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Characteristics of Satire |
- Satire at its heart is concerned with ethical reform. It attacks those institutions or
individuals the satirist deems corrupt.
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- It works to make vice laughable and/or reprehensible and thus bring social pressure on
those who still engage in wrongdoing.
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- It seeks a reform in public behavior, a shoring up of its audience's standards, or at
the very least a wake-up call in an otherwise corrupt culture.
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- Satire is often implicit and assumes readers who can pick up on its moral clues. It is
not a sermon.
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- Satire in general attacks types -- the fool, the boor, the adulterer, the proud --
rather than specific persons.
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- If it does attack some by name, rather than hoping to reform these persons, it seeks to
warn the public against approving of them.
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- Satire is witty, ironic, and often exaggerated. It uses extremes to bring its audience
to a renewed awareness of its ethical and spiritual danger.
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- Sometime if the satirist is in danger for his or her attack, ambiguity, innuendo and
understatement can be used to help protect its author.
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Types
of Satire: |
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Horatian (named
for Horace): A gentle, sympathetic form of satire in which the subject is mildly made fun
of with a show of engaging wit. This form of satire tends to ask the audience to
laugh at themselves as much as the players. |
| Juvenalian (named
for Juvenal): A harsher, bitter form of satire in which the subject is subjected to
contempt and condemnation. This form of satire is more judgmental, asking the
audience to respond with indignation to the events it portrays. |
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Menippean (named for
Menippus): A chaotic, often formless satire that satirizes the structure of the world as
well as its subject matter. It tends to mix genres, collapse categories, and
intentionally ridicule everything. Its exact target are often hard to locate because
it seems to attack everything, and it often includes a preoccupation with sexual
misfunctions and bodily fluids.
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Mikhail Bakhtin argues that such satire is inherently dialogistic.
This suggests that there are competing voices in the text that offer a dialogue
over the text's position and values. Such a text has a kind of "authorial
surplus" in which the voices in a work may overwhelm any possible authorial
intentionality. Instead of either a complete relativism (where no final meaning can be
decided on) or finalized system (where only one meaning can be derived), Bakhtin argues
for a continued negotiation between the voices that can never be finally closed.
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