|
Satire is a technique of ridicule (of a person, an idea or attitude, an institution or social practice) that is characterized by subtlety. Satire is generally witty, but is not essentially comedic. Satire is often not clearly distinguished from related literary devices and genres such as parody, irony, sarcasm, burlesque, exaggeration, and double entendre. The etymology of the English word "satire" provides limited insight into the modern usage of the word and its methods. It seems derive from the latin word "satura," which referred to a medley of ingredients. The term is applied now to language (written or spoken) that is a "mixture" of apparent approval and criticism. The satirist uses mock-approval, or deadpan to draw the reader into his fictional world.
Satire as Moral Fiction In order to clarify what satire is "in-itself", apart from other techniques of social commentary and criticism, it is useful to look at a pure instance of it. Jonathan Swift suggests in his "Modest Proposal" that poor parents 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 now agreed to be ridicule of an Irish government indifferent to the plight of its desperately poor citizens. Some found it to be in bad taste, but "good taste" is not a criterion to judge satire. Before it was recognized as satire, Swift's "proposal" was taken to be a serious recommendation of cannibalism, and he was reviled. Swift's other satires, such as Gulliver's Travels are mixed with comedy. A less well known case of moral fiction may be found in Plato, where one of his characters (Pausanias at the Symposium) argues that boys ought to be ashamed of submitting to sex with older men when they are looking for money or favors, or if they are afraid of being ill-treated (Symposium 184a-c). (He says the laws of Athens "encourage" them to submit if they are hoping to gain wisdom from the encounter.) In this pedophile's "Margaritaville", Pausanias pretends that adults never bear any shame in man-boy love affairs (even if they have tried to bribe or force a boy into sex), but that some ill-motivated boys do. A satirist's fiction may be "material" as well as moral. For example, in the bible, Lot's daughters take turns raping their father after getting him drunk. (Genesis 19:30-38). Here, the bible writer is not content to accuse his enemies of being drunks who rape their own daughters. He exaggerates their vileness by inverting it. The daughters of Lot are said to be the maternal ancestors of the Moabites and the Ammonites, traditional enemies of Israel. Besides assigning their enemies a ghastly genealogy, this fiction gives the girls a kind of poetic justice. Earlier, Lot had offered his virgin daughters up to the Sodomists if they would only refrain from assaulting his guests, strangers to whom he inexplicably felt a stronger obligation to protect than his daughters (Genesis 19:4-9). So while the latter part of the Lot story satirizes enemy ancestry, the earlier part satirizes men who fail to protect their daughters. Misunderstanding of satire The satirist enters the wacky moral universe of his victim, and pretends (often stupidly) to be a denizen of it. Uncritical readers of satire don't understand the game, and accuse the satirist of being immoral. Thus, even now naive critics of Mark Twain see his anti-slavery satire, Huckleberry Finn, as "racist" and offensive largely because Huck uses the "n" word. Huck's laments that he is going to hell (for being a thief) because he is helping Jim escape are satiric and funny, ludicrous in light of the post-slavery moral enlightenment. Just as the beneficiaries of a satire may fail to "get it", so may its victims. For example, Steven 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 and played head chef and ordered the women about, while they played their parts as "sous-chefs." Both women may be regarded as opportunistic feminists, who, having used their sexuality to get ahead, now chirp that men don't take them seriously. Steinem is a former Playboy Bunny, and Fonda's most recent incarnation (since being Ted Turner's wife) is apparently, born-again feminist. Both women left the set apparently unwounded by Colbert. Satire in History Western European literary tradition tends not to recognize satire as a literary form until the Roman period, where the term in modern use originates. Nevertheless, some classics of Greek literature may be considered satiric. Homer's Iliad is based on the "wacky" moral premise that one woman's willful sexual indiscretion (Helens's running off with the Trojan prince, Paris) is appropriately requited by the forcible despoiling of all the the females in that otherwise innocent city. If Homer disapproves his raping pillagers, he does not say so outright. On the contrary, he says that the Achaeans, not the luckless Trojans, are the favorites of the high god, Zeus. Greek tragic plays, which frequently re-employ characters from Homer's great poetry, stage characters who are morally wacky. In Euripides' "Orestes," the title character murders his own mother because she has killed his father. Orestes thinks that Apollo has ordered the revenge killing, but admits under pressure that the god s also disapprove of matricide. Orestes boasts that he is "saved" for avenging his father's murder, and "damned" for his matricide. In this case, the satire of blood vengeance takes the form of a moral paradox. 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. In the vein of the classical Greek tragedians, William Shakespeare delivers up what is arguably the greatest satire of the Renaissance period. Medieval Christian theology taught people that all that was necessary for the attainment of heaven was that a man be in a state of atonement for his sins at the precise moment of death. Shakespeare's wise-cracking Hamlet declines to exact revenge on his murderous uncle because his opportunity to kill him comes immediately after the king has supposedly made his peace with god. Hamlet's father's ghost has complained to his son that he had been "sent to his account (e.g. purgatory) with all his imperfections on his head." Hamlet derides himself for being "pigeon-livered" but his real problem is that he has signed up for Christian moral logic: that if the timing of their deaths is exactly right, a murderer may end up in heaven, while his victim (who has not recently prayed for his soul) may end up in purgatory. Tradition tends to psychologize Hamlet and to take his self-criticism at face value, when it ought at his inverted moral logic (Act III scene iii 73-92). There must be something wrong with a theology that excuses killers and punishes victims. If the theology were "true," few if any murder victims would be in heaven, (because they had no foreknowledge of their deaths), and all convicted murders would be there because they know when they will die - when the executioner comes to dispatch them (after a prayer?). Shakespeare's Macbeth ridicules still another medieval superstition, that it is possible, as Banquo says, "to look into the seeds of time and see which will grow and which will not." Macbeth's "tragic flaw" is that he believes that the witches have supernatural knowledge of the future. One concidence convinces him that he is destined to be king, but he muses about whether he needs to lend The Inevitable a helping hand. If Fate were real, of course, one would not have to "help it along". More direct social commentary via satire did not return until 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. Foremost among these is Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), arguably the greatest prose satirist in the English language. John Dryden also wrote an influential essay on satire that helped fix its definition in the literary world. 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. 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, 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 Satire The most important satirist working now may be Steven Colbert, whose television broadcast "The Colbert Report" is instructive in the methods of satire. Colbert's finger wagging character is known to be inspired by Bill O'Reilley, whose "Fair and Balanced" Fox TV news program reporting is practically self-satirizing. O'Reilley is a self-righteous right-wing bombast who in his TV interviews interrupts people, points and wags his finger at them, and apparently unwittingly, uses every logical fallacy known to man. Colbert exaggerates O'Reilley's gestures and interruptive habits, and uses the same sort of mock-logic. The most important print satirist is probably the long-established, but publicity shy 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 kept American feet to the fire. Recently one of his gay characters lamented that because he was not legally married to his partner, he was deprived of the "exquiste agony" of getting a nasty and painful divorce like the rest of us. This, of course, satirizes the right-wing claim that gay unions would somehow denigrate the sanctity of traditional marriage. Satire under fire Because satire is stealthy criticism, it is generally not censored. However, very offensive satire has itself come under harsh criticism. 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 humor. 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. 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. 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. List of notable satirists Notable satires and satirists in modern popular culture | ||||||||
|
| |||||||||
 |
|
| |