Defining Satire

If there is one thing that virtually all critics of satire agree on, it is that satire, as a literary form, evades easy definitions. Robert C. Elliot, in his oft-cited essay “The Definition of Satire: A Note on Method” (1962) explicitly states that “there are no properties common to all of the uses” of satire, and that any definition of the term would be “so general, as to be useless.”¹ Twenty years later, Alastair Fowler would take a nearly identical position in Kinds of Literature (1982), arguing that “satire is the most problematic mode to the taxonomist, since it appears never to have corresponded to any one kind. It can take almost any form, and has clearly been doing so for a very long time.”² Recent historical investigations of satire in periods that appear uniform, such as English satire of the 18th century, have only reinforced the essentially disparate nature of satirical practices; Ashley Marshall’s taxonomic study of a broad range of 18th-century texts newly available to scholars through databases such as Early English Books Online suggests that “the canonical masterpieces are not representative of satiric practice in this period,” which generally does “not seem ‘literary.’”³ And, yet, despite its protean nature, satire is also an ancient form with a classical lineage that is frequently evoked by both modern satirists and critics. Satire is thus simultaneously an undefinable form with virtually endless historical variations and a timeless, literary tradition that traces itself back to antiquity.

This article will focus primarily on modern conceptions and how they have repurposed satiric tradition for their own uses in ways that extend rather than resolve this contradiction. Perhaps the key dichotomy for modern theories of satire relates to the opposition between Horace and Juvenal as two different models for satire that are respectively viewed as ethical and rhetorical. Critical views of satire have also been affected by the fact that, at least from the 20th century onward, satire has been a comparatively marginal object of study. Satire has been largely absent from prominent discourse in literary theory, and there has been comparatively little highly conceptual or philosophically oriented research on satire, with the exception of a few works, such as Rose Zimbardo’s At Zero Point (2014). Theories of satire have orbited these larger debates, responding to new developments in literary scholarship from the safer distance of period-based subfields.

Nonetheless, most 21st-century works on satire do seem to agree on a small set of claims. Ashley Marshall, for example, lists five qualities of satire that are agreed upon by scholars: (1) satire is a “literary art,” (2) it “attacks its targets,” (3) its targets are “discernible historical particulars,” (4) its critiques are “to some extent humorous,” and (5) it is an essentially “negative enterprise.”⁴ Naomi Milthorpe has offered a slightly different thumbnail sketch of the consensus view, which helpfully supplements Marshall’s list: Satire “is a mode that, by necessity, is responsive to the historical, biographical, or literary environments of its creation,” and it is an “intentional” form, attacking “specific targets” who are “deserving of censure or praise.”⁵ These two definitions taken together present a reasonable description of most contemporary views on satire.

There is a general (though not universal) consensus that satire is a mode rather than a genre (to employ Alistair Fowler’s terminology), although satire’s relationship to genre is more complex than typically acknowledged. At certain times and within certain traditions, satire, or at least significant portions of it, may well have met the criteria for a genre, and, as scholars such as Leon Guilhamet have argued, satiric works often explicitly inhabit other established genres in ways that seem essential to their being.⁶ The argument for satire as a mode also ignores the fact that modern prose satires, for example, often deploy a series of formal techniques for comic effect, including intentionally “flat” characterization, the use of the Rabelaisian catalogue (in which long lists of disparate objects are reproduced for a comic effect), long dialogues between characters who hold opposing views, and a tendency to resist narrative closure. Verse satires of various eras have also been associated with a variety of formal devices, such as Alexander Pope’s use of the heroic couplet; this form is so commonly associated with 18th-century verse satire that it becomes a feature of later satirical pastiches, such as John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), which evokes this era. Such features may not be enough to constitute a genre or genres, but they also seem to be more than “just” modal.

