Satire

1867 edition of Punch, a ground-breaking British magazine of popular humour, including a good deal of satire of the contemporary social and political scene.

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Satire is a rhetorical strategy 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, ideally with an intent to bring about improvement. In the strict sense is a literary genre, but the larger notion of satire, poking fun at the foibles of others is also found in the graphic and performing arts as well. Although satire is usually intended to be funny, the purpose of satire is not primarily humor itself so much as an attack on something of which the author strongly disapproves, using the weapon of wit.

A very common, almost defining feature of satire is its strong vein of irony or sarcasm, using parody, burlesque, exaggeration, juxtaposition, comparison, analogy, and double entendre to drive home the point. "In satire, irony is militant.". This "militant irony" (or sarcasm) often professes to approve the very things the satirist actually wishes to attack.

Term

The word satire comes from Latin satura lanx and means "medley, dish of colourful fruits" - it was held by Quintilian to be a "wholly Roman phenomenon" (satura tota nostra est). This derivation properly has nothing to do with the Greek mythological figure satyr. To Quintilian, the satire was a strict literary form, but the term soon escaped from its original narrow definition. Robert Elliott wrote:

"As soon as a noun enters the domain of metaphor, as one modern scholar has pointed out, it clamours for extension; and satura (which had had no verbal, adverbial, or adjectival forms) was immediately broadened by appropriation from the Greek word for “satyr” (satyros) and its derivatives. The odd result is that the English “satire” comes from the Latin satura; but “satirize,” “satiric,” etc., are of Greek origin. By about the 4th century AD the writer of satires came to be known as satyricus; St. Jerome, for example, was called by one of his enemies 'a satirist in prose' ('satyricus scriptor in prosa'). Subsequent orthographic modifications obscured the Latin origin of the word satire: satura becomes satyra, and in England, by the 16th century, it was written 'satyre.'"

Satire (in the modern sense of the word) is found in many artistic forms of expression, including literature, plays, commentary, and media such as song lyrics.

The term is also today applied to many works other than those which would have been considered satire by Quintilian - including, for instance, ancient Greek authors predating the first Roman satires. Public opinion in the Athenian democracy, for example, was remarkably influenced by the political satire written by such comic poets as Aristophanes for the theatre.

Satire and Humor

Not all satire is humorous and not all humor has a satirical intent. Satirical works often contain (non-satirical) humor usually to give some relief from what might otherwise be relentless "preaching". This has always been the case, although it is probably more marked in modern satire. On the other hand some satire has little or no humour at all. It is not "funny" - and nor is it meant to be.

Humour about a particular subject (politics, religion and art for instance) is not necessarily satirical because the subject itself is often a subject of satire. Nor is humour using the great satiric tools of irony, parody, or burlesque always meant in a satirical sense.

Development

Ancient Egypt

The Satire of the Trades dates to the beginning of the 2 millennium B.C.E. and is one of the oldest texts using hyperbole in order to achieve a didactic aim. It describes the various trades in an exaggeratedly disparaging fashion in order to convince students tired of studying that their lot as scribes will be far superior to that of their less fortunate brethern. Some scholars like Helck think that, rather than satirical, the descriptions were intended to be serious, although the point of satire is always quite serious.

The Papyrus Anastasi I (late 2nd millennium B.C.E.) contains the text of a satirical letter in which the writer at first praises the virtues but then mercilessly mocks the meagre knowledge and achievements of the recipient of the letter.

Ancient Greece

The Greeks had no word for what later would be called "satire", although cynicism and parody were common techniques. In retrospect, the Greek playwright Aristophanes is one of the best known early satirists; he is particularly famous for his political satire. He used satire to criticize the powerful Cleon (as in The Knights) for the persecution he underwent.

Minippean satire

The oldest form of satire still in use is the Menippean satire by Menippos of Gadara. Menippean satire is a term broadly used to refer to prose satires that are rhapsodic in nature, combining many different targets of ridicule into a fragmented satiric narrative similar to a novel. The term is used by classical grammarians and by philologists mostly to refer to satires in prose (cf. the verse Satires of Juvenal and his imitators).

The form is named after the Greek cynic Menippus, whose works, now lost, influenced the works of Lucian and Marcus Terentius Varro; such satires are sometimes termed Varronian satire, although Varro's own 150 books of Menippean satires survive only through quotations. The genre continued with Seneca the Younger, whose Apocolocyntosis, or "Pumpkinification," is the only near-complete classical Menippean satire to survive. The Menippean tradition is later evident in of Petronius' Satyricon, especially in the banquet scene "Cena Trimalchionis," which combines epic, tragedy, and philosophy with verse and prose. In Apuleius' Golden Ass, the form is combined with the comic novel.

