Satire

Satire is a form of humor, and is considered the cruelest form of comedy. Satire points out the folly of people, organizations, institutions, and ideas.

Often, satire will use fictional counterparts of real people as characters, as a parody of Real Life. However, a satirical work can also use original characters to explore the foibles or ramifications of an organization or course of action.

Satire often relies on current events, which raises a danger that it won't be appreciated in another era. The poetry of Pope and Dryden satirized English politics of the 18th century, but few would appreciate the humor now. The best satire can still be appreciated on its own merits even after the thing it's criticizing fades from consciousness. Occasionally, a piece of satire regains relevance in similar circumstances; for example, satire aimed at George Bush I (or, perhaps more justifiably, Richard Nixon) can often be easily applied to Bill Clinton; 1990s "look at the old guy!" barbs at Bob Dole were recycled in 2008 to target John McCain.

The Roman poets Ennius and Lucilius are considered the progenitors of the genre, though almost all of their work has been lost. Latin satire was generally delivered in verse, like most literature of the time. It was considered the sole branch of literature native to Rome and there was no Greek equivalent, though some Greek comedy, such as Aristophanes, had elements that we would consider satiric. Horace, Persius, and Juvenal are perhaps the three most famous Roman satirists, ranging from good-natured (Horace disposing of a dreadful bore) to savage (Juvenal's condemnation of sodomites pretending to be philosophers). They are for the most part preoccupied with urban life, morality, and how other people suck.

Literary convention divides satire into the Horatian (good-natured, almost affectionate, light-hearted, and more likely to view the target as foolish rather than evil) and the Juvenalian (contemptuous, abrasive, scornful, and outraged, relentlessly mocking a target often regarded as outright evil).

See also Parody, Pastiche, Farce, Meta Trope Intro. Compare Deconstruction, as a lot of satire incorporates elements of it, as well as Black Comedy and Take That!. See also The Comically Serious, which is often a key component of satire.

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Examples:

Alternate Reality Games

• Omega Mart: Meow Wolf's primary intention with this Alternate Reality supermarket is to provide a Surrealist Satire of the American grocery store, with surreal parodies of common grocery store items designed to make people who go through it think about the relationship they have with the products they purchase.

Anime & Manga

• Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei makes dark commentary on general shallowness, escapism, otaku and society in general.
• Kino's Journey basically does this Once an Episode as Kino travels from one city to another. Notably one episode has a democracy where only a single citizen is still alive, all the others having died because of their absolute belief in majority rules.
• Oh! Edo Rocket is a farcical meta-satire of its own genre, managing to (hilariously) savage just about every cliche and character type in the world of anime and manga.
• Depending on if you consider it a parody or not Black Lagoon is this towards the over-the-top violence that was '90s anime.

Arts

• Superflat is a Post-Modern art movement that was started by Takashi Murakami who was inspired by Hideaki Anno. It sometimes satirizes many aspects of Japan (particularly things sparked by Anime) such as consumerism, the prevalence of Kawaisa, Lolicon, and Fanservice along with the Otaku subculture that is the driving force behind all of them. However, since certain artists associated with Superflat are lolicon otaku themselves, it could also be seen as a form of Self-Parody. Furthermore, it should be noted that not all Superflat works are satirical in nature — Superflat Monogram, by Murakami and Mamoru Hosoda, for instance, is merely a Louis Vuitton commercial.
• Dada was a Post-Modern movement that was a satire of modern art and post-WWI malaise.

Comic Books

• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a Deconstruction/satire of Victorian era fiction and values.
• Tintin
  • Especially the album The Blue Lotus, which references the Chinese-Japanese War in the 1930s.
  • The Broken Ear is a satire of the Gran Chaco War in South America.
• Suske en Wiske
• Asterix
• Tom Poes
• Urbanus
• Robert Crumb
• Transmetropolitan: An excessively Juvenalian satire of American consumer culture, Politics, Journalism, Television, Religion, Cyberpunk writing, Utopian futurism and the future in general.
• Not Brand Echh had satires of many Marvel comic book heroes as well as a few other companies' characters.
• Judge Dredd is a satire on zero-tolerance policing, with a main character who is a Judge, Jury, and Executioner in a Crapsack World and a decent amount of Black Comedy.
• Invader Zim
• I Summoned Cthulhu to Fund My Kickstarter is a satire on the crowdfunded comics industry and its overreliance on offering adult content.

