Satire

1867 edition of Punch, a ground-breaking British magazine of popular literary satire.

Satire (sometimes incorrectly said to be from Latin satura lanx, "medley, dish of colourful fruits" [especially in the Early Modern Age] but actually deriving its name from the Greek satyr play, see below) is an artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to bring about improvement. It is used in graphic arts and performing arts as well. Although satire is usually witty, and often very funny, the purpose of satire is not primarily humour but criticism of an event, an individual or a group in a clever manner.

Satire usually has a definite target, which may be a person or group of people, an idea or attitude, an institution or a social practice. It is found in many artistic forms of expression, including literature, plays, commentary, and media such as song lyrics. Often the target is examined by being held up for ridicule, typically in the hope of shaming it into reform. A very common, almost defining feature of satire is a strong vein of irony or sarcasm. Also, parody, burlesque, exaggeration, juxtaposition, comparison, analogy, and double entendre are devices frequently used in satirical 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. Satirical writing or drama often professes to approve values that are the diametric opposite of what the satirist actually wishes to promote.

There is also a formless genre known as Menippean satire.

History of Western Satire

Greece and Ancient Rome

Aristophanes, a Greek playwright, is one of the best known early satirists; he is particularly famous for his political satire in which he criticized the powerful Cleon (as in The Knights) and for the persecution he underwent.

The first to discuss satire critically was Quintilian, who invented the term to describe the writings of Lucilius. In the 16th century, most believed that the term satire came from the Greek satyr; satyrs were the companions of Dionysos and central characters of the satyr plays of the Theatre of Ancient Greece. Its derivatives satirical and satirise are indeed, but the style of the Roman satire is rather linked to the satira, or satura lanx, a "dish of fruits" resembling the colourful mockings or figuratively a "medley". Pliny reports that the 6th century BC poet Hipponax wrote satirae that were so cruel that the offended hanged themselves. The confusion with the satyr supported the understanding of satire as biting, like Juvenal, and not mild, like Horace, method of criticism in Early Modern Europe until the 17th century.

Criticism of Roman emperors (notably Augustus) needed to be presented in veiled ironical terms - but the term when applied to Latin works actually titled as "satires" is much wider than in the modern sense of the word, including fantastic and highly coloured humorous writing with little or no real mocking intent.

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. Other important Roman satirists are Lucilius and Persius.

Middle Ages

There are examples of satire from the Early Middle Ages, especially songs by goliards or vagants now best known as an anthology called Carmina Burana and made famous as texts of a composition by the 20th century composer Carl Orff. Satirical poetry is believed to have been popular, although little has survived. With the advent of the High Middle Ages and the birth of modern vernacular literature in the 12th century, it began to be used again, most notably by Chaucer. The disrespectful manner was considered "Unchristian" and ignored but for the moral satire, which mocked misbehavior in Christian terms. Examples are Livre des Manières (~1170), Till Eulenspiegel and Reynard the Fox, and in some of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Its (more overt) comeback was in Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff (1494), Erasmus' Moriae Encomium (1509) and Thomas More's Utopia (1516).

Early modern western satire

The Elizabethan (i.e. 16th century English) writers did not know about the real origin of the word satire, and stressed only the Greek-influenced derivative, so that they believed it to relate to the half-animal, half-human satyr, that lived in the wild and was full of grim. They related it only to the notoriously rude, harse and sharp satyr play. That way, authors attempting satire developed an even more biting pamphlet than the (well-known) Roman original satire was. The discussion ended when French Huguenot Isaac Casaubon discovered in 1605 that satire was a Roman term, ending the misunderstanding. Since then it referred again to the "amendment of vices" (Dryden).

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). In the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th century advocating rationality, began the breakthrough of English satire, largely due to the creation of Tory and Whig groups and the necessity to convey the true meaning of criticism, especially true for Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Here, astute and biting satire of institutions and individuals became a popular weapon. Although Isaac Casaubon discovered and published Quintilian's writing and presented the original meaning of the term (satira, not satyr), Early Modern satire was already an established genre, but the sense of wittiness (reflecting the "dishfull of fruits") became more important again.

Jonathan Swift was one of the greatest of Anglo-Irish satirists, and one of the first to practice modern journalistic satire. For instance, his "A Modest Proposal" suggest that poor parents be encouraged to sell their own children as food, or dissenters be slaughtered by the High Church. 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.

Anglo-American satire

Ebenezer Cooke, author of "The Sot-Weed Factor," is possibly the first to bring satire to the British colonies; Benjamin Franklin and others followed, using satire to shape an emerging nation's culture through shaping its sense of the ridiculous.

Mark Twain was a great American satirist: his novel Huckleberry Finn is set in the ante-bellum South, where the moral values Twain wishes to promote are completely turned on their heads. His hero, Huck, is a rather simple but good-hearted lad who 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.

Twain's younger contemporary Ambrose Bierce gained notoriety as a cynic, pessimist and black humourist with his dark, bitterly ironic stories, many set during the American Civil War, which satirised the limitations of human perception and reason. Bierce's most famous work of satire is probably The Devil's Dictionary, in which the definitions mock cant, hypocrisy and received wisdom.

