SATIRE ASSIGNMENT
Length: 500 words or longer-double spaced rough draft
Write a satire: a literary work that ridicules a subject--an institution, person, trend, practice, idea, etc.--by presenting that subject with ironic humor calculated to expose various absurdities (follies, abuses, stupidities) associated with the subject. Horatian satire (named after the Roman poet, Horace) is gentle and somewhat sympathetic toward its subject; Juvenalian satire (from the Roman poet, Juvenal) is bitter and blasts away at human corruption with scathing moral indignation.
Forbidden topics: No "personal" topic (=my trip to Florida, etc.)
Recommended topics: current news events and personalities
In writing your satire:
1. Make sure you use irony--language that means the mocking opposite of what it says. Thus, you will be using indirection so that instead of directly attacking your subject, you will expose its weaknesses in an amusingly indirect manner.
2. Beware of direct sarcastic attack. Sarcastic name-calling loses the sense of control that the satirist strives for. (Example of indirect attack: "Sir, I am sitting in the smallest room in my house, with your letter in front of me. Soon, it will be behind me." The satiric effect here is also gained by the sly use of a pun; satirists thrive on words with such double meanings.) Therefore, AVOID HARSH SARCASM--the blatant contradiction of one statement by another: "I like your letter so much, I think I'll use it as toilet paper!" "This food is so delicious, I only vomited 5 times when eating it!"
3. Give your reader some clues as to your true feelings. Since you will sometimes be writing the opposite of what you mean, you'll need to use language in such a way that the reader is not likely to misinterpret what you say and take it at face value.
4. No matter how far-fetched, your satire should imply a serious purpose--a main point.
5. Above all, make sure you create an imaginative situation, a "mode," to expose the target of your ridicule. For example, make up an awards ceremony, a 900-number, a test, a disease, a sport, a new product, a new law, a theme park, etc. as the satiric vehicle for your ridicule. If you are comically clever enough to create such a mode, your satire is likely to be more amusing than a satire that more directly attacks its target.
Satiric strategy suggestions:
1. Overpraise your subject so that you reveal by implication those features in it that you dislike.
2. For a serious problem, offer a "solution" that is designed, not really to convince the reader of your solution, but to expose something about the problem. Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is the classic example of such a strategy.
3. Follow the plot details of a well-known story (fairy tale, film, novel) as you tell another story. Select your well-known story so that you can make a number of effective parallels between that work and your subject. (Russell Baker's "Little Red Riding Hood Revisited" uses a different strategy here--he retells the original story but does so in such a way that his style mocks several targets).
4. Create a fictitious persona (a fictional first-person narrator, an "I") who expresses a view that is inherently unconvincing, yet it serves to expose some serious issue and imply a more adequate set of values than those under attack. An extension of this strategy would be to create a dialogue between two characters, one of whom serves as the "straight man" for the other. (Example: Russell Baker's "Hey, Ruble." Baker's satire also exemplifies another strategy: placing a famous person from a bygone era in a modern setting in order to expose the folly of some modern trend in contrast to the values we associate with the famous person).
5. Take a news incident or trend and satirize it by placing some of its features and characteristics in another context which reveals the original features in an outlandish way.
See The Onion (check its archives) for numerous satiric articles, connected with news events. (http://www.theonion.com/index.php?pre=1)
6. Overturn a subject by presenting it from a viewpoint which is the direct opposite of an attitude that we normally associate with the subject. (Example: In "The Dorm Dilemma," Art Buchwald reverses the expected attitudes of parents and their college-age children toward pre-marital cohabitation).