Comic Strips

• Al Capp's Li'l Abner is a brutal but comedic satire on society and culture.
• The Dilbert comic strip is a satire of the corporate world. Mostly Horatian.
• Calvin and Hobbes contains a variety of satire. Most often Calvin himself acts as satire of narrow-minded self-centeredness of people or the shallow ethos of the consumer society, sometimes other things. His father's behavior is often satire of certain kind of parental behavior. Both of them sometimes offer satire of hobbies taken too seriously (bicycling for Dad and chewing gum for Calvin). And there's more.
• Nero
• Pogo
• Peanuts dabbles in this occasionally:
  • Linus' obsession with The Great Pumpkin was Charles Schultz's way of making fun of Santa Claus.
  • A series of strips in October of 1964 featured Linus running for president as a strongman candidate, only to have his political career ruined by a gaffe involving (you guessed it!) The Great Pumpkin. Later adapted into You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown.
• Pugad Baboy
• Andy Capp's titular protagonist is a satirical take of people in northern England. He's surprisingly popular in that region, all things considered.
• Political cartoons tend to be satirical by nature.
  • Bloom County: One of the few comic strips to win the Pulitzer for Editorial Cartooning.
  • Non Sequitur is a left-of-center example.
  • Mallard Fillmore is a more right-leaning strip.
  • Prickly City is another right-leaning strip.

Fan Works

• Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus is a hilarious and exceptionally well-made satirical mockery of popular conventions in Harry Potter Fan Fiction, the Harry Potter fandom, and the universe of Harry Potter in general. Of special note is the relationship between the Mundane and Wizarding worlds — which is sharply delineated in the source material and most fanfiction. In the protagonist's eyes there is no divide, and a significant element of the humor stems from everyone around her being unable to parse this.
• Edgar satirizes Disney's trend of creating live-action sympathetic origin story movies for their classic villains by making one of these for Edgar of The Aristocats.

Films — Animation

• Peanuts Animated Films:
  • You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown as seen above.
  • A Charlie Brown Christmas makes fun of the commercialization of Christmas, and famously caused the decline of aluminum Christmas trees.
• Several of Ralph Bakshi's animated feature films are heavy on satire, particularly Coonskin.
• South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is a satire of censorship.
• Sausage Party is a satire of religion.
• Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation, the direct-to-video animated film of the series, jabs its toes further into Summertime Activities, such as water fights, boating, including a car trip to a satirical Disneyland Park, Johnny Depp in the form of a skunk cartoon, and even the late 1980s horror films Friday the 13th and The Hitcher.
• Beavis and Butt-Head Do America mockingly puts it feet down further at The U.S. Federal Governments incompetence, inadequacy and inefficiency, especially when dealing with dangerous criminals and terrorists, predating the 9/11 tragedy of 2001. It also shows us about life on the lam, through the eyes of two idiotic teenage boys.