20th century western 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 and United States. The film, The Great Dictator (1940) by Charlie Chaplin is a satire on Adolf Hitler and his Nazi army; many social critics of the time, such as Dorothy Parker and H. L. Mencken used satire as their main weapon, and Mencken in particular is noted for having said that "one horse laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms" in the persuasion of the public to accept a criticism.

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.

Contemporary western satire

Stephen Colbert’s television program The Colbert Report is instructive in the methods of contemporary Western satire. Colbert's character is 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. In doing so, he demonstrates the principle of modern American satire: the ridicule of the actions of politicians and other public figures by taking all their statements and purported beliefs to their furthest (supposedly) logical conclusion, thus revealing their hypocrisy and stupidity. Colbert's character is generally considered to be inspired by Bill O'Reilly, who hosts a conservative news program on Fox News Channel, though Colbert usually attacks the American Right in general, rather than just O'Reilly in particular.

Cartoonists often use satire as well as straight humour. Garry Trudeau, in particular, whose comic strip Doonesbury has charted and recorded every American folly for the last generation. With his story lines dealing with Vietnam (and now, Iraq), dumbed-down education, and over-eating at "McFriendly's", Trudeau exemplified humor mixed with criticism. 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 experiencing a nasty and painful divorce like heterosexuals. This, of course, satirized the claim that gay unions would denigrate the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Doonesbury also presents an example of how satire can cause social change. The comic strip satirized a Florida county that had a law requiring minorities to have a passcard in the area; the law was soon repealed with an act nicknamed the Doonesbury Act. 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.

Like their literary predecessors, many recent modern TV satires combine satirical and comical elements. The most prominent are the animated series The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy. The children's cartoon Spongebob Squarepants is notable for its use of witty social satire, although it is not intended for children to understand. Animated shows can easily use images of public figures and generally have greater freedom to do so than conventional shows using actors. Filmed satire, however, has been less common and less successful. The recent Hollywood comedy, American Dreamz, for example, which satirized instant celebrity and the George Bush administration, was criticized for taking on a too-easy target.

Satiric parodies are common on the internet; one of the most prominent examples is the news satire site The Onion. Viral videos are commonplace on the internet and have become a prominent outlet for satiric parodies such as JibJab's "This Land", which was linked to by thousands of websites worldwide and featured several times by national print and television media.

Satirical shows such as Have I Got News For You and They Think It's All Over are also popular on British television.

History of Persian satire

Main article: Persian satire

Obeid e zakani introduced satire into Persia during the 14th century. Between 1905 and 1911, Bibi Khatoon Astarabadi and other Iranian writers wrote notable satires.

Appreciation of satire

Because satire often combines anger and humour it can be profoundly disturbing - because it is essentially ironic or sarcastic, 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 of its publication, many people misunderstood Swift’s purpose in "A Modest Proposal" – assuming it to be a serious recommendation of cannibalism.

Some critics of Mark Twain see Huckleberry Finn as racist and offensive while others claim it is one of the most powerful anti-racist works ever written.

Satire under fire

Because satire is stealthy criticism, it frequently escapes censorship. Periodically, however, it runs into serious opposition.

In 1599, the Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift and the Bishop of London George Abbot, 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 histories and 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 attacked 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 show never went on air again.

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.

In 2005, the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy caused global protests by offended Muslims and violent attacks with many fatalities in the Near East. It was not the first case of Muslim protests against criticism in the form of satire, but the Western world was surprised by the hostility of the reaction: Any country's flag in which a newspaper chose to publish the parodies was being burnt in a Near East country, then embassies were attacked, killing 139 people in mainly four countries (see article); politicians throughout Europe agreed that satire was an aspect of the freedom of speech, and therefore to be a protected means of dialogue. Persia threatened to start an International Holocaust Cartoon Competition, which was immediatly responded to by Jews with a Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest. Although not really satirical, Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses from 1988 was similarly violent; Khomeinei responded with a fatwa, death sentence, for the author, resulting in a 10-year breach of Irano-British diplomatic relations and a continued threat to the author's life.

In 2006 British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen released Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan a "mockumentary" that satirized everyone, from high society to frat boys. Criticism of the film was heavy, from claims of antisemitism (forgetting the author is Jewish), to the massive boycott of the film by the Kazakh government; the film itself had been a reaction to a longer quarrel between the government and the comedian.

Satire being prophetic

Satire is often prophetic, leading to invent jokes that precede events. Among the eminent examples is the 1784 presaging of modern Daylight saving time, later actually proposed in 1907. While an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin anonymously published a letter in 1784 suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by arising earlier to use morning sunlight. In the 1920s an English cartoonist imagined a very laughable thing for that time: a hotel for cars. He drew a Multi-storey car park.

See also

• List of satirists and satires

References

• Lee, Jae Num. "Scatology in Continental Satirical Writings from Aristophanes to Rabelais" and "English Scatological Writings from Skelton to Pope." Swift and Scatological Satire. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1971. 7-22; 23-53.
• 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 [2], 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.