-1993) - We're Only In It For The Money
- Carl Hiaasen (1953-) - Tourist Season, Double Whammy, Basket Case, Skinny Dip
- George C. Wolfe (1954 - ) - "The Colored Museum"
- Christopher Buckley - Thank You For Smoking, The White House Mess
- Tom Wolfe - The Bonfire of the Vanities
- Terry Pratchett - The Discworld books and others
[edit] Notable satires and satirists in modern popular culture
- Le Canard enchaîné (weekly French satirical newspaper)
- Saturday Night Live (US TV show)
- This Hour Has 22 Minutes (Canadian TV show)
- The Daily Show (US TV show)
- The Colbert Report (US TV show)
- Borat (fictional satirical character performed by Sacha Baron Cohen)
- The Onion (US Magazine)
- "Mercedes-Benz" a McClure-Joplin song sung by Janis Joplin
- Private Eye (United Kingdom magazine)
- The Chaser (Australian newspaper and TV shows)
- Chris Morris (English Satirist)
- Bill Hicks (American stand-up comedian)
- Facelift (New Zealand Political show)
- South Park (US TV show)
- Spitting Image (UK TV show famous for its puppets)
- Yes Minister (also "Yes, Prime Minister" - UK TV show satirising government)
- Dave Chapelle (comedian)
[edit] References
- Jacob Bronowski & Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition From Leonardo to Hegel, p. 252 (1960; as repub. in 1993 Barnes & Noble ed.).
- Theorizing Satire: A Bibliography [1], by Brian A. Connery, Oakland University
- Bloom, Edward A. . "Sacramentum Militiae: The Dynamics of Religious Satire." Studies in the Literary Imagination 5 (1972): 119-42.
- The Modern Satiric Grotesque. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1991.
Theories/Critical approaches to satire as a genre:
- Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. (See in particular the discussion of the 4 "myths").
- Hammer, Stephanie. Satirizing the Satirist.
- Highet, Gilbert. Satire.
- Kernan, Alvin. The Cankered Muse
The Plot of Satire.
- Seidel, Michael. Satiric Inheritance.
