Satire

• 1. Introduction

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  Satire is one of the oldest tools humanity has ever picked up to fight power. When philosopher Plato was asked by a friend for a book that would help him understand Athenian society, he did not recommend a history or a philosophical treatise. He pointed the friend to the plays of Aristophanes. That answer says everything about what satire does that other forms of expression cannot. It holds up vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings to ridicule, often with the specific purpose of exposing or shaming those perceived flaws into correction. But it does this through humor, through wit, through the surprising angle rather than the frontal assault. The questions that follow from that are fascinating ones. Why does laughter so often do what direct argument cannot? How did a Latin phrase meaning a dish of various fruits become the name of an entire mode of human expression? And why have the people most threatened by satire, from Roman senators to Soviet officials to modern governments, tried so hard and so repeatedly to silence it?

• 2. The Word and Its Roots

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  The Latin word satur meant simply "full", but paired with lanx in the phrase lanx satura, the meaning shifted to something like "miscellany" or "medley". Literally, lanx satura describes a full dish of various kinds of fruits, a rich mixture rather than a single thing. That culinary image is contested: the scholar B.L. Ullman disputed the role of the word lanx in the phrase. What is not disputed is that the term was narrow when Quintilian first deployed it. To Quintilian, satura described only Roman verse satire, specifically written in hexameter form, a strict genre he famously declared to be of wholly Roman origin with the phrase satura tota nostra est. He knew of Greek satire and commented on it, but he did not label it as such. The word then escaped its own definition. As Robert Elliott describes it, once a noun enters the domain of metaphor, it clamours for extension. The Latin satura was quickly broadened by borrowing from the Greek word for satyr, and this produced a linguistic split that survives today: the English word satire comes from the Latin satura, but satirize, satiric, and related words are of Greek origin. By around the 4th century AD, a writer of satires was called satyricus, and St. Jerome was called by one enemy a satirist in prose. In the 16th century, English writers were spelling it satyre. It took the 17th-century philologist Isaac Casaubon to first formally dispute the etymology connecting satire to the mythological satyr, correcting a belief that had held for generations. Casaubon also helped shift English understanding of the word toward the Roman model, pointing out that Roman satire was something more civilized than the crude abuse Elizabethan writers had associated with the rough old satyr play.

• 3. What Satire Actually Does

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  Northrop Frye, writing as a literary critic, captured the core of the form in five words: "in satire, irony is militant". That militancy is the key distinction. Satire often appears to approve of, or at least to accept as natural, the very things the satirist wants to question. This is why it confuses people. A typical misreading is to mistake the satirist's persona for the satirist's actual position. When Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal suggested that Irish peasants be encouraged to sell their own children as food for the rich, many readers at the time took it as a genuine economic recommendation. Swift's real purpose was to attack the indifference of the powerful to desperate poverty. The Nobel laureate playwright Dario Fo drew a sharp line between satire and what he called teasing, or sfottò. Teasing, in his account, is a shallow parody of physical appearance and manner; it humanizes and draws sympathy for whoever it targets. Hermann Goring, Fo noted, actively propagated jokes against himself with the aim of appearing more human. Satire does the opposite: it goes against power and its oppressions, carries a moral dimension, and makes a judgment. Fo offered a practical test: real satire arouses an outraged and violent reaction. The more strongly those in power try to stop it, by his reasoning, the better the work is doing its job. Max Eastman framed the same idea in terms of temperature, describing a spectrum of satiric biting from satire proper at the hot end to mere kidding at the cool end. And the Ig Nobel Prize organizers put the double motion of satire in plain terms: first make people laugh, then make them think.