Films — Live-Action

• The movie The Player satirized Hollywood's crushing effect on the visions of individual artists as well as the kind of people that environment attracts.
• Being There, which brought us Chance the Gardener, is a satire of the human tendency to favor style over substance and take things at face value, particularly where media and politics are concerned. Basically Horatian.
• Buried On Sunday: The plot has its serious moments but is has a fousi on satirizing Canadian politics.
• Cannibal Holocaust: It is the most sick, vile, twisted, bloody and most violent piece of satire ever made by a film director. Eli Roth's The Green Inferno is more bloody, gorier and more barbarically gruesome, not to mention even more controversial.
• A Clockwork Orange is a satire of the battle against violence in society.
• Don't Look Up is a satire of the Global Warming crisis and society's response to it. The approaching comet is a thinly-veiled metaphor for climate change, and the heroes who are trying to address the issue are stymied by various short-sighted people out to exploit it for their own interests.
• Dream Scenario is a satire on fame in the Internet age, as an ineffectual teacher and Henpecked Husband finds himself appearing in everyone's dreams.
• Dr. Strangelove is one of the most well known satires of the Cold War, and of the foolishness of the nuclear arms race. An interesting case where Horatian techniques were put to a Juvenalian end.
  "Mr. President, we must not allow... A MINE SHAFT GAP!"
• Bruno Dumont's France satirizes modern French media, the fabric of "star journalism", "news as entertainment" and the intellectual dishonesty of news-based TV channels.
• Friend of the World is a satire on the topics of war and disease.
• Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator is a satire on Hitler, Nazism and Fascism. Given the subject, it's Juvenalian, but surprisingly mildly so.
• Man Bites Dog is a satire on the sensationalism of the TV industry.
• Meet John Doe is a satire on the populist movement in the United States and Europe following The Great Depression.
• Monty Python's Life of Brian is a satire on religions and ideologies and their followers, more specifically Christianity. Generally Horatian and very gently toward Chistianity, but other ideologies get sharper treatment.
• Network by Sidney Lumet is a satire on the television industry. Quite Juvenalian.
• Thank You for Smoking is a satire of the tobacco industry. Combines Juvenalian and Horatian techniques to great comic effect.
• To Be or Not to Be is a satire of Nazism.
• The Truman Show is a satire of reality TV and television in general, yet it inspired the television show Big Brother.
• The films of Jacques Tati are a satire on the contrast between the traditional society and the technological innovations of the modern world.
• A Serbian Film is a satire (supposedly) of modern Serbian cinema and the history of the nation as a whole. So Juvenalian, some couldn't even tell it was a satire.
• Wag the Dog is a particularly Juvenalian satire on the US news media and politics.
• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is a comedic take on the Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll musician Biopic film, applying the tropes to an exaggerated version of the life story of "Weird Al" Yankovic.
• UHF: Weird Al's film mocks retro pop culture, TV shows and movies. Targets include The Beverly Hillbillies, Network, Star Wars, Blazing Saddles, Conan the Barbarian, Rambo, Wheel of Fortune, The Pinwheel Channel, The A-Team, The Shining, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Gone with the Wind, and Gandhi.
• Idiocracy: A satirical dystopian Sci-Fi critique on human evolution in modern society, mass pop culture, mainstream media and commercialism. It also both references and lampoons classic dystopian sci-fi films like The Running Man, Total Recall (1990), 2001: A Space Odyssey, Logan's Run, plus the novels Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World.
• Bamboozled shows how far African-American portrayals on television can really go, and how television network executives will do anything to keep their ratings up, at the cost of racially exploiting and ruining the lives of others.
• This is Spın̈al Tap is a satire of rock bands.
• Plácido ruthlessly mocks the hypocritical upper-class people of a town in 1961 Spain, who take in homeless people for dinner on Christmas Eve not because they want to, but because they want to look charitable in front of their neighbors.
• Hollywood Shuffle is a satire of Hollywood's attitudes about black actors in the 1980's.
• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story does this to musician biopics. Word of God from Al himself is that specific inspirations were Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman (2019).

Literature

• The Book of Jonah: Possibly the Ur-example. The title character is a Take That! toward people who desire God's mercy for themselves, but not for other people.
• Adrian Mole satirises "the Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher (whom he despises), in the form of a poem:
  Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?
  Do you wake, Mrs Thatcher, in your sleep?
  Do you weep like a sad willow? On your Marks and Spencer's pillow?
  Are your tears molten steel? Do you weep?
  Do you wake with "three million" on your brain?
  Are you sorry that they'll never work again?
  When you're dressing in your blue, do you see the waiting queue?
  Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?
• Jonathan Swift in general, really. His A Modest Proposal and Gulliver's Travels are among the most Juvenalian works ever produced.
• Samuel Johnson was another notable satirist. An example of his work being The Life of Richard Savage.
• Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 novella Flatland is a scathing dissection of Victorian class structures, of biological racism and eugenics, and of misogyny.
• The works of Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Rabelais and Voltaire.
• Some of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books are satires of government, religion, and other things, often with the assistance of parody and pastiche. Typically Horatian.
• Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote satirizes nearly all of its contemporary examples of literature and theater and ridicules them; also a Juvenalian take of Spanish society at The Cavalier Years.
• Horace's satires tend to be playfully sly and give the characteristics of Horatian satire. He even provides his own description of satire here in his first satire:

Furthermore, not to go rattling off lists the way comics tell one joke
After another, — yet what's to forbid our amusement at telling
Truths, the way teacher cajole little boys by awarding them cookies,
Coaxing them on to the point where they want to learn more of their letters?

