Genres
Satire
A genre of the arts, usually fiction, in which vices, follies and abuses are held up to ridicule toward improvement.
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary and performing arts, usually fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, with the intent of shaming individuals, institutions or society into improvement. It is usually humorous but its deeper purpose is constructive social criticism; Northrop Frye's formulation is that in satire, irony is militant. Parody, burlesque, exaggeration, juxtaposition and double entendre are its standard tools. Swift's A Modest Proposal and Gulliver's Travels, Aristophanes, and Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn anchor the canon.
Satire is tone management at maximum difficulty: the target must stay legible while the voice stays comic, and the world's level of absurdity, set in chapter one, must hold to the end. It sits toward the literary end of the commercial and literary spectrum.