Satire Webbing

There's a lot to be said for the merits of comedy, in particular satire in it's rawest form. It doesn't automatically fall into favour with all human life on earth, some take it personally whilst some take it as a divers syle of anarchy and others, well they just have no sense of humour.

Whatever viewpoint any individual takes it can't be denied that laughter keeps you sane and adds a whole lot of fun in the proccess - but it's nothing new, satire is not a modernism attributed to Private Eye or any other well known satirists, it is indeed the origin of today's funny man, so popular to the good humoured worldwide. Comedy is inbuilt, it's not something that needs to be worked on before acceptance in the minds of most, it lifts the spirits and heaven knows, we all need that from time to time.

It's not possible to trace the origins of satire with any accuracy but it can be seen from artistry throughout the ages that depict entertainers such as the court jester performing for an audience, there are many examples recorded over the centuries in various art forms - from the author to the playright to the illustrator to the painter so on and so forth.

Here we will reflect on the broad aspects of satire in the realms of politics, society in general, the media leading on to the most recent of earth's creations .... the internet and social media in all it's guises.

Starting with a brief history of satire.

Satire

Satire, 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, parody, caricature, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to inspire social reform.

Satire is a protean term. Together with its derivatives, it is one of the most heavily worked literary designations and one of the most imprecise. The great English lexicographer Samuel Johnson defined satire as “a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured,” and more elaborate definitions are rarely more satisfactory. No strict definition can encompass the complexity of a word that signifies, on one hand, a kind of literature—as when one speaks of the satires of the Roman poet Horace or calls the American novelist Nathanael West’s A Cool Million a satire—and, on the other, a mocking spirit or tone that manifests itself in many literary genres but can also enter into almost any kind of human communication. Wherever wit is employed to expose something foolish or vicious to criticism, there satire exists, whether it be in song or sermon, in painting or political debate, on television or in the movies. In this sense satire is everywhere.

In literary works, satire can be direct or indirect. With direct satire, the narrator speaks directly to the reader. With indirect satire, the author’s intent is realized within the narrative and its story. Although this article deals primarily with satire as a literary phenomenon, it records its manifestations in a number of other areas of human activity as well.

The nature of satire
Historical definitions

The terminological difficulty is pointed up by a phrase of the Roman rhetorician Quintilian: “satire is wholly our own” (“satura tota nostra est”). Quintilian seems to be claiming satire as a Roman phenomenon, although he had read the Greek dramatist Aristophanes and was familiar with a number of Greek forms that one would call satiric. But the Greeks had no specific word for satire, and by satura (which meant originally something like “medley” or “miscellany” and from which comes the English satire) Quintilian intended to specify that kind of poem “invented” by Gaius Lucilius, written in hexameters on certain appropriate themes, and characterized by a Lucilian-Horatian tone. Satura referred, in short, to a poetic form, established and fixed by Roman practice. (Quintilian mentions also an even older kind of satire written in prose by Marcus Terentius Varro and, one might add, by Menippus and his followers Lucian and Petronius.) After Quintilian’s day, satura began to be used metaphorically to designate works that were satirical in tone but not in form. 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 no verbal, adverbial, or adjectival forms) was immediately broadened by appropriation from the Greek 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 ce 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.

Elizabethan writers, anxious to follow Classical models but misled by a false etymology, believed that satyre derived from the Greek satyr play: satyrs being notoriously rude, unmannerly creatures, it seemed to follow that the word satyre should indicate something harsh, coarse, rough. The English author Joseph Hall wrote:

   The Satyre should be like the Porcupine,
   That shoots sharpe quils out in each angry line,
   And wounds the blushing cheeke, and fiery eye,
   Of him that heares, and readeth guiltily.

   (Virgidemiarum, V, 3, 1–4)

The false etymology that derives satire from satyrs was finally exposed in the 17th century by the Classical scholar Isaac Casaubon, but the old tradition has aesthetic if not etymological appropriateness and has remained strong.

In the prologue to his book, Hall makes a claim that has caused confusion like that following from Quintilian’s remark on Roman satire. Hall boasts:

   I first adventure: follow me who list,
   And be the second English Satyrist.

But Hall knew the satirical poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Skelton, among other predecessors, and probably meant that he was the first to imitate systematically the formal satirists of Rome.