Menippean satire moves rapidly between styles and points of view. Such satires deal less with human characters than with the single-minded mental attitudes, or "humors", that they represent: the pedant, the braggart, the bigot, the miser, the quack, the seducer, etc. Critic Northrop Frye observed, "The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect" (1974, p. 309); he illustrated this distinction by positing Squire Western (from Tom Jones) as a character rooted in novelistic realism but the tutors Thwackum and Square as figures of Menippean satire.

Menippean satire plays a special role in Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin treats Menippean satire as one of the classical "serio-comic" genres, alongside Socratic dialogue and other forms that Bakhtin claims are united by a "carnival sense of the world," wherein "carnival is the past millennia's way of sensing the world as one great communal performance" and is "opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change." Authors of "Menippea" in Bakhtin's sense include Voltaire, Diderot and E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Contemporary scholars including Frye classify Swift's A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, François Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman as Menippean satires.^{[citation needed]}

Roman Satire

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.

In Rome, 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 B.C.E. 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.

Middle Ages

Examples from the Early Middle Ages include 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 include Livre des Manières (~1170) as well as some of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The epos was mocked, and even feudal society, but there was hardly a general interest in the genre. After the Middle Ages in the Renaissance reawakening of Roman literary traditions, the satires Till Eulenspiegel and Reynard the Fox were published, and also in Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff (1494), Erasmus' Moriae Encomium (1509) and Thomas More's Utopia (1516).

Persia

File:Sotoon-e-panjom.jpg

Ebrahim Nabavi's masterpiece of Persian satire, Sotoon e panjom, published at the turn of the millennium

Ancient Persian satire

Perhaps the most notable Persian satirist of Ancient times is Obeid e Zakani (d. 1370 C.E.). His work is noted for its obscene verses, often political or bawdy, and often cited in debates involving homosexual practices. His works include Resaleh-ye Delgosha, as well as Akhlaq al-Ashraf ("Ethics of the Aristocracy") and the famous humorous fable Masnavi Mush-O-Gorbeh (Mouse and Cat)– a political satire. His non-satirical serious classical verses have also been regarded as very well written, in league with the other great works of Persian literature.

Persian satire and constitutionalism

The Persian Constitutional Revolution coincided with the emergence of numerous legendary satirists and literary figures such as Iraj Mirza, Ali Akbar Dehkhoda and Bibi Khatoon Astarabadi. Most satirists wrote their works in the form of poetry. Apart from Persian satire, Azeri satire had a strong presence during the revolution. Legendary Iranian-Azerbaijani satirist, Jalil Mohammad Gholizadeh published his famous Molla Nasreddin weekly magazine in Tabriz during this period. He published the first very first cartoons in the history of Iranian cartoon art.

Contemporary Persian satire

During late 20th century, Tofigh and Gol-agha magazines contributed significantly to Persian satire and Persian political satire in Iran. At the turn of the millennium, Persian Satire underwent a revolution through the works of Ebrahim Nabavi in the Jame-eh daily. He offered a novel form of Persian satire in his work entitled "Sotoon e panjom".

The emergence and development of satire in Afghanistan is closely connected with political history. Mahmud Tarzi, Abdul Sabur Ghafory, Muhamad Yusof, Shaeq Jamal were perhaps the most notable satirists during the period of 1873-1965. The period from 1965 till 1978 was the most productive period and different types of satire emerged and flourished in Afghanistan. In addition, an even larger number of the same kind of work was imported from Iran.

Early modern western satire

The Elizabethan (i.e. 16th century English) writers thought of satire as related to the notoriously rude, coarse and sharp satyr play. Elizabethan "satire" (typically in pamphlet form) therefore contains more straight forward abuse than subtle irony. The French Huguenot Isaac Casaubon pointed out in 1605 that satire in the Roman fashion was something altogether more civilized. 17th century English satire once again aimed at the "amendment of vices." (John 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 suggests that poor Irish parents be encouraged to sell their own children as food, while his The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters says that dissenters (from established Church doctrine) are to be vigorously persecuted. In his book Gulliver's Travels he writes about the flaws in human society in general and English society in particular. Swift creates a moral fiction, for instance a world in which parents do not have their most obvious responsibility, which is to protect their children from harm, or in which freedom of religion is reduced to the freedom to conform. His purpose is of course to attack indifference to the plight of the desperately poor, and to advocate freedom of conscience.

