Category: Jonathan Swift

  • Satire II: The Political Sphere of Satire; The Fine Line

    Okay, deep breath. Politics will be mentioned today but I want to be very clear that I’m only talking politics insofar as its relationship with satire. We’ve established that satire is generally presented as a ludicrous solution to a real social problem. The difficulty lies in the fact that different people consider different things ludicrous.…

  • Satire I: Definitions, the Trick of It, and A Modest Proposal

    When we’re talking about a guy like Wodehouse, humorist extraordinaire, it’s impossible not to talk about satire. So we’re going to pause our regularly scheduled programming to talk less about our mentor directly (don’t worry, it’ll come back around) and talk in more general terms about satire itself–which we’ll define as a comeuppance to society…