Influence of Horace and Juvenal

By their practice, the great Roman poets Horace and Juvenal set indelibly the lineaments of the genre known as the formal verse satire and, in so doing, exerted pervasive, if often indirect, influence on all subsequent literary satire. They gave laws to the form they established, but it must be said that the laws were very loose indeed. Consider, for example, style. In three of his Satires (I, iv; I, x; II, i) Horace discusses the tone appropriate to the satirist who out of a moral concern attacks the vice and folly he sees around him. As opposed to the harshness of Lucilius, Horace opts for mild mockery and playful wit as the means most effective for his ends. Although I portray examples of folly, he says, I am not a prosecutor and I do not like to give pain; if I laugh at the nonsense I see about me, I am not motivated by malice. The satirist’s verse, he implies, should reflect this attitude: it should be easy and unpretentious, sharp when necessary, but flexible enough to vary from grave to gay. In short, the character of the satirist as projected by Horace is that of an urbane man of the world, concerned about folly, which he sees everywhere, but moved to laughter rather than rage.

Juvenal, more than a century later, conceives the satirist’s role differently. His most characteristic posture is that of the upright man who looks with horror on the corruptions of his time, his heart consumed with anger and frustration. Why does he write satire? Because tragedy and epic are irrelevant to his age. Viciousness and corruption so dominate Roman life that, for someone who is honest, it is difficult not to write satire. He looks about him, and his heart burns dry with rage; never has vice been more triumphant. How can he be silent (Satires, I)? Juvenal’s declamatory manner, the amplification and luxuriousness of his invective, are wholly out of keeping with the stylistic prescriptions set by Horace. At the end of the scabrous sixth satire, a long, perfervid invective against women, Juvenal flaunts his innovation: in this poem, he says, satire has gone beyond the limits established by his predecessors; it has taken to itself the lofty tone of tragedy.

The results of Juvenal’s innovation have been highly confusing for literary history. What is satire if the two poets universally acknowledged to be supreme masters of the form differ so completely in their work as to be almost incommensurable? The formulation of the English poet John Dryden has been widely accepted. Roman satire has two kinds, he says: comical satire and tragical satire, each with its own kind of legitimacy. These denominations have come to mark the boundaries of the satiric spectrum, whether reference is to poetry or prose or to some form of satiric expression in another medium. At the Horatian end of the spectrum, satire merges imperceptibly into comedy, which has an abiding interest in human follies but has not satire’s reforming intent. The distinction between the two modes, rarely clear, is marked by the intensity with which folly is pursued: fops and fools and pedants appear in both, but only satire has a moral purpose. And, although the great engine of both comedy and satire is irony, in satire, as the 20th-century critic Northrop Frye claimed, irony is militant.

Nicolas Boileau, Dryden, and Alexander Pope, writing in the 17th and 18th centuries—the modern age of satire—catch beautifully, when they like, the deft Horatian tone. However, satire’s wit can also be sombre, deeply probing, and prophetic, as it explores the ranges of the Juvenalian end of the satiric spectrum, where satire merges with tragedy, melodrama, and nightmare. Pope’s Dunciad ends with these lines:

   Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d;
   Light dies before thy uncreating word:
   Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
   And Universal Darkness buries All.

It is the same darkness that falls on Book IV of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, on some of Mark Twain’s satire—The Mysterious Stranger and “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”—and on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and, in a more surrealist vein, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

Structure of verse satire

Roman satire is hardly more determinate in its structure than in its style; the poems are so haphazardly organized, so randomly individual, that there seems little justification for speaking of them as a literary kind at all. Beneath the surface complexity of the poems, however, there exists, as one modern scholar has pointed out, a structural principle common to the satires of the Roman poets and their French and English followers. These poems have a bipartite structure: a thesis part, in which some vice or folly is examined critically from many different angles and points of view, and an antithesis part, in which an opposing virtue is recommended. The two parts are disproportionate in length and in importance, for satirists have always been more disposed to castigate wickedness than exhort to virtue.

In the prologue to his book, Hall makes a claim that has caused confusion like that following from Quintilian’s remark on Roman satire. Hall boasts:

   I first adventure: follow me who list,
   And be the second English Satyrist.