• Juvenal's satires, on the other hand, tend to be much more abrasive and establish the characteristics of Juvenalian satire. Juvenal provides his own description in his first satire:

When a flabby eunuch marries, when well-born girls o crazy
for pig-sticking up-country, bare-breasted, spear in fist;
when the barber who rasped away at my youthful beard has risen
to challenge good society with his millions; when Crispinus —
that Delta-bred house-slave, silt washed down by the Nile —
now hitches his shoulders under Tyrian purple, airs
a thin gold ring in summer on his sweaty finger
('My dear, I couldn't bear to wear my heavier jewels') —
it's harder not to be writing satires; for who could endure
this monstrous city, however callous at heart, and swallow
his wrath?

• The Confidence-Man has characters that are satirized expys of 19th-century authors.
• Forrest Gump:
  • The novel (but not the movie) was a fairly biting satire of Americana from the '50s to the '70s. The novel was more Juvenalian, the film being Horatian.
  • Its sequel, Gump and Co. was a less-biting satire of the '80s and '90s, including a light dig at the original novel's film adaptation.
• Many of the works of Mark Twain are clear examples of satire — most famously, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (protestations to the contrary on the back cover notwithstanding).
• Andrew Martin's novel Bilton is a satire on lifestyle journalism, involving a rude and alcoholic Marxist intellectual who works at the Daily Globe, a newspaper so swollen and fatuous that it has a supplement listing all the other supplements.
• The Devil's Dictionary, satirizing a wide variety of topics (and Juvenalian to the core). Notably contains an entry on "satire" teeming with sarcastic disdain for those who don't get satire.
• Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock is mocking the hubbub that sprang up when a friend of his cut a woman's lock of hair. Long story short: hair gets cut, war erupts. Very obviously Horatian (the targets of Pope's satire were his friends, whom he thought were making a mountain out of a molehill).
• Tom Sharpe's Wilt, while primarily comic farce, is also a bitter satire on academic bureaucracy and the heirarchy within colleges and universities. The theme is more deeply developed in the later books of the Wilt series, but Sharpe, a veteran of the unglamorous end of British higher education, makes some pretty trenchant points about what education should actually be for, and lays into the sort of people who let ambition, or wooly thinking, or vested interests, get in the way of delivering education to the people who arguably need it most. the Ipford Technical College is there primarily to provide vocational trades education and continuing education to adults who missed out earlier in life: its Principal misses the point entirely and is wasting the budget trying to get the place one step nearer becoming a university, for his personal prestige. Despite the fact this is not what it is intended to be and it is far more effective doing the job it was built for. Interfering politicians, Ministry of Education bureaucrats, political extremists, trendy teachers, ridiculous or grandiose "Mickey Mouse courses" and others who get in the way of the purpose of education are also mercilessly hammered.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Very Juvenalian, the novel satirizes Imperialism: The Nautilus itself is a parody of The Empire - a Oddly Small Organization that manages to be a N.G.O. Superpower, their members only consumes sea products and speak only their own language, but we never know any of them, nameless masses. The only one who matters is Captain Nemo (the Emperor), who claims a entire continent on his name and constantly crosses the Moral Event Horizon for no other reason because he can. The three prisoners personify the attitudes about The Empire of the conquered nations: Aronnax is the high class, who tries to get all the knowledge he can from the Empire, Counseil is the middle class, who passively accepts his loss of freedom as something inevitable and doesn’t want to make a decision without the approval of the high class, and Ned Land is the lower class who rebels constantly and uselessly. However, after seeing Nemo’s Kick the Dog moment with his Weapon of Mass Destruction, the three classes agree that Nemo’s empire is as bad as any other.
• The Manchurian Candidate (the original novel) satirized Red Scare politics of the 1950s and McCarthyism in particular. Extremely Juvenalian.
• Beauty Queens is a satire of the media, consumerism and gender roles.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory satirizes parents who coddle and indulge their children, and the spoiled brats that said children become (embodiments of gluttony, greed, pride, and sloth), with a contemptuous, Juvenalian approach as the brats meet a variety of blackly comic fates. The Serious Business of the Golden Ticket hunt and its media coverage come in for gentler, Horatian satire, especially in adaptations. The 1971 and 2005 film adaptations dial back the aggressiveness of the satire with regards to the brats. But the 2013 stage musical not only updates two of the brats to satirize vapid modern celebrity (Violet) and parents who try to excuse a child's downright malicious behavior (Mike) but tightens the screws — several of them suffer karmic Death by Adaptation.