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," was among the first to bring satire to the British colonies; Benjamin Franklin and others followed, using satire to shape an emerging nation's culture.

Mark Twain was a great American satirist. His novel [[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn], set in the antebellum South, uses Huck's naive innate goodness to lampoon the prevailing moral values. 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. His conscience—warped by the distorted moral world he has grown up in—often bothers him most at the moment that he seeks to follow his good impulses against the what passes for morality in society.

Twain's younger contemporary Ambrose Bierce gained notoriety as a cynic, pessimist and black humorist with his dark, bitterly ironic stories, many set during the American Civil War, which satirized 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.

Satire in Victorian England

Novelists such as Charles Dickens often used passages of satiric writing in their treatment of social issues. Several satiric papers competed for the public's attention in the Victorian era and Edwardian period, such as Punch and Fun.

Perhaps the most enduring examples of Victorian satire, however, are to be found in the Savoy Operas of W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan. In fact, in The Yeomen of the Guard, a jester is given lines that paint a very neat picture of the method and purpose of the satirist, and might almost be taken as a statement of Gilbert's own intent:

"I can set a braggart quailing with a quip,

The upstart I can wither with a whim;

He may wear a merry laugh upon his lip,

But his laughter has an echo that is grim!"

20th century satire

In the 20th century, satire was 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. 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. Joseph Heller's most famous work, Catch-22, satirizes bureaucracy and the military, and is frequently cited as one of the greatest literary works of the Twentieth Century. Novelist Sinclair Lewis was known for his satirical stories such as Babbitt, Main Street, and It Can't Happen Here. His books often explored and satirized contemporary American values.

The film Dr. Strangelove from 1964 was a popular satire on the Cold War. 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.

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. Iran threatened to start an International Holocaust Cartoon Competition, which was immediately responded to by Jews with a Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest. Although not really satirical, the response to 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 (despite the fact Cohen 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.

See also

• Onomastì komodèin
• List of satirists and satires

Sources

• 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").
• Emil Draitser. Techniques of Satire: The Case of Saltykov-Shchedrin. (Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994) ISBN 3110126249.
• Hammer, Stephanie. Satirizing the Satirist.
• Highet, Gilbert. Satire.
• Kernan, Alvin. The Cankered Muse

The Plot of Satire.

• Seidel, Michael. Satiric Inheritance.
• Entopia: Revolution of the Ants (2008), by Rad Zdero.
• Hasan Javadi, Satire in Persian Literature. ISBN 0-8386-3260-2

Bibliography

• Relihan, Joel. 1993. Ancient Menippean Satire. Baltimore.
• Kirk, Eugene P. Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism. New York: Garland, 1980.
• Martin, Martial, "Préface" in Satyre Menippee de la Vertu du Catholicon d'Espagne et de la tenue des Estats de Paris, MARTIN Martial (édition critique de), Paris, H. Champion, 2007, "Textes de la Renaissance", n° 117, 944 p. ISBN : 9782745314840
• Boudou, B., M. Driol, and P. Lambercy. "Carnaval et monde renverse." Etudes sur la Satyre Menippee. Ed. Frank Lestringant and Daniel Menager. Geneva: Droz, 1986. 105-118.
• Vignes, Jean. "Culture et histoire dans la Satyre Menippee." Etudes sur la Satyre Mennippee. Ed. Frank Lestringant and Daniel Menager. Geneva: Droz, 1985. 151-99.
• Kharpertian, Theodore D. A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson U P, 1990.
• Kharpertian, Theodore D. "Of Models, Muddles, and Middles: Menippean Satire and Pynchon's V." Pynchon Notes 17.Fall (1985): 3-14.
• Courtney, E. Parody and Literary Allusion in Menippean Satire. Philologus 106 (1962): 86-100.
• Tristram Shandy, Digressions, and the Menippean Tradition. Scholia Satyrica 1.4 (1975): 3-16.
• Wilson, Robert Rawdon and Edward Milowicki. ""Troilus and Cressida": Voices in The Darkness of Troy." Jonathan Hart, ed. ""Reading The Renaissance: Culture, Poetics, and Drama."" New York: Garland, 1996. 129-144, 234-240.
• Milowicki, Edward J. and Robert Rawdon Wilson. "A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare." ""Poetics Today"" 23: 2 (Summer 2002). 291-326.
• Payne, F. Anne. Chaucer and the Menippean Satire. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1981.
• Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, translated by Caryl Emerson. Minnesota U P 1984

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