Defining the Elements of Satire
in Prose or Poetry
Satire: Composition in which human frailty, and vices are held up to ridicule. It is comic rather
than tragic and is written in a mood of scornful amusement at human weaknesses and foibles.
Satire is literally “a dish full of mixed foods” and come from the Greek word satire meaning
“medley” or mixture of things. It is so called because it uses not only prose or verse, but also the
techniques of irony, innuendo, invective, sarcasm, humor and scorn. Although in most cases its
purpose is to improve through censure or criticism, it is not necessarily didactic and may be
nothing more than an expression of personal feelings. It ranges from light ridicule to bitter
attack.
Age of Satire: The great age of satire in England was the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries (Dryden, Pope, Addison, Steele, Swift), but all ages have had satirists.
History of Satire: Roman had two types of satire.
1. Juvenal (ian): which is biting, dark, bitter, and angry satire; it points with contempt
and moral indignation to the corruption and evil of human beings and institutions.
2. Horace (Horatian): which is gentle, urbane, smiling, light and playful. It aims to
correct by gentle, broad, sympathetic humor.
Sources of Satire:
Human weaknesses, vices and follies.
Institutions.
Accepted beliefs.
Historical situations.
Most good satirical writers believe it is best not to attack individuals unless they represent
broader issues; personal attack is considered less worthy satire.
Famous Satires:
Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, “Nun’s Priest’s Tale”.
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, “A Modest Proposal”.
Pope’s “Rape of the Lock”.
Voltaire’s Candide.
Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are dead.
Famous Satirists: Juvenal, Horace, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jonathan Swift, Dryden, Addison,
Steele, G. B. Shaw, Noel Coward, Henry Fielding, Mark Twain, Joseph Heller, Voltaire,
Cervantes, Jane Austen, William M. Thackeray, Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and George
Orwell.
Satiric Techniques:
 Antithesis: a figure of speech with strongly contrasting words or ideas. Good is the
antithesis of evil. Example: The little, big man. Or: And wretches hang that jurymen may
dine.
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Bathos: going quickly from the sublime or serious to the ridiculous or to oversentimentalization. Example: “Advance the fringed curtains of your eyes/ And tell me who
comes yonder.” If a movie maker intends to make his audience cry and they laugh, the result
is bathos.
Burlesque: a composition which derives its humor from exaggerated imitation of a more
serious work. A person’s action may be burlesqued. Cervantes burlesques medieval
romances in Don Quixote.
Caricature: a person’s features may be caricatured. Caricature in art or in literature is an
exaggerated representation of a character, a cartoon-like portrait.
Exaggeration (overstatement or hyperbole): Exaggeration by saying more than you mean to
say. A deliberate form of exaggeration to produce humor.
Innuendo: a form of irony in which something derogatory is implied. Example: the man
recovered from the bite, while the dog died. Since the 1980s the most popular form is sexual
innuendo, see any Ally McBeal or Drew Carey episode for examples.
Invective: harsh, abusive language directed against a person or cause.
Irony: a double meaning; saying one thing and meaning another. There is verbal irony,
situational irony, and dramatic irony.
Mockery: subject of laughter, scorn, or ridicule.
Mock heroic: Imitation of a literary epic and its style by exaggeration and distortion and by
elevating the trivial to a level higher than it deserves. A rooster is a handsome hero and his
hen, a fair damsel.
Oxymoron: a figure of speech in which the idea expressed is two contradictory terms in two
words which are joined. Example: living death, sad joy, wise fool, eloquent silence, military
intelligence.
Paradox: a statement which, because of its contradictory nature, seems absurd, but which
really is well founded. Example: Nature often shows her strangeness in her sameness.
Parody: a mocking imitation of a known person, literary work, movie, or event. Mad
Magazine did many parodies.
Reductio ad absurdum: a method of argument which carries to an extreme, but logical
conclusion some general idea. For example, the more sleep one gets the healthier one is:
therefore, someone who has sleeping sickness and sleeps for months or someone in a coma is
really in the best of health.
Sarcasm: Using praise to personally mock someone; the word comes from the Greek
sarkazein meaning “ to tear flesh,” literally to put in hooks and to rip flesh. A form of verbal
irony where a strong and personal disapproval is given.
Understatement: Implying the opposite by saying less than you mean to say. A form of
irony in which we play down the concept to produce humor. Saying a person has a penny or
two if he is wealthy. This is an intentional representation of something as less than what it is.
Writing Satire: The trick to writing is to do the opposite of your subject matter: if the subject
matter is light, overstate and exaggerate as in Pope’s “Rape of the Lock”; if the subject is
serious, understate or make it ridiculous as in Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”