Satire is the use of humor, irony, or exaggeration to expose and criticize people’s immoral behavior, usually when it has to deal with politics or other controversial topics. It can also be described as any piece of writing or media that was designed to make the reader feel critical, whether it be of themselves, their peers, or their society. It is used in many literary works such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Satire is also seen throughout today’s society in political cartoons and TV shows.
Jonathan Swift defined satire in “The Battle of the Books and Other Short Pieces” as “a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.” Before the story gets started in Volume D of The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Swift was described as brilliant and his satirical writings were very popular in his time and still remain popular in today’s society. Many of his works “poked fun at all of us in some way or another, mocking political ambitions, religious convictions, scientific knowledge, war, power, lust, vanity, and greed.” According to our book, much of the world had trouble figuring out whether Swift had any affirmative beliefs or values because of his derisive wit in his works.
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In part four of Gulliver’s Travels Swift ridicules and denounces humans by pointing out their stupid and heinous actions. In this story, Swift makes his ideal beings look like horses and the others look like people. The horses, also known as Houyhnhnms, were “the most generous and comely animal we had; that they excelled in strength and swiftness (pg. 298),” while the people, Yahoos, were “an abominable animal with a perfect human figure; but the differences are common to all savage nations(pg. 291)”. Upon getting to the country, When Gulliver encounters the natives, he describes the Yahoos, the human-like creatures, as “deformed… Their heads and breasts were covered with thick hair… but the rest of their bodies were bare… They had no tails and often stood on their hind feet… (pg. 287)” When he first arrives, he is seen as a Yahoo, because he looks exactly like them. He is treated like one and actually has to sleep in their pens. He cannot see himself as a Yahoo and so he tries to become a horse. Ironically, he just cannot change himself into more of a horse; he’s more a Yahoo.
“The Office” is a great example of satirical work in today’s society. It includes sarcasm, ridiculousness, and funny, inappropriate jokes. This show uses satire to play on issues that exist in actual corporate offices in today’s society such as, sexism, gender, race and other stereotypes through humor and different storylines. There is one episode where they are talking about the sexual harassment problem throughout the workspace. In this episode, the boundaries are pushed solely for humor but it also brought attention to issues that happen in the workplace like the issue of homosexuality at work with Oscar.
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