Milthorpe’s contention that satire is “intentional” is also particularly significant. Unlike virtually all other literary forms, which have been associated with claims of literary autonomy at different points in time, satire has been almost universally viewed as being an instrumental form by critics (with the lone exception of Wyndham Lewis). The nature of this purpose, however, has been debated since antiquity. Is satire a moral literary art that seeks to improve the world by critiquing vice and folly as a form of ethical instruction? Or is it motivated by the baser natures of the satirist, whose critique always threatens to become a destructive force? Gilbert Highet’s The Anatomy of Satire (1962) lists a series of potential motivations, such as “personal grudges,” “sense of inferiority and injustice,” “wish to amend vice and folly,” “desire to make an aesthetic pattern,” and “idealism,” which broadly catalogue the many purposes attributed to satire.⁷

Most scholars also agree that satire is distinguished from comedy by the fact that it seeks to critique or ridicule specific persons or events and that this critique can only be fully understood within a given historical context; as Leon Guilhamet explains, “If comedy presents its ridiculous objects as things of no importance, the harmlessly ugly or base, satire interprets the ridiculous as harmful or destructive, at least potentially.”⁸ Satire thus differs from comedy in both the specificity and the urgent tone of its critique. Satiric critiques always seek to make their targets ridiculous but can vary dramatically in their intensity. For example, Thomas Love Peacock gently satirizes Coleridge’s love of philosophical abstraction by having his parodic avatar, Flosky, state that “if any person living could . . . say that they had obtained any information on any subject from Ferdinando Flosky, my transcendental reputation would be ruined for ever!”⁹ But Gilbert Sorrentino’s satiric roman-à-clef of Greenwich Village artists in the 1960s employs bitter invective, describing the character Sheila Henry by saying, “While she was, in effect, a modern-day whore, there was none of the whore’s finesse about her.”¹⁰

But this seemingly clear distinction begins to blur with certain forms of comedy. In particular, romantic irony, which counterpoises idealism with its blistering critique, often resembles satire much more closely than is widely acknowledged. A writer such as Thomas Love Peacock presents a good example of this blurry line: his novels clearly satirize real historical persons (such as Samuel Coleridge and Lord Byron) and specific modes of discourse (such as the gothic novel), yet they seem to lack both the program of positive values and the moral certainty that most critics associate with satire. The result is that he has been variously described as both a satirist and a romantic ironist. Works classed as Menippean satires also often seem to occupy an ambiguous zone between satire and comedy.

Finally, there is a general consensus that satire is a rhetorically complex literary form, and that the speaker or so-called satiric persona within a text cannot simply be identified with the author of a satire. The degree to which these figures can be separated, however, remains a point of contention among scholars, many of whom still overwhelmingly attribute biographical or authorial intentions to satire that would be viewed with greater suspicion in other genres. This remains perhaps both the central and the most vexing conundrum for satiric theory: can satire’s instrumental or purposive intervention in contemporary discourses be reconciled with the modern view of art as an object of aesthetic contemplation?

Ancient Satire in Modernity

Satire can claim an ancient lineage across cultures. Examples of satire appear in Ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and Roman literature, as well as in the bible.¹¹ The Greek and Roman traditions have remained particularly important for modern satirists, who have often drawn on these traditions to legitimize their own work, as in the case of a writer such as Dryden, whose translations and essays helped to frame his own satirical practice. But despite these frequent classical references, the transmission of ancient satire into the modern world was not linear. Even the most basic issues surrounding ancient satire, such as the provenance of the word, which comes from “satura” (mixture) rather than “satyr,” as many thought, were not always widely understood. Certain ancient satiric traditions have been particularly important in the modern world, while others have been largely overlooked. Despite, say, the importance of Petronius’s Satyricon as a work, the three most influential traditions of ancient satire for much of modernity have been Horatian, Juvenalian, and Menippean satire. Rather than examining these ancient traditions as they existed, the focus here is on how these terms were interpolated and repurposed by modern satirists. The distinction between Horatian and Juvenalian traditions of satire became particularly important for early modern satirists, and this distinction continues to be re-inscribed in contemporary criticism on satire.

The Horace–Juvenal binary can already be seen in the opening sentence of Isaac Casaubon’s Prolegomena to the Satires of Persius (1605), which is arguably the first major theorization of satire in modernity: “These two features in particular determine Roman satire: moral doctrine on the one hand and wit and humor on the other.”¹² Although Casaubon does not directly associate these qualities with Horace and Juvenal, the portraits of each that he conjures up nonetheless reinforce this distinction between morality and rhetorical flair. Whereas Horace is the author of “good-natured jests,” Juvenal possesses a much keener wit, with his critiques being so “humorous that they often display the sharpness, the erudition, and the genius for speaking which was well developed through long use.”¹³ Whereas Horace “was everywhere occupied with the commonest precepts of morality,” Casaubon notes that we “know nothing of the morality of Juvenal.”¹⁴ Juvenal’s satire appears as complexly rhetorical but ambiguous in its larger ethical stance, whereas Horace’s satire is rhetorically much simpler but has a clear ethical orientation.

