Satire From Aristophanes to Swift Has Always Been the Weapon of the Underdog

No tyrant in history has ever had a sense of humour about himself. Not one. Some of them have had a sense of humour about other people, and a few have enjoyed a good joke at a banquet as long as the guest of honour was somebody else. But when the punch line lands on the man in the big chair, the room goes quiet, the guards shift, and somebody ends up in a cell, in exile, or in front of a magistrate.

That reaction is the best evidence that satire works. You do not lock up a man for a joke that failed. You lock him up for a joke that hit. So let me tell you the story of how the oldest weapon of the powerless got passed down for twenty-five centuries, and why you can read the history of liberty as a long record of governments that tried to silence a comedian and ended up making him famous.

What satire is, and what it is for

Define the term first. Satire is the use of ridicule, exaggeration and irony to expose the folly or vice of people, especially people in power, and so to change how the audience sees them. A satirist does not merely complain. He picks the most absurd consequence of the target's own position and presents it with a straight face, until the audience sees the absurdity for itself.

Three features run through every example in this post.

1. It is aimed up. The great satirists go after the people who hold power over them. When it is aimed down, at the poor and the weak, it is just cruelty with good timing.
2. It is a weapon of the outsider. The insider has other tools: an office, a vote, a press release. The outsider has a pen and a crowd that is willing to laugh.
3. It outlasts its targets. Who remembers the officials Swift ridiculed? We remember Swift.

Athens, 424 BC

The oldest case in the record is also one of the boldest. In 424 BC, the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes staged The Knights, a comedy that lampooned Cleon, the most powerful politician in Athens at that moment. Cleon was a demagogue who had risen on the back of popular favour and the war with Sparta, and he was not a man to be trifled with. Aristophanes put him on stage, thinly disguised as a scheming household slave who flatters his master and steals his dinner. According to the ancient tradition, the maskmakers refused to caricature Cleon's face, so the comic villain had to appear without a mask in his likeness. That detail comes from later commentators, so I give it as tradition, not as certain fact.

What is certain is that Aristophanes wrote the play, that it won the prize at the festival, and that Cleon was alive and powerful when the audience watched it. An Athenian audience laughed at the ruler of the city, in public, in a state-sponsored festival. That is a freedom that many later regimes did not allow.

Athens also shows the limits. The same city that tolerated Aristophanes put Socrates to death in 399 BC, and the play The Clouds, which made fun of Socrates, has been blamed by some readers for helping poison opinion against him. I raise that for balance. Satire is a blunt instrument, and a satirist can hit the wrong man. Even so, the principle that a free city lets its comedians mock its leaders is worth the occasional misfire.

Ireland, 1729

Jump forward twenty centuries. In 1729, a pamphlet appeared under the title A Modest Proposal. Its author was Jonathan Swift, the Anglo-Irish clergyman and writer, and its premise was a calm, reasonable, statistical suggestion that the poor of Ireland should sell their babies as food to the rich. The proposer speaks in the language of a political arithmetician, with calculations, cost estimates and a tone of civic spirit.

It is one of the best-known pieces of satire ever written, and it works exactly the way I described: Swift takes the logic of the people who talked about the Irish poor as an economic problem, and follows it one step further than they dared. Many readers took the pamphlet as outrageous because it was outrageous, and the point was to make them see that the policies in fashion, which treated human beings as line items, were worse. The monstrous proposal was a mirror. The reaction of a reader who recoils from it should be turned on the policies that made it conceivable.

That is the move that every good satirist makes: take the idea to its logical conclusion and let the audience see what it was all along. I have no better advice for anyone who wants to write political comedy.

New York, 1871

Now to America. Thomas Nast, the German-born illustrator for Harper's Weekly, drew, at the height of his campaign in 1871, a series of cartoons against William "Boss" Tweed and the Tammany Hall ring that looted New York City. The ring's graft, much of it connected with the building of the county courthouse, ran into the millions. Nast drew Tweed as a heavy figure with a moneybag for a head and the ring as a pack of vultures. Because a cartoon needed no literacy, it reached voters who could not read the newspaper's accompanying exposé, and it did so at a speed that the printed word could not match.

Tweed was prosecuted and convicted. He escaped, was caught in Spain, and died in jail in 1878. Nast did not do it alone, since reporters and reform lawyers did the grinding work, but the cartoons were a large part of why the public could not look away. The Supreme Court mentioned that tradition when it decided Hustler v. Falwell in 1988, and I discussed what that means for conservatives in Hustler v. Falwell Protected Parody, and Conservatives Benefit From It Now.

Mark Twain and the Congress

Samuel Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, spent much of his career laughing at the government. With Charles Dudley Warner he wrote The Gilded Age in 1873, a satire of the greed and corruption of the postwar era, and it gave a name to the whole period. Twain went after Congress with special relish. A line attributed to him says that the one native American criminal class is Congress, and whether or not he phrased it exactly that way, it expresses a view he held for the rest of his life: that the legislators had earned the contempt of the public.

