Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Satire & Satirists")
Aug. 27-Sep. 2, 2023 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: “Satire & Satirists”
Opening Line of the Week
If you’re going to begin an essay with an observation that attempts to capture the essence of your subject, it had better be a good one—and in this case, once you get by the outdated notion that a satirist is “a man” rather than a person of either gender, it turns out to be a superb observation about satire and the motivation of satirists.
Vidal was writing about the English writer Evelyn (pronounced EVE-uh-lin) Waugh, who he described as “Our time’s first satirist.“ About Waugh, Vidal continued: “For thirty years his savagery and wit have given pleasure and alarm. . .all set down in a prose so chaste that at times one longs for a violation of syntax to suggest that its creator is fallible, or at least part American.”
We typically think of great opening lines as coming from books, but, as you see here, they can also appear in essays, articles, and columns in newspapers and magazines. You can find more than 200 additional examples in GreatOpeningLines.com.
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This Week’s Puzzler
On August 30, 1944, this woman was born in Monterey, California. Raised in an upscale environment in Houston, Texas (her father was a prominent oil and gas executive), she attended one of the state’s most prestigious prep schools, spent one unhappy year at Scripps College in California, and ended up at Smith College in Massachusetts. While attending Smith, she interned for three summers at the Houston Chronicle, where she worked in such low-level positions that she once described herself as the paper's “sewer editor.”
After graduating in 1966, she attended Columbia University's School of Journalism, getting an M.A. in 1967. In 1970, after a few years at the Minneapolis Tribune, she took a job at the Texas Observer, an alternative publication that was compatible with her left-leaning political orientation. Over the next six years, the six-foot-tall reporter with striking red hair won the admiration of many “Good ol’ Boys” in the Texas legislature with her remarkable ability to turn a phrase (as when she once said about a Texas congressman, “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day”).
In 1976, The New York Times lured her away with a five-fold increase in salary. From the beginning, it was not a good fit. If the Times was the journalistic equivalent of a gray flannel suit, she was a red Satin dress with a feather boa. After a year in Manhattan, she transferred to the paper's Rocky Mountain Bureau in Denver. In 1982, she made it back to her beloved Texas, working first for the Dallas Times Herald and then the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (her columns ultimately resulted in a number of best-selling books, including You've Got to Dance With Them That Brung You).
In a 1991 People magazine article, she said, “There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity—like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule—that’s what I do.” She then went on to add:
Who is this woman? (Answer below)
What Does Satire Mean to You?
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines satire as “a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn.” Whether offered in writing (books, poetry, essays, newspapers, pamphlets), on the stage (plays, movies, skits, comedic sketches, songs, poems), or in drawings (cartoons and illustrations), satire is driven principally by a desire to expose the flaws and foibles of powerful people or institutions.
Satire can take many different forms (irony, parody, buffoonery, burlesque,
caricature, lampoons, mockery, ridicule), but several years ago its central purpose was beautifully expressed by the folks who brought us the Ig Nobel Prize (the famous parody of the Nobel Prize):
“To first make people laugh, and then make them think.”
Satire almost always has a sharp and biting “edge” to it, often leading its
targets to dismiss it as unbalanced and unfair. According to Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, one of the great modern satirists, that’s exactly as it should be.
Satire first emerged as a literary form in the classical age of Greece, and was refined and expanded during the Roman Empire, when the 1st-century writer known as Juvenal wrote that there is so much folly in the world that “It is hard not to write satire.” The problem back then, though, was that criticism of political and religious leaders was almost always censored—and those making the criticism were often jailed, tortured, and executed. Given this harsh reality, the motivation of satirists from the beginning was to write in such a veiled way that their targets didn’t even realize they were being described.
The Austrian writer Karl Kraus was clearly thinking about this historical reality when he wrote, “Satire that the censor understands is rightly censored.” And Jonathan Swift—generally regarded as history’s greatest prose satirist for such works as A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726)—was on the same wavelength when he wrote: “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” (in Swift’s time, glass was the common term for a mirror). But my favorite observation on the theme came from one of the few women in her era to become widely admired for her wit and wisdom.
In the 20th century, the ability to write such “under the radar” satirical critiques reached a zenith in such classic works of literature as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and two separate works by George Orwell: Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
In the 1950s and 60s, Mad magazine, The Harvard Lampoon, and satirists like Lenny Bruce and Tom Lehrer began to offer a more “in-your-face” form of satire in which targets were completely aware—often painfully so—of what was being said or written about them. I witnessed this for myself during the 1960 presidential race between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. The press loved the telegenic young politician from Massachusetts, in no small part because he himself had a flair for wit and humor (in a 1960 press conference, he enthralled those in attendance when he quipped, “Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I’m the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House”).
As much as the press adored JFK, they had serious reservations about Nixon—and given his cartoonish-like looks (heavy five o’clock shadow, ski-jump nose, heavy black eyebrows, sagging jowls, and brooding appearance), he was easy pickings for his detractors. Indeed, the satirical depictions of Nixon were so consequential that, a few years back, comedian Chris Rock made one of the most trenchant observations ever made about the 1960 presidential campaign.
NOTE: The cartoon image above is used with permission from Tom Richmond, who was named “Caricaturist of the Year” in both 1998 and 1999 by the International Society of Caricature Artists. For more on Tom and his amazing work, go here.
This week, think about where the world would be without satire and satirists. To stimulate your thinking, here are ten more of my favorite observations on the subject:
Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded. — Anita Brookner
Fools are my theme, let Satire be my song. — Lord Byron
A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true. — G. K. Chesterton
The difference between satire and humor is that the satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive—often to release him again for another chance. — Peter De Vries
A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible to get relief. — John Dos Passos
Satire is focused bitterness. — Leo Rosten
Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art. — Philip Roth
The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little—or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives. — Anthony Trollope
Satire picks a one-sided fight, and the more its intended target reacts, the more the practitioner gains the advantage. — Garry Trudeau
Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality. — Barbara W. Tuchman
For source information on these quotations, and others on the subject of SATIRE & SATIRISTS, go to Dr. Mardy's Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations.
Cartoon of the Week
Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:
Molly Ivins
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, Ivins fought valiantly for eight years before finally succumbing at age 62 in 2007. She kept her sense of humor through the entire ordeal.
Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week
Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Maturity.”
Mardy
WOHDERFUL COLLECTION OF THOUGHTS ABOUT SATIRE. ALSO GREAT TO BE
REMINDED OF THE WIT OF MOLLY IVENS. THANK YOU/.
in high school we were to write a satire. I forgot to put my name on mine, as did another student, a male. My writing was a direct insult towards my female English teacher who blatantly played favorites. My paper rec'd an A; the other below that. I distinctly remember the teacher's look of surprise when she realized I was the one who wrote the paper...