John Dryden’s “A Discourse on the Original and Progress of Satire” (1693) draws heavily on Casaubon’s essay and even more strongly pits Horace against Juvenal. Horace, as a satirist “is the more copious, and profitable in his instructions of humane life,” but “Juvenal is the more delightful author.”¹⁵ Although Dryden signals an express preference for Juvenal’s rhetoric, which “gives me as much pleasure as I can bear,” he also expresses concerns about the potential excesses within Juvenal’s style, which is “sometimes too luxuriant, too redundant.”¹⁶ This concern about the potentially excessive nature of rhetorical satire continues into the 21st century. Ultimately, Dryden states a preference for the more measured “manner of Horace” even if he has not “executed it” as well as Juvenal, because Horace’s tendency towards instruction is socially useful.¹⁷

For Dryden, satire had to be socially beneficial. As he states in what is perhaps the most famous passage of his essay: “The poet is bound, and that ex Officio, to give his reader some one precept of moral virtue, and to caution him against some one particular vice or folly.”¹⁸ Here, Dryden underscores that satire must be justified by a specific and clear program of moral instruction, which is linked to the poet’s role within the social order. Dryden clearly believes that both Horace and Juvenal fulfilled this role, but his concerns about the excesses of Juvenal’s rhetorical satire are perpetuated by subsequent theorists who worry about the potential amorality of rhetorical satire. But this dichotomy, as Dustin Griffin has noted, does not correspond to historical reality: Horace’s practice of explicating the positive motivations for his satires in a prologue appears to have been a preemptive defense against accusations of libel or malicious intent, rather than a philosophical position.¹⁹ Nonetheless, Dryden’s views would strongly influence the major British satirists that followed him, such as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope.

Satire Criticism in the 20th Century

The next major developments in satiric theory occurred in the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, 20th-century critics typically accuse 19th-century scholarship on satire of a biographical orientation. Such claims certainly ignore the contributions of many satirists, such as Oscar Wilde, and more recent scholarship by Aaron Matz has examined the close relationship between Victorian realism and modal satire.²⁰ But 20th-century criticism does make a series of novel claims about satire, even though these arguments often occurred on the periphery of larger literary debates. As Brian Connery and Kirk Combe have argued, the New Critics can be accused of a “malign neglect of satire” in their work; they list five reasons for this omission: (1) satire’s specific historical frames of reference undermined New Critical claims for the “self-containment of literary texts,” (2) satiric critique suggests an explicit intentionality at odds with the New Critical notion of the intentional fallacy, (3) satire “tends toward open-endedness, irresolution, and thus chaos,” which conflicts with New Critical ideas of aesthetic closure, (4) satire’s relentless inhabitation of other forms makes it resistant to easy analysis within a formalist mode, and (5) satire’s aesthetic procedures, rather than unifying disparate elements, tends to multiply the disorder within a text, revealing an “imminent incoherence” not suitable to New Critical aesthetics.²¹ While the New Critics may not have addressed satire at length, however, a new rhetorical school of satire criticism appeared in their wake.

The Yale School, the Chicago School, and the Standard View of Satire

Menippean Satire

Although Menippean satire was a significant form of ancient satire, it had largely fallen into obscurity by the 20th century. The critical recuperation of this genre can be directly traced to Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. As Howard D. Weinbrot recounts, Frye himself once wrote that “there was not one in a thousand university English teachers of Gulliver’s Travels who knew what Menippean satire was: now there must be two or three.”⁷⁰ Frye identifies Menippean satire as a genre of prose fiction that includes works such as Gulliver’s Travels, which are “fiction but not a novel” and also not a romance; he identifies a wide array of similar works including Voltaire’s Candide (1759), Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903) and Erewhon (1872), and Aldous Huxley’s Point Counterpoint (1928) and Brave New World (1932).⁷¹ For Frye, Menippean satire differs from traditional satire in that it “deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes” seeking to ridicule “pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts” and “rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds.”⁷² In other words, Menippean satires have general, rather than specific, satiric targets.