• 4. Three Ancient Traditions

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  One of the earliest surviving examples that scholars classify as satire comes from Egyptian writing at the beginning of the second millennium BC. The Satire of the Trades is a text addressed to students tired of their studies, arguing that their lot as scribes is far superior to that of ordinary working men. The Papyrus Anastasi I, from the late second millennium BC, contains a satirical letter that begins by praising its recipient, then pivots to mocking the reader's meagre knowledge and achievements. The Greeks had no single word for what we now call satire, though they practiced the thing itself. Aristophanes wrote plays whose political and social commentary could get him into serious trouble: he was persecuted by the powerful demagogue Cleon, who was also a target of his comedy The Knights. His work turned on images of filth and disease, a tradition that literary critics connect to satire's long relationship with the grotesque. The Roman tradition produced the two satirists whose names still define the genre's major moods. Horace, born in 65 BC and dying in 8 BC, addressed the follies of Roman and Greek philosophical life with gentle mockery and self-deprecating humor. His goal, in the language that later came to describe his style, was to heal situations with smiles. Juvenal, writing in the late first and early second century AD, worked in a harsher register. He actively attacked public officials and institutions, regarding their opinions not merely as wrong but as evil. Jonathan Swift is described by scholars as a writer who borrowed heavily from Juvenal's techniques in his critique of contemporary English society. The oldest form of satire still in use is the Menippean satire, traced to Menippus of Gadara, whose own writings are lost but whose admirers mixed seriousness and mockery in dialogues and diatribes.

• 5. Suppression and Censorship

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  In 1599, the Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift and the Bishop of London Richard Bancroft issued a decree that ordered the burning of verse satires by John Marston, Thomas Middleton, Joseph Hall, and others. The decree, now known as the Bishops' Ban of 1599, also required histories and plays to be specially approved by a member of the Queen's Privy Council, and it prohibited future printing of verse satire. Scholars have puzzled over the motives; some of the banned books had been licensed by the same authorities less than a year before. The ban was in any case little enforced, even by the authority that issued it. Suppression proved far more systematic under totalitarian regimes. In the Soviet Union, dissidents including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov faced strong government pressure. Satire of everyday Soviet life was tolerated, with Arkady Raikin becoming its most prominent practitioner, but political satire survived mainly in the form of jokes and anecdotes, particularly those mocking Brezhnev's narrow-mindedness and his appetite for awards and decorations. The state of political satire in any society, as the source observes, directly reflects the degree of civil liberties present. In 2005, the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Muhammad triggered protests across the Near East; embassies were attacked, and the violence killed 139 people across mainly four countries. In 2009, the South African Broadcasting Corporation shelved a satirical television show by cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro and later pulled a documentary about political satire featuring him, hours before it was scheduled to air. The legal exposure for satirists varies sharply by jurisdiction. In Germany, Japan, and Italy, satire is protected by the constitution. In Australia, a September 2017 dispute over The Juice Media's satirical Coat of Harms logo was followed within five days by a bill before parliament that would have made certain satirical impersonations punishable by two to five years in prison.

• 6. Satire as Prophecy

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  Benjamin Franklin, while serving as an American envoy to France, anonymously published a letter in 1784 suggesting that Parisians economise on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. The letter was a satirical joke; the policy it described, daylight saving time, was not actually proposed until 1907. The pattern of satire anticipating reality appears across several centuries. In 1975, the first episode of Saturday Night Live included an advertisement for a fictional triple-blade razor called the Triple-Trac. In 2001, Gillette introduced the Mach3. In 2004, The Onion ran a mock article predicting a five-blade razor; in 2006, Gillette released the Fusion. In January 2001, The Onion ran a piece headlined "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over," in which the newly elected George Bush vowed to develop expensive weapons technologies and engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict, while also promising tax cuts that would lead to recession. The article anticipated the Iraq War, the Bush tax cuts, and the Great Recession. After the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, The Onion ran a headline about the United States soothing an upset Netanyahu with a shipment of ballistic missiles. Reports of the Obama administration offering military upgrades to Israel broke the following day. David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest described a celebrity president named Johnny Gentle whose signature policy was the erection of a wall between the United States and Canada, with the Canadian government compelled to pay for it. Saul Alinsky, the US community organizer and author of Rules for Radicals, put the underlying mechanism plainly: "Humour is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to people are satire and ridicule."