The best satires are written by the seriously pissed—the angrier they are, the more biting the writing. Life is too tragi-comic and either one goes sublimely profound on it or exposes it for the farce it is. One is pathos, the other bathos—however, like a typo that may sound, it is the fine line between Oliver Twist and Catch-22. Satire is a literary genre that self-mocks.
Beneath the wordplay and the irony is a truth no one wants to look in the eye. And unlike the fun-house mirror which shows everything too bumpy, too lumpy, too fat or too thin, with satire you are pretty much looking at what is. It is a fighting form of writing, gloves off. And the mockery is powered by righteousness, the kind with its heart in the right place and tongue firmly in cheek.
Why satire? It is literally like clicking on a button called ‘change’. Reactions are bang on and mindsets bombed. The laidback, the apolitical and the fence-sitters have to work hard at appearing placid after such a landmine blast right under them. Basically, satire kicks ass.
Classics like The Rape of the Lock and A Modest Proposal delight not just with their plot premise but with the sheer audacity of their telling. One is a high burlesque poem by Alexander Pope detailing a man’s attempt to snip a girl’s hair and the other is a fun suggestion by Jonathan Swift about eating, well, babies. By pretending to take the absurd seriously, satirists pull legs even as they let us have it. Satire exposes the ridiculous. And once you see something as silly, it can never go back to un-silly.
A lot of writers, knowing how effective it is to wax satirical, cleverly couch it in all they write. Julian Barnes, for example, or Ian McEwan, can give us the most philosophical and psychological contemporary masterpieces but there is the straight-faced and unmistakable poking of fun.
With Punch going out of print in 2002 and Mad magazine still hanging in there, lampooning went all audio-visual on us with TV shows like Saturday Night Live and comic strips like Doonesbury. Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit but in this genre it is king. Bring on the double entendres. Exaggerate to your heart’s content. Go to town with verbal gesticulations and puns. Nothing is taboo in the world of satire. Deadpan is Bachchan asking Basanti: Tumhara naam kya hai, Basanti?
Good satirists make it look simple; a mad logic permeates down to the punchline. A really effective attempt comes from the heart; a genuine peeve coupled with sharp wit. Arm yourself with a sense of justice, of what is not right, a point you want to make, never losing sight of it till the end, and the most absurd of arguments. The hyperbole should show attitude and no desperate jest please. Flat jokes can kill.