But Hall knew the satirical poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Skelton, among other predecessors, and probably meant that he was the first to imitate systematically the formal satirists of Rome.

Influence of Horace and Juvenal

By their practice, the great Roman poets Horace and Juvenal set indelibly the lineaments of the genre known as the formal verse satire and, in so doing, exerted pervasive, if often indirect, influence on all subsequent literary satire. They gave laws to the form they established, but it must be said that the laws were very loose indeed. Consider, for example, style. In three of his Satires (I, iv; I, x; II, i) Horace discusses the tone appropriate to the satirist who out of a moral concern attacks the vice and folly he sees around him. As opposed to the harshness of Lucilius, Horace opts for mild mockery and playful wit as the means most effective for his ends. Although I portray examples of folly, he says, I am not a prosecutor and I do not like to give pain; if I laugh at the nonsense I see about me, I am not motivated by malice. The satirist’s verse, he implies, should reflect this attitude: it should be easy and unpretentious, sharp when necessary, but flexible enough to vary from grave to gay. In short, the character of the satirist as projected by Horace is that of an urbane man of the world, concerned about folly, which he sees everywhere, but moved to laughter rather than rage.

Juvenal, more than a century later, conceives the satirist’s role differently. His most characteristic posture is that of the upright man who looks with horror on the corruptions of his time, his heart consumed with anger and frustration. Why does he write satire? Because tragedy and epic are irrelevant to his age. Viciousness and corruption so dominate Roman life that, for someone who is honest, it is difficult not to write satire. He looks about him, and his heart burns dry with rage; never has vice been more triumphant. How can he be silent (Satires, I)? Juvenal’s declamatory manner, the amplification and luxuriousness of his invective, are wholly out of keeping with the stylistic prescriptions set by Horace. At the end of the scabrous sixth satire, a long, perfervid invective against women, Juvenal flaunts his innovation: in this poem, he says, satire has gone beyond the limits established by his predecessors; it has taken to itself the lofty tone of tragedy.

The results of Juvenal’s innovation have been highly confusing for literary history. What is satire if the two poets universally acknowledged to be supreme masters of the form differ so completely in their work as to be almost incommensurable? The formulation of the English poet John Dryden has been widely accepted. Roman satire has two kinds, he says: comical satire and tragical satire, each with its own kind of legitimacy. These denominations have come to mark the boundaries of the satiric spectrum, whether reference is to poetry or prose or to some form of satiric expression in another medium. At the Horatian end of the spectrum, satire merges imperceptibly into comedy, which has an abiding interest in human follies but has not satire’s reforming intent. The distinction between the two modes, rarely clear, is marked by the intensity with which folly is pursued: fops and fools and pedants appear in both, but only satire has a moral purpose. And, although the great engine of both comedy and satire is irony, in satire, as the 20th-century critic Northrop Frye claimed, irony is militant.

Nicolas Boileau, Dryden, and Alexander Pope, writing in the 17th and 18th centuries—the modern age of satire—catch beautifully, when they like, the deft Horatian tone. However, satire’s wit can also be sombre, deeply probing, and prophetic, as it explores the ranges of the Juvenalian end of the satiric spectrum, where satire merges with tragedy, melodrama, and nightmare. Pope’s Dunciad ends with these lines:

   Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d;
   Light dies before thy uncreating word:
   Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
   And Universal Darkness buries All.

It is the same darkness that falls on Book IV of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, on some of Mark Twain’s satire—The Mysterious Stranger and “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”—and on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and, in a more surrealist vein, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
Structure of verse satire

Roman satire is hardly more determinate in its structure than in its style; the poems are so haphazardly organized, so randomly individual, that there seems little justification for speaking of them as a literary kind at all. Beneath the surface complexity of the poems, however, there exists, as one modern scholar has pointed out, a structural principle common to the satires of the Roman poets and their French and English followers. These poems have a bipartite structure: a thesis part, in which some vice or folly is examined critically from many different angles and points of view, and an antithesis part, in which an opposing virtue is recommended. The two parts are disproportionate in length and in importance, for satirists have always been more disposed to castigate wickedness than exhort to virtue.

George Bernard Shaw considered himself a satirist. As he once wrote :

   It is no more possible for me to do my work honestly as a playwright without giving pain than it is for a dentist. The nation’s morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.

