Satire Assessment Task – English
1) What is Satire?
Satire as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary is “the use of humour, irony,
exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices.” Satire does this
with the purpose of urging the reader or viewer to remedy the problem being satirised. A
satirist employs various techniques such as irony and exaggeration to help show flaws and
idiocy of society. There are two primary forms of satire, dark and very serious or humorous
and witty. Bruce Dawe’s poems Homecoming and Life Cycle, Jonathon Swift’s A Modest
Proposal, Scott Adams’ Dilbert Comics and Caricature and cartoons from the lecture will be
used to highlight and explain what satire is.
The various techniques satire is characteristic of are exaggeration, irony, parody,
sarcasm and caricature.
Exaggeration or hyperbole, when used in satire is to increase or enlarge a certain
aspect of something or someone to an extent that it becomes absurd, so as to show fault of the
aspect focused on. On slide forty of the lecture the comic on the “Inquisition into un-
Australian activities,” exaggerates the consequences faced by the man in the comic who is an
“atheist” when it came to looking at sport stars as god like figures. Exaggeration is used here
to show how ridiculous it is to be labelled un-Australian if not obsessed with sport. In Swifts
A Modest Proposal, an example of exaggeration is apparent from the title itself. Swift
describes his proposal as modest, but it is soon known to the reader that this has been
extremely exaggerated as his proposal includes selling children to be used as food to solve
Ireland’s problems. Exaggeration proves to be effective as it’s use is obvious, so a reader can
easily pick it out and understand the aspect being criticised.
Irony is one of the most commonly used tools of a satirist. Irony when used in Satire is
the expression of language such that the opposite is implied, in order to criticise an aspect of
society, or even an individual. In the poem Homecoming by Bruce Dawe, which shows the
foolishness and lunacy of war, an example of irony can be seen in the phrase “They’re
bringing them home, now, too late, too early.” The “too late, too early” is ironic as it implies
that the soldiers have died and its too late to stop these and many more deaths as well as
implying that the soldiers died at a very early age. The Beach comic on slide 12 of the lecture
