OH. Satire. I loathe satire....same as LYING. Don't need it. Enough lies going around. I see ZERO VALUE in satire. Some might believe it. What is the point? Same as pushing propaganda. It is worthless.
The value, point, and worth of satire is to deflate the self-regard of those who commit hubris, take themselves too seriously, or are somehow regarded as immune from criticism. Its role is similar to that of the court jester in the days when only the jester, under cover of humor, was allowed to criticize the king (cf. the Fool-for-Christ's-Sake Basil, who was the only person who could criticize Ivan the Terrible). Satire has a long history among the English speaking peoples: Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels is full of satires of British society in his day, and of course his
A Modest Proposal, suggesting dealing with the Irish famine by eating Irish children served as a stinging rebuke of the inhuman policies that led to the famine in the first place. A whole genre, the mock epic (as for example, Alexander Pope's
The Rape of the Lock, which makes a love-besotted man's contrivance to steal a lock of his beloved's hair the subject of a massive poem in iambic pentameter) made fun of the pretentiousness of latter-day Homer wannabes writing epic poetry.
Mikhail Bakhtin in his
Rabelais and His World wrote of folk festivals that mocked those in power in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ""laughing truth ... degraded power". And that is the point, value and worth of satire.