• James and Harrison of The Chronicles of Steve Stollberg believe that Mickey Mouse faked his death and was cryogenically frozen respectively, which is portrayed as extremely stupid as they believe so despite overwhelming contrary evidence. This satirizes people who believe that Tupac Shakur faked his drive-by-shooting death, and also satirizes people who believe that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen.
• The Satyricon satirizes, among other things, poetic conventions, the Neronian court, and various aspects of Roman life.
• Isaac Asimov:
  • "The Dead Past": Dr Asimov takes the idea of an Obstructive Bureaucrat, creating a world where governments dictate scientific progress, and then takes it apart to see how it fails. The government is trying to preserve our way of life (rather than withholding the technology for selfish motives). The hyper-focus in narrow fields of study was supposed to prevent the advancement of certain fields (except an unrelated field was responsible for a huge leap forward in a suppressed field of study). The story ends with the suppressed technology getting worldwide publication, essentially proving that trying to suppress science will never work.
  • Franchise: Dr Asimov explores the idea of computer programs that predict voting habits based on broad swaths of information. The story itself ends on a bit of irony; Muller sees himself as being the expression of open and political voting, while the reader is expected to notice that Muller is never asked a question about political platforms or political candidates.
• Andrew Marvell is mostly remembered for his poetry on more abstract themes, but he was active in politics and wrote prose and verse satire attacking both Britain's enemies and its corrupt court — sometimes fiercely enough that his authorship had to remain anonymous.
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The entire book is one of cliched fantasy settings, all encapsulated into "Fantasyland", with the "Management" being their collective authors who stage "Tours" from our world. Many entries poke fun at the ignorance or laziness that causes frequent problems with how all this "Fantasyland" gets depicted. Lots of "Original Management Terms (OMTs)" (i.e. hackneyed, overused phrases) are listed as well.
• The essay "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" was a not-very-subtle jab at both anthropology and American culture.
• C. S. Lewis:
  • His most notable satirical work is The Screwtape Letters, an Epistolary Novel in which a more experienced devil named Screwtape writes a series of letters to a younger devil named Wormwood on how to successfully tempt a man, with the idea being that readers will notice when their own devils are trying such tactics. Has spawned a number of copycats, with none of them as successful as the first.
  • Screwtape Proposes a Toast, the pseudo-sequel to The Screwtape Letters, makes fun of Tall Poppy Syndrome in the American educational system. (Screwtape actually says it's the British system, but that's only because Lewis didn't think Americans would take a Brit criticizing them very well)
  • The Great Divorce features a lot of characters who refuse to go to heaven because they can't let go of their vices, most of whom are Played for Laughs. It's also a more direct Take That! to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake.

