What Is Satire? Ridicule With a Purpose, From Swift to the Present
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
In 1729 Jonathan Swift published a pamphlet calmly proposing that the poor of Ireland sell their one-year-old children as food for the rich, complete with recipes and financial projections. He was not joking, in the sense that he meant every word of his real target: an English policy that was letting the Irish starve. He was joking in the sense that nobody was to eat anyone. That double stance, deadly serious and outrageous at once, is satire, and it is the sharpest tool literature has for attacking power.
Comedy with a target
Satire is the use of humour, irony, exaggeration or ridicule to expose and criticise something: a person, a policy, an institution, a habit of mind. The defining feature is the target. Comedy can exist to be funny; satire exists to make something look foolish or wicked, and the laughter is the means. Take the target away and what remains is either not funny or merely funny.
That is also what separates it from parody, with which it is constantly confused. Parody imitates the style of a particular work or writer for comic effect, and its target is the style itself. Satire may use parody as one of its methods, imitating a government report or a news broadcast, but its target lies beyond the form, in the world the form describes. A parody of a news programme mocks news programmes. A satirical one uses the news format to mock what is in the news.
The tools
Satirists work with a small set of techniques, most of which depend on the reader noticing a gap between what is said and what is meant:
- •Irony: saying the opposite of what is meant, so that the reader supplies the criticism
- •Exaggeration: enlarging a flaw until it cannot be missed
- •Understatement: treating an outrage as a minor inconvenience
- •Incongruity: placing the target in a setting that exposes it, such as a pig running a farm
- •The deadpan persona: a narrator who reports absurdity as normal and never winks
Two temperaments
Critics distinguish two moods in satire, named after Roman poets. Horatian satire, after Horace, is amused and forgiving; it laughs at human folly as something we all share and hopes to correct it gently. Jane Austen's treatment of social climbers and Chaucer's portraits of pilgrims sit here. Juvenalian satire, after Juvenal, is angry and contemptuous; it treats its target as vicious rather than foolish and aims to wound. Swift's proposal is Juvenalian, and so is Orwell's Animal Farm, in which the pigs' betrayal of the revolution is told as a children's fable and is not funny at all by the end.
The two can coexist in one writer and even one work, and the tone often depends on whether the satirist believes the target can be shamed into reform. Horatian satire assumes it can. Juvenalian satire has given up and is writing for the record.
Why it keeps being taken literally
Satire depends on the reader recognising that the surface is not the point, and some readers never do. Swift received serious replies about his proposal. Defoe was pilloried in 1703 for a pamphlet in which he adopted the voice of a hardline churchman calling for dissenters to be hanged, meaning to expose the churchmen; the churchmen agreed with it and the dissenters were horrified. Today satirical news sites are shared as real news daily, and the phenomenon has a name, Poe's law: without a clear signal, a parody of an extreme view is indistinguishable from the view.
The problem grows as the targets become more extreme, because a satirist who exaggerates a position has to exaggerate beyond what its actual holders say, and the gap keeps closing. Satire also fails in the other direction when the audience already agrees with it. A cartoon that only makes the converted laugh is entertainment; the test of satire is whether it can make the target's own side wince.
Reading satire in an exam
The questions worth asking of any satirical text are the same as those the writer asked of the world. What is the target, and how do you know: what clue signals that the narrator is not to be trusted? Which technique carries the attack, and what would be lost if the point were made directly? Is the tone Horatian or Juvenalian, and what does that tell you about whether the writer expects reform? The strongest answers treat the surface story as a machine and explain what it is built to do.
Satire and the law
Satirists have long run into trouble with the authorities, and modern law has had to decide how to treat them. A key idea is that satire is usually not a statement of fact. In the United States, the Supreme Court held in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell in 1988 that a public figure could not win damages for a crude parody advertisement that no reasonable reader would take as describing real events. Courts in many countries reason the same way in defamation cases: if the audience would understand a piece as exaggeration or mockery, it is judged as opinion rather than as a false claim.
Copyright raises a different question, because satire and parody often borrow someone else's words, music or images. American courts have treated parody that comments on the original as a strong candidate for fair use. The United Kingdom added an explicit exception to copyright for caricature, parody and pastiche in 2014, though the use must still be fair and limited. The protection is not unlimited anywhere. Calling something satire does not excuse genuine threats, invented facts presented as real or, in some countries, material judged to stir up hatred, and the label is tested against how a reasonable audience would read it.
From Lilliput's eggs to computer memory
Swift's best-known satire, Gulliver's Travels of 1726, shows how shrinking a dispute exposes it. In Lilliput, where the people are about six inches tall, politics is split between parties who wear high heels and low heels, a dig at the Tories and Whigs. Worse, the empire has fought a long war with its neighbour Blefuscu over which end of a boiled egg should be broken, ever since an emperor decreed the small end and the Big-Endians rebelled. The quarrel stands for the religious divisions between Catholics and Protestants, and bloodshed over an egg makes the real wars look just as petty.
The joke had an unexpected afterlife. In 1980 the computer scientist Danny Cohen wrote a paper about a quarrel among engineers over the order in which the bytes of a number should be stored and sent, with the most significant part first or last. He borrowed Swift's terms, calling the two camps big-endian and little-endian, and titled the paper On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace. His point was Swift's own: either convention works, and what matters is that everyone agrees. The words stuck and are still standard, so a piece of eighteenth-century satire now names a basic feature of every computer processor.
A magazine that has been sued for decades
Britain's best-known satirical magazine, Private Eye, was founded in 1961 and has spent much of its life in the law courts. Its mix of jokes, mocking covers and serious investigative journalism has provoked many libel actions, some of which it lost at great cost, and its editor Ian Hislop once remarked that if one famous damages award was justice, he was a banana.
Satire and investigation sit side by side in its pages, which is part of its importance: the jokes draw readers in, and the reporting has exposed real scandals that other outlets missed. On television, the puppet show Spitting Image, first broadcast in 1984, did something similar with grotesque latex caricatures of politicians and celebrities. Both show satire working as a regular check on power rather than an occasional laugh.
The takeaway
Satire is humour aimed at a target, using irony, exaggeration and a straight-faced narrator to make folly or vice look ridiculous so that a reader will judge it. It differs from parody in attacking the world rather than a style, it ranges from Horace's amusement to Juvenal's fury, and it works only when the reader notices the gap between what the text says and what it means.