Twain's method is instructive. He does not shout. He deadpans. He lets the reader work out the joke. And he is nearly impossible to place by party, since he was happy to wound anyone who deserved it.

Baltimore, 1920s

H. L. Mencken, the Baltimore newspaperman and critic, did the same work a generation later. Through his columns and his magazine, The American Mercury, founded in 1924, he mocked reformers, politicians, moralists and the whole machinery of uplift. He made special sport of Prohibition, the great reform of his day, and of the officials who enforced it. Prohibition was a constitutional amendment, and it was an ideal subject for a satirist: a project to perfect human nature that required an army of inspectors and produced a booming trade in crime.

Mencken's reputation is complicated, and I do not offer him as a hero in every respect. Some of his opinions have aged badly. My point is narrower. He understood that the people who most want to improve you are the people most in need of a joke at their expense, and the history of Prohibition suggests he had a point.

What the powerful do about it

If you read these stories in order, a pattern emerges. The powerful try, over and over, to shut the satirist up, and over and over they lose.

• In England, the licensing of the press, under which printing required a government licence, lapsed in 1695, and Parliament chose not to renew it. The state gave up trying to approve every pamphlet.
• In the colonies, the printer John Peter Zenger was tried in 1735 for seditious libel over his newspaper's attacks on the royal governor of New York, and a jury acquitted him. I told the story in John Peter Zenger and the Jury That Defended American Press Freedom in 1735. The jury refused to punish what they believed was true criticism of a man in power.
• In 1798 Congress passed the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish false, scandalous and malicious writing against the government. It was used against newspaper editors and even a sitting congressman, Matthew Lyon of Vermont, who was jailed and then re-elected while he sat in prison. The act expired in 1801, and its legacy was an enduring American suspicion of any law that punishes criticism of the government. See The Sedition Act of 1798 Jailed a Congressman Who Won Reelection From His Cell.

Each attempt failed for the same reason. A joke cannot be repealed. Once the audience has seen the emperor's costume, the audience cannot unsee it, and every punishment becomes a second joke.

The strongest objection, and an answer

Somebody will say: this is all very nice, but satire has a darker side. It can spread falsehoods. It can be used to demean the weak. It can be a cover for cruelty. Surely not every joke deserves protection.

Part of that is right. Satire can be unfair, and bad satire is plentiful. A fair reader can reject a cartoon as vicious or a parody as lazy, and can say so loudly. The remedy for bad satire, however, has always been better satire, plus the ordinary social consequences of being wrong. The danger of making the state the referee is that the state will protect itself first, which is the entire history I just told. Aristophanes's targets, Swift's targets and Nast's targets all thought they were being treated unfairly. Fairness, to the man in the cartoon, is always in the eye of the beholder.

The best answer is the Founders' answer. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." The men who wrote that had been the target of the Crown's censorship and had been satirists themselves, from Franklin's 1773 mock edict of the King of Prussia to the pamphlets of the Revolution. They knew that a free people will say unflattering things about its rulers, and they chose to live with it.

Why the weapon now so often comes from the right

Now the part that makes some readers uncomfortable. If satire belongs to those outside power, then the question of who is outside power matters, and it does not always have the same answer. For much of the twentieth century, mockery of the establishment often came from the left, because the establishment was perceived as conservative. Today a good deal of the cultural establishment is not. Universities, large parts of the entertainment industry, much of the press and a thick layer of the corporate world have adopted a common set of fashionable ideas and a common vocabulary to go with them. Fashionable ideas held by institutions are the natural prey of satirists.

So it should not surprise anyone that a lot of lively, irreverent humour now comes from conservatives and from independents who are tired of being lectured. The jokes about mandatory trainings, about the language of administrators, about regulations that run to hundreds of pages, have a long lineage. They are Nast's cartoons on a new subject. I have argued elsewhere that late-night television gave up a lot of this ground when it started to lecture, and you can read that in Late Night Comedy Stopped Punching at Power and Started Lecturing. The sensible response of those in the establishment is to laugh, or at least to shrug. The unsensible response, and an old one, is to call the satirist dangerous and ask somebody to do something about it.

I should add a caution for our own side. If satire belongs to the outsider, then conservatives who win have to expect to become targets. When the movement holds office, the jokes will be on us, and we should take them as Rogers and Twain would have: with a grin, and with a willingness to reform. A movement that can only laugh at its enemies is one election away from becoming the establishment it mocked.

The case in brief

1. Satire is the oldest answer of the governed to the governing, from Aristophanes's mockery of Cleon in 424 BC through Swift in 1729, Nast in the 1870s, Twain and Mencken.
2. Every attempt to suppress it has failed, from the lapse of English licensing in 1695 to Zenger's acquittal in 1735 and the expiry of the Sedition Act in 1801.
3. Satire is legitimate when it aims up and illegitimate when it aims down, and the test is who holds the power.
4. Because many cultural institutions now share one set of fashionable ideas, the satirists of today are often conservatives.
5. The remedy for bad satire is better satire, never a government referee.

What you can do: read the first two pages of A Modest Proposal aloud with a friend, then talk about which policy of our own day deserves the same treatment.