A Note in Defence of Satire

The purpose of this paper is to reopen the question of the nature of satire and to make some suggestions towards the answer. In the current standard treatises on laughter and the comic spirit satire appears as the least attractive and the least defensible of the many manifestations of the comic spirit,--if, indeed, it can be defended at all. No one cares to champion anything so ignoble and ill-mannered and negative. And it is not difficult to understand why this should be so, in view of the orientation and general tendency of modern theory regarding the nature of the comic. The psychologists and estheticians who have studied laughter and the comic spirit have quite properly insisted that in their pure states they are innocent, even though they may be corrective; laughter is related to the play instinct, for instance, and the pure comic spirit is an enjoyable perception of mere incongruity, a free play of the intelligence without malice-as Meredith described it in his classic treatise. But in satire, they observe, the comic spirit is contaminated, if not obscured, by something foreign to its nature; in the place of hearty and wholesome laughter we get the sneer of malignity. Moreover, they derive conclusions distinctly unfavorable to

Art · Environmental ethics · Political science · History · Humor Studies and Applications · Philosophy

• Zu Begriff und Theorie der Satire

  Jürgen Brummack•Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für…•1971

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