Although Menippean satires might resemble novels, they differ at the level of characterization. Menippean characters are not naturalistic but fictionalized “mouthpieces of the ideas they represent”⁷³ as in the case of Pangloss from Candide, who could be seen as satirizing idealist philosophy:

All events are interconnected in this best of all possible worlds, for if you hadn’t been driven from a beautiful castle with hard kicks in the behinds because of your love for Lady Cunegonde, if you hadn’t been seized by the Inquisition, if you hadn’t wandered over America on foot, if you hadn’t thrust your sword through the baron, and if you hadn’t lost all your sheep from the land of Eldorado, you wouldn’t be here eating candied citrons and pistachio nuts.⁷⁴

Here, the critique is still arguably satiric rather than comic, since it is directed at a specific historical philosopher (Leibniz) and critiques his philosophy through standard satirical trope of reductio ad absurdum. Menippean satires such as Candide are governed by an “intellectual structure” that disrupts the “customary logic of narrative” that readers expect in the novel, and formally speaking these satires frequently take the form of a “dialogue or colloquy” between different characters who represent different ideas, as in the case of Thomas Love Peacock’s novels, for example.⁷⁵ The second, and arguably more influential theorist of Menippean satire is Mikhail Bakhtin. But a note of caution needs to be sounded here from the outset. In Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin outlines a theory of the carnivalesque that has subsequently been associated with Menippean satire, but he only briefly discusses the influence of Menippus on Rabelais and never employs the term “Menippean satire” in this context. Nonetheless, Bakhtin does characterize the “carnival-grotesque” as a novelistic tradition that seeks “to consecrate inventive freedom,” to combine “a variety of different elements and their rapprochement,” and to undermine the “prevailing point of view of the world” and its accompanying “established truths” and “clichés.”⁷⁶ In The Dialogic Imagination (1975), Bakhtin explicitly discusses Menippean satire as a “serial-comico” genre of the novel, which shares historical roots with Socratic dialogue and employs “fantastic plots” (although, again, he never explicitly associates it with the carnivalesque).⁷⁷ Like Frye, Bakhtin argues that Menippean satire seeks to “expose ideas and ideologues” to ridicule, but without necessarily including specific historical references.⁷⁸

Both Frye and Bakhtin’s definitions of Menippean satire have rightly been challenged. Alistair Fowler, for example, argues that “so many forms are united” in Frye’s conception of Menippean satire that it “threatens to prove a baggier monster than the novel.”⁷⁹ Howard Weinbrot argues that Bakhtin “even surpasses Frye in creating a baggy genre into which almost any work can be made to fit” because his “synchronic” method “forces him into generalizations regarding Menippean satire that are impossible to verify.”⁸⁰ The result of the ambiguity generated by these claims, as David Musgrave notes, is that “the term ‘Menippean’” is “bandied about and applied almost willy-nilly to many works which are clearly not Menippean satires.”⁸¹ While it is clear that there was a distinct tradition of classical Menippean satire, the direct influence of this body of literature on many alleged Menippean satires of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is hard to establish.⁸²

The main problem, however, is that many works that are regularly classified as Menippean satires could not meaningfully be described as satires. There are many “carnivalesque” works that employ categories of the grotesque and occasional moments of modal satire but are also largely devoid of either satiric critique or references to specific persons or events. For example, writers such as Joyce and Pynchon could reasonably be classed as Menippean satirists, who occasionally employ aspects of modal satire, but they clearly seem not to be satirists in the way that such writers as Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, and William Gaddisare, since these latter authors’ target specific historical persons, movement, and events. While there is a non-linear tradition of Menippean satire in both ancient and modern times, scholarship on this form too frequently confuses the comic (which attacks general targets) with the satirical (which attacks historically specific targets). Nonetheless, the tradition of criticism on Menippean satire arguably presents a much stronger tendency to valorize the aesthetic possibilities of satire than even the Juvenalian tradition. Rather than worrying about the excesses of Menippean satire, critics have generally praised the excessiveness inherent within it, arguing that its subversion of norms is the locus of its value—a stark difference from most claims about other traditions of satire.

Satire and New Media in the 20th and 21st Century

Throughout the 20th century, satire proliferated across an array of new media forms, including radio, television, film, and the Internet. While satire has long been a popular form that has extended beyond the literary to include both the visual and performative arts, specific media forms have nonetheless altered satirical practices in various ways. There is a significant tradition of political satire in films, with works such as Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a bleak send-up of Cold War politics, having attained a classic status. Jeff Nillson has also identified a prominent subgenre of satirical Hollywood films from the 1990s, including such seemingly disparate works as The Player (1992), Bob Roberts (1992), Forrest Gump (1994), Wag the Dog (1997), and Primary Colors (1998), which emphasizes the enduring popularity of satire.

