Satire Techniques: How the Pros Do It
Satire uses a specific set of techniques that have been developed and refined over two and a half thousand years of practice. The techniques are not formulas – great satire deploys them with judgment and precision rather than mechanically – but understanding them is the difference between producing satire and producing something that intends to be satire but isn’t quite getting there.
Irony: The Foundation Technique
Irony is the technique of saying the opposite of what you mean in a way that the audience understands you mean the opposite. It is the most widely used satirical technique and the most easily executed badly. Irony fails when the signal is too obvious – when the audience is told that irony is happening rather than allowed to detect it – and when the gap between what is said and what is meant is too wide for the audience to bridge without help. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of irony is the starting point. Understanding its etymology – from the Greek eiron, the dissembler – helps you understand why the technique depends on the audience’s complicity: irony is a shared secret between the writer and the reader, and it only works if both parties are in on it.
Verbal Irony vs Dramatic Irony
Verbal irony is the statement that means the opposite of what it says. Dramatic irony is the situation in which the audience knows something the character does not. Both are tools for the satirist, and they work differently. Verbal irony comments directly on its subject. Dramatic irony creates situations in which the subject’s ignorance is itself the satirical point: the character who is enthusiastically endorsing their own destruction, the institution that is celebrating its own failures. Yes Minister uses dramatic irony constantly: the audience sees what Hacker cannot, which is that Sir Humphrey is managing him rather than serving him.
Exaggeration and Hyperbole
Exaggeration takes a real characteristic of the target and amplifies it until the characteristic becomes undeniable. The technique works because the exaggeration must be grounded in something true: if the target does not actually have the characteristic being exaggerated, the exaggeration produces misrepresentation rather than satire. Spitting Image’s Thatcher puppet worked because Thatcher was genuinely imperious; the puppet simply made the imperious quality impossible to miss. Exaggeration that is not grounded in truth is not satire but caricature in the pejorative sense – a distortion that tells you nothing about the original.
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition places two things side by side – the official claim and the contradicting reality, the stated value and the actual behaviour, the grand ceremony and the squalid motive – without editorial comment. The gap between the two elements does the satirical work. This is the technique of the straight-faced news report, the documentary that simply observes, and the speech that quotes the target’s own words in a context that reveals them as contradictions. Political fact-checkers use juxtaposition as their primary tool: here is what was said, here is what was done, the audience can assess the gap. The satirist uses the same technique but in a comic rather than journalistic frame.
Parody and Pastiche
Parody reproduces the form of the target – its style, its conventions, its vocabulary – in order to expose the content through the reproduction. The Day Today parodies television news by reproducing its form perfectly and then filling the form with content that reveals how the form shapes what can be said. The technique requires deep familiarity with the original: parody that does not accurately reproduce the target’s form fails because the audience cannot see what is being reproduced. Study the original before you parody it. The accuracy of the reproduction is the first test of the parody’s quality.
Absurdism: Following Logic to Its Conclusion
Absurdist satire takes the internal logic of the target’s position and follows it to its inevitable conclusion, which turns out to be absurd. A Modest Proposal follows the logic of colonial economic extraction to its conclusion: if the Irish are regarded as a resource, then their children are a resource, and resources can be consumed. The Thick of It follows the logic of spin to its conclusion: if presentation matters more than substance, then the entire energy of government is devoted to managing presentation, and substance disappears. The absurdist technique is the most intellectually demanding because it requires genuine understanding of the target’s logic before you can demonstrate where that logic leads. The Guardian’s satire coverage identifies contemporary examples of this technique regularly.
The Unreliable Spokesperson
The unreliable spokesperson – the character who defends a position while inadvertently revealing its flaws – is one of satire’s most powerful tools. Holy Willie, Swift’s religious hypocrite, defends his own righteousness while revealing his hypocrisy. Alan Partridge defends his own talent while revealing his mediocrity. The technique works because the defence is sincere: the spokesperson genuinely believes what they are saying, and the sincerity of the belief is what reveals the gap between the belief and the reality. An insincere spokesperson cannot be satirically unreliable, only dishonest, which is a different and less interesting thing.
Timing: The Technique That Cannot Be Taught
Timing in satire is the sense of when the satirical point has been made precisely enough to land without being laboured. It is the technique that separates competent satire from great satire, and it cannot be taught in the way that irony or juxtaposition can be taught. It can only be developed through reading great satire, writing bad satire, reading the bad satire again, understanding why it is bad, and writing something better. The only rule: when in doubt, stop earlier than you think you should. Great satire almost always does less than it could. It trusts the audience to complete the thought. It is right to trust them.