Live-Action TV

• The Daily Show satirizes modern US and global news events, as does the Spin-Off, The Colbert Report. Whether their satire is Juvenalian or Horatian depends on the subject: Fox News Channel? Juvenalian (particularly when it comes to Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity). Barack Obama? Horatian. George W. Bush? Are we talking 2001-2006 or 2006-2009?^note First period is mostly Juvenalian, thanks to the Iraq War, etc., while second period he was seen as more or less pathetic, and leaned more Horatian. The rest of the media? What are they saying now? Etc., etc., etc.
• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Hosted by Daily Show graduate John Oliver, it can do the Horatian, but is usually fiercely, fiercely Juvenalian. Oliver has a habit of selecting a single target and pointing out how unbelievably horrible it is for 20 minutes at a time and unabashedly insulting people and institutions he regards as idiots or evil.
• Full Frontal with Samantha Bee: Hosted by another Daily Show graduate, Samantha Bee. Furiously Juvenalian, freely mocking everyone Bee regards as awful (and Bee regards a lot of people as awful). Carries on the Daily Show tradition of sending "correspondents" to conduct man-on-the-street interviews in which interviewees' responses to questions are made the subject of ridicule.
• When Stephen Colbert took over The Late Show in 2015, he took with him his satiric roots. He did change his approach, becoming rather more Horatian, as he shed his "Stephen Colbert-the-right-wing-pundit" character and simply appears as someone more or like his actual self (a rather mild-mannered liberal and suburban dad of deep but unostentatious Catholic faith).
• On a meta level, the Onion's You're Right satirizes political late night hosts such as Stewart and Colbert, accusing them of pandering to their audience and only telling them what they want to hear.
• Yes, Minister satirized 1980s UK Governmental policy and decision-making. Generally Horatian with occasional dips into Juvenalian territory.
• ...and its Spiritual Successor The Thick of It now satirises UK politics in the 21st century. Purely Juvenalian.
• Veep, Transatlantic Equivalent of The Thick of It, is, despite coming from the same crew, surprisingly far less Juvenalian and even moves into Horatian territory, with the politicians and staffers mostly being overworked or likeably incompetent rather than scheming sons-of-bitches. It helps that there is no clear equivalent to Malcolm; the Invisible President's messenger to the VP's office is possibly the saddest schmuck in the District (and the District is full of schmucks). This is partly because Armando Iannucci was struck (while researching for In the Loop) about how young everyone in the American government seemed to be. (Today, "the Veep explanation" (or similar) of a political phenomenon is a common Beltway shorthand descriptor for "the explanation that assumes that the phenomenon is the result of overworked and/or incompetent staffers trying to make sense of their equally-overworked and/or incompetent bosses' pronouncements without any of it being part of a plot for anything more nefarious than temporary political advantage this news cycle.")
• Brass Eye satirized the reporting methods of 90s UK news media as well as wider social and political issues. Out-Juvenals Juvenal himself.
• Frontline satirized Australian current affairs programmes in the 1990s.
• Have I Got News for You. Fittingly for the editor of Juvenalian satirical magazine Private Eye, Ian Hislop's contributions are toward the Juvenalian end of the scale, while Paul Merton tends more toward the Horatian end when he isn't making plays on words or indulging in surrealism and flights of fancy.
• MADtv (1995): This took MAD Magazine, and put it on our television screens in the form of a sketch comedy show.
• Mock the Week
• Ugly Betty satirizes the fashion industry. Horatian.
• Bewitched continually satirizes American conformity, consumerism, and racism. More or less Horatian, per the standards of the day.
• Royal Canadian Air Farce satirized Canadian politics and current events and just about every other aspect of of Canadian life in its long run. It was something of a forerunner for Canadian television and influenced the CBC in particular for a number of years.
• Another Canadian series, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, was a satirical presentation of current events and was shown in a news format. It was known for having strictly Newfoundland performers and a particularly eastern perspective on things.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus
• Spitting Image: satirizing politicians and other celebrities of the day. Its more enduring portrayals are typically more Juvenalian (e.g. "I've Never Met a Nice South African", which calls all Afrikaners racist, ignorant, talentless, humourless, murderous, smelly loudmouths who exiled their one and only decent countryman).
• That Was the Week That Was kickstarted the British television satire boom of the 1960s. Juvenalian.
• The "Really!?! with Seth (and Amy)" skit on Saturday Night Live. Constantly points out the absurdity of celebrities or politicians by comparing their actions with how the same actions would affect ordinary people. Typically Juvenalian, although Tina Fey's "Really!?!" to Greece on her first guest appearance in 2008 was more disappointed than nasty.
• Van Kooten En De Bie: Dutch comedic duo satirizing Dutch society from 1964 until 1998.
• Dinosaurs: Dinosaurs is entirely a satire of society that condemns environmental pollution, political correctness, corporate greed, government controlling citizens' private lives, propaganda on television and religion.
• Black Mirror takes a dark commentary on how people and society abuse technology, showing the negative aspects that it will bring about.
• Corporate is an extremely Juvenalian satire on the modern corporate workplace and its denizens.
• Midnight Mass (2021): The show ultimately tries to point out the folly of being religious. The first two episodes clearly establish that the writers respect those with religious beliefs by accurately portraying Catholicism, but after that the show gets more and more offensive to religious people. By the end of the the first season, it's clear this is a satire that favors atheism over religious beliefs.
  • The Decoy Protagonist is an atheist who tries to stop the Catholic vampires, and the first victim of the show, a dog, is killed by the most well-read Catholic character.
  • There are some "classic" anti-Catholic tropes present throughout the season, such as only one Catholic knowing much about Scripture, Catholics drinking literal blood as opposed to blood in the form of wine, the Church embezzling people's money, the monsignor regretting becoming a priest and fraternizing with a member of his flock, the faithful being timid and subservient to the one person who quotes Scripture the most, and Catholics being generally closed-minded concerning other religions.
  • While there are two characters who are Muslim, one of them converts to Catholicism and by the end of the show they both die while praying. Moreover, the Catholic vampires all die while singing a hymn, which is a form of prayer.
  • In the season finale, one of the supposedly devout Catholics, who has attended Mass every day, suddenly goes through a "death-bed conversion" to atheism, insisting that she will become one with the universe after decomposing and even going so far as to use the phrase "I am that I am," making herself equivalent to God, which is the last thing one would expect a devout Christian to say.