There are significant traditions of satire in television as well, including the “mockumentary,” sketch-based political satire, such as Saturday Night Live (1975–2019), animated shows with satirical content, such as The Simpsons (1989–2019) and South Park (1997–2019), and satirical news programs, which have proliferated around the world, including such examples as The Daily Show (1996–2019) in the United States, CNNNN (2002–2003) and Mad as Hell (2012–2019) in Australia, and Mock the Week (2005–2019) in the United Kingdom.⁸³ While all of these shows undeniably contain satirical content, the force and meaning of this content can differ wildly. For example, animated shows such as The Simpsons contain satire, but this satire is often viewed as a “post-ideological” critique associated with a postmodern cynicism rather than with a positive set of satiric values.⁸⁴ By contrast, satirical news programs often have a more explicit educative and ideological component, especially among “the coast, college-educated cadre of young viewers who get much of their political analysis in the form of satire.”⁸⁵ Once again, these two traditions seem to reflect distinct Juvenalian and Horatian tendencies, that tend toward either an aesthetic enjoyment of satirical critique or the use of satire to reinforce moral or ideological instruction.

Satire has also developed in particularly influential ways within Internet culture and has been associated with meme culture and so-called trolling and shitposting in anarcho-libertarian and alt-right message boards such as 4chan. These practices resemble satire in various ways, since they are directed at specific targets and seek to produce a specific form of laughter known as “lulz,” a term that derives from the internet acronym “lol” or “laughing out loud.” But “lulz” typically constitute a “detached and dissociated amusement at others’ distress” in response to memes or troll attacks.⁸⁶ In this sense, they tend to amplify the most sadistic aspects of satirical critique or else employ them for specific ideological ends, usually associated with radical right-wing politics. These online practices also emphasize that the Juvenalian tradition of rhetorically changed satire—which trolling and meme posting seem to inhabit as an extreme form—can absolutely be used for political or practical ends.

Discussion of the Literature

The first major modern theorist of satire is Isaac Casaubon, who argues for the distinct traditions of rhetoric and ethics in ancient satire.⁸⁷ This key distinction is appropriated by John Dryden in his “Discourse Concerning the Original and the Progress of Satire,” where he explicitly associates rhetoric with Juvenal and ethics with Horace.⁸⁸ This distinction between rhetoric and ethics is recapitulated throughout 20th-century criticism on satire. The Yale school of critics in the 1950s takes an explicitly rhetorical approach to satire, which they view as a genre. Maynard Mack argues for the impersonality of satire and the existence of a “satiric persona” that is similar to (but not the same as) the author of the work.⁸⁹ Robert C. Elliott discusses the importance of self-parody in satire as a way of distancing the satiric persona from the author.⁹⁰ Alvin Kernan identifies key formal features of satire, including its deployment of a static plot that differs markedly from novelistic plots.⁹¹ Despite this rhetorical orientation, however, the Yale school insists upon the ethical grounding of satire as a form. The Chicago school of the 1960s focuses on satire’s reference to specific historical figures, debates, and discourses. Edward Rosenheim argues that “satire consists of an attack by means of a manifest fiction upon discernible historic particulars.”⁹² Sheldon Sacks similarly argues that satire is defined by its external references.⁹³ But these historical analyses of satire are still used to generate largely formalists accounts of satire. Subsequent theorists of satire can still largely be split into rhetorical and historicist camps. The new rhetorical readings draw on aspects of poststructural theory to argue that the structure of satirical works undermines their explicit, ethical or normative claims; scholarly works like Michael Seidel’s Satiric Inheritance, Leon Guilhamet’s Satire and the Transformation of Genre, and Fredric Bogel’s The Difference Satire Makes, all advance claims about satire as a deformative and transgressive literary form. Contemporary historicist criticism of satire typically relies on archival evidence to make claims about satire in specific historical periods; exemplary works in this mode include Ashley Marshall’s Practice of Satire in England, Steven Jones’s Satire and Romanticism, and Jonathan Greenberg’s Satire, Modernism, and the Novel.