Yet, as inventive and witty as Shaw’s work is, compared with the 20th-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose anatomizing of social injustice cuts deep, Shaw was a gentle practitioner indeed.

Motion pictures and television

By the mid-20th century, film began to exceed theatre in its satirical ambitions, not least because the makers of movies exploded an ancient doctrine having to do with principles of decorum in the use of satire and ridicule. The English novelist Henry Fielding was reflecting centuries of tradition when, in the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), he spoke of the inappropriateness of ridicule applied to black villainy or dire calamity: “What could exceed the absurdity of an Author, who should write the Comedy of Nero, with the merry Incident of ripping up his Mother’s Belly?” Given this point of view, Adolf Hitler seems an unlikely target for satire, yet in The Great Dictator (1940) Charlie Chaplin managed a successful, if risky, burlesque. (Chaplin wrote, however, that, determined as he was to ridicule the Nazi notions of a superrace, if he had known of the horrors of the concentration camps, he could not have made the film.)

Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) denies all limitation; through some alchemy, Kubrick created an immensely funny, savagely satirical film about the annihilation of the world. A combination of farce and nightmare, Dr. Strangelove satirizes military men, scientists, statesmen—the whole ethos of the technological age—in the most mordant terms; it shows the doomsday blast, yet leaves audiences laughing. “You can’t fight in here,” says the president of the United States as doom nears, “this is the War Room.” The film’s tone is less didactic than in most powerful satire—the mushroom cloud carries its own moral—yet satire’s full force is there.

At about the same time, television was showing itself erratically receptive to satire. That Was the Week That Was, a weekly satirical review started in England in 1962, had remarkable success for a time but succumbed to a variety of pressures, some of them political; when a version of the program was attempted in the United States, it was emasculated by restrictions imposed by sponsors fearful of offending customers and by program lawyers wary of libel suits. Yet by the mid-1970s, when Saturday Night Live launched on NBC in the United States, the atmosphere had changed. The pointed irreverence of the show’s early seasons, combined with its commercial success, influenced a generation of television programs, and its satirical spirit reached something like an apotheosis with The Daily Show as hosted by Jon Stewart (1999–2015) and Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report (2005–14) in the United States and with Rick Mercer’s The Rick Mercer Report (begun 2004) in Canada. Jonathan Swift said that he wrote to vex the world rather than divert it; by the 21st century, Stewart, Colbert, Mercer, and others had discovered that vexation could attract large passionate audiences.

Visual arts

The critique that is satire may be conveyed even more potently in the visual arts than by way of the spoken or written word. In caricature and cartoons (and, specifically, the political cartoon), artists since the Renaissance have left a wealth of startlingly vivid commentary on the people and events of their time. These artists include: in England, William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, Sir John Tenniel, and Sir Max Beerbohm; in France, Charles Philipon (whose metamorphosis of King Louis-Philippe into a poire—that is, “fathead,” or “fool”—is classic) and Honoré Daumier; in Spain, Francisco Goya, and out of Spain, Pablo Picasso; and among 20th-century political cartoonists, Sir David Low, Vicky (Victor Weisz), Herblock (Herbert Block), and Paul Conrad.


The favourite medium of such individuals is a print in which the satirical attack is pointed up by a brief verbal caption. The social impact of their art is incalculable. Dictators recognize this all too well, and in times of social tension political cartoonists are among the first victims of the censor.
The satirist, the law, and society

The relations of satirists to the law have always been delicate and complex. Both Horace and Juvenal took extraordinary pains to avoid entanglements with authority—Juvenal ends his first satire with the self-protective announcement that he will write only of the dead. In England in 1599 the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London issued an order prohibiting the printing of any satires whatever and requiring that the published satires of Joseph Hall, John Marston, Thomas Nashe, and others be burned.

Today the satirists who attack individuals may risk financial loss to themselves and their publishers. In totalitarian countries the consequences are higher, and a satirist may suffer imprisonment, exile, or death. Under extreme conditions, satire against the reigning order is out of the question. Such was the case during the 20th century in the Soviet Union and most other communist countries; Osip Mandelshtam is an example of writer whose savage epigram against Joseph Stalin set in motion a conflict with the Soviet state that culminated in 1938 with his arrest and death in transit to a labour camp.

