Satire and Parody: A Modest Proposal, Modern Satire and Editorial Cartoons

Hook: the straight face

The funniest person you know might be the one who tells a ridiculous story with a completely straight face. The calmer they are, the funnier it gets. Satire works the same way: a writer says something outrageous in a calm, reasonable voice, and the gap between the voice and the idea makes readers laugh, and then think. Satire is humour with a target.

What is satire?

Satire uses humour, irony and exaggeration to criticize people, institutions or ideas, usually to push for change. Its key parts:

• A target: a real problem or real people (for example, a government, a policy, a habit of society).
• Irony: saying the opposite of what you mean, or a gap between what is said and what is true.
• Hyperbole: exaggerating a problem until its absurdity is obvious.
• Deadpan tone: a calm, serious voice for a ridiculous idea.
• Persona: a narrator who is not the writer, often naive or heartless, whose reasoning exposes the problem.

Parody imitates the style or form of a serious text (a news report, an ad, a scientific paper, a political speech) for comic or critical effect. Its humour comes from readers recognizing the form. Many satires use parody: they borrow a serious form to say something absurd.

A classic: Swift's A Modest Proposal (1729)

In 1729, the Irish writer Jonathan Swift published A Modest Proposal. At the time, many people in Ireland lived in severe poverty, while many landlords lived comfortably, some of them in England. Swift's narrator, a calm, statistics-loving projector (a person who proposes schemes), suggests that poor Irish families could sell their babies to the rich as food.

The narrator never raises his voice. He discusses costs, recipes (whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled) and economic benefits as if this were an ordinary policy paper. That deadpan tone is the point: Swift is showing that the way powerful people already treated the poor was monstrous, by having his narrator say the monstrous thing out loud.

Near the end, the narrator lists "other expedients" he says he will not consider, such as taxing landlords who live abroad and buying Irish-made goods. These were, in fact, the kind of practical reforms Swift supported. The satire's real target is the indifference of the powerful toward the poor.

A modern satire to read

A Modest Proposal for the Scheduling of Tests

(A satirical essay written for this website.)

It is a melancholy sight to walk through the halls of our school in the first week of December and see students with three tests, two essays and a lab report due, while the second week of November sits empty and unused, like a rink nobody floods.

I have therefore given this problem my most serious attention, and I humbly propose a solution so efficient that I am astonished no one has adopted it already: every test of the year should be written on a single day.

Consider the advantages. Students would need to be anxious only once, saving eleven months of worry for more productive uses. Teachers could share a single gym, a single box of pencils and a single sigh of relief. Parents would know exactly which night to hide the snacks.

Some will object that students cannot possibly study for eight subjects at once. To these critics I reply that students already do so in the first week of December, and they have never once complained, except daily.

I have no personal interest in this proposal. I graduated years ago, and my only tests now are the ones my car fails.

Satire in graphic texts: the editorial cartoon

Editorial cartoons are satire in a single image. Their graphic tools:

• Caricature: exaggerating recognizable features of a public figure or institution so readers know who is meant.
• Labels: words on objects that name what they stand for.
• Symbols: images that stand for ideas (a piggy bank for savings, a maple leaf for Canada).
• Juxtaposition: placing contrasting things side by side, often words against actions.
• Captions and speech bubbles: frequently ironic.

To evaluate a cartoon, ask: Do the graphic elements make the target and the criticism clear quickly? Is the exaggeration fair enough to persuade, or so unfair it backfires?