One creative response that satirists make to social and legal pressures is to try by rhetorical means to approach their targets indirectly; that is, a prohibition of direct attack fosters the maneuvers of indirection that will make an attack palatable (e.g., irony, burlesque, and parody). It is a nice complication that the devices that render satire acceptable to society at the same time sharpen its point. “Abuse is not so dangerous,” said Samuel Johnson, “when there is no vehicle of wit or delicacy, no subtle conveyance.” The conveyances are born out of prohibition.

Anthony Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, writing in the 18th century, recognized the “creative” significance of legal and other repressions on the writing of satire. “The greater the weight [of constraint] is, the bitterer will be the satire. The higher the slavery, the more exquisite the buffoonery.” Shaftesbury’s insight requires the qualification made above. Under a massively efficient tyranny, satire of the forms, institutions, or personalities of that tyranny is impossible. But, under the more relaxed authoritarianism of an easier-going day, remarkable things could be done. Max Radin, a Polish-born American author, noted how satirical journals in Germany before World War I, even in the face of a severe law, vied with each other to see how close they could come to caricatures of the Kaiser without actually producing them. “Satire which the censor understands,” said the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, “deserves to be banned.”

The 20th-century American critic Kenneth Burke summed up this paradoxical aspect of satire’s relation with the law by suggesting that the most inventive satire is produced when the satirist knowingly takes serious risks and is not sure whether he will be acclaimed or punished. The whole career of Voltaire is an excellent case in point. Bigots and tyrants may have turned pale at his name, as a famous hyperbole has it. However, Voltaire’s satire was sharpened and his life rendered painfully complicated as he sought to avoid the penalties of the law and the wrath of those he had angered. Satirists such as Voltaire and Kraus and the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin attack evil in high places, pitting their wit and moral authority against cruder forms of power.

Readers have an excellent opportunity to examine the satirist’s claim to social approval by reason of the literary convention that decrees that satirists must justify their problematic art. Nearly all satirists write apologies, and nearly all the apologies project an image of the satirist as a plain, honest person, wishing no harm to anyone worthy but appalled at seemingly ubiquitous evil and forced by conscience to write satire. Alexander Pope’s claim is the most extravagant:

   Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
   Men not afraid of God, afraid of me:
   Safe from the Bar, the Pulpit, and the Throne,
   Yet touch’d and sham’d by Ridicule alone.
   O sacred Weapon! left for Truth’s defence,
   Sole Dread of Folly, Vice, and Insolence!
   (“Epilogue to the Satires,” II, 208–13)

After the great age of satire in the 17th and 18th centuries, which Pope brought to a close, such pretensions would have been wholly anachronistic. Ridicule depends on shared assumptions against which the deviant stands in naked relief. The satirist must have an audience that shares a commitment to certain intellectual and moral standards that, in turn, validate the satirist’s attacks on aberration. The greatest satire has been written in periods when ethical and rational norms were sufficiently powerful to attract widespread assent yet not so powerful as to compel absolute conformity—those periods when the satirist could be part of society and yet separate from it, in a space that allows a double vision.

Neoclassical writers had available to them as an implicit metaphor the towering standard of the Classical past; for the 19th and 20th centuries very few, if no, such metaphors were available. It is odd, however, that, whereas the 19th century in general disliked and distrusted satire (there are of course obvious exceptions), the 20th century—a period, arguably, bereft of unifying symbols, scorning traditional rituals, searching for beliefs—still found satire a congenial mode in almost any medium. Although 20th-century satire was often dismissed as self-serving and trivial, there were notable achievements. Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 (1961) once again made use of farce as the agent of the most probing criticism: Who is sane, the book asks, in a world whose major energies are devoted to blowing itself up? Beneath a surface of hilariously grotesque fantasy, in which characters from Marx Brothers’ comedy carry out lethal assignments, there is exposed a dehumanized world of hypocrisy, greed, and cant. Heller was a satirist in the great tradition. If he could no longer, like Pope, tell his audience with confidence what they should be for, he was splendid at showing them what they must be against. The reader laughs at the mad logic of Catch-22—and, as the reader laughs, the reader learns. This is precisely the way satire has worked from the beginning.

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