Music

• The Rutles are a satire on The Beatles.
• Even Johann Sebastian Bach took a crack at satire, with his "Coffee Cantata" satirizing the then-emerging opinion that drinking coffee was a bad habit. Apparently, Moral Guardians were just as annoying in Bach's time as they are today. To top it all, the piece is not actually a cantata but a mini opera.
• Mike Posner's "I Took A Plane to Ibiza" single in 2018 was a satire of the Ibiza lifestyle and Celebrity Is Overrated, and also veered into Self-Parody, since Mike actually did visit the club scene, but was not involved in drug scandals etc.

Print Media

• MAD
• The Onion: Arguably the most famous satire site on the internet, it started out in print before becoming a digitally-exclusive paper in 2013.
• Punch!, a British magazine launched in 1841, was a groundbreaking satirical periodical, including satire of then-contemporary society and politics. (It closed, a shadow of its former self, in 2002, having been fighting a losing battle against Private Eye — for which see below — for at least 30 years).
• Punch was an express attempt at replicating a French satirical magazine of the day, Le Charivari, a Paris magazine that lampooned July Monarchy-era French politics and mores — as evidenced by the British publication's full title, Punch, or the London Charivari. The actual Charivari of Paris stopped doing satire shortly after Punch started, turning into a lifestyle magazine, after falling afoul of Louis-Philippe's censors.
• Punch also inspired an American publication named Puck (which ran 1871-1903).
• The pornographic magazine Hustler uses satire to express Larry Flynt's beliefs and opinions. Almost always Juvenalian.
• The articles in Private Eye are mostly Juvenalian satire... when they aren't hard-hitting straight-up exposés of real wrongdoing. Sometimes articles do dip into the Horatian (particularly the Prime Minister parodies, which are usually too ridiculous to be truly stinging). Incidentally, the founders of Private Eye in The '60s specifically cited (again) Punch in its heyday as their inspiration — rather than as it existed in their time, which they found rather insipid (and which eventually was reduced to writing nasty articles at the Eye's expense).
• The New Yorker is known for its satire, particularly The Borowitz Report by Andy Borowitz.
• P. J. O'Rourke is another satirical columnist who wrote articles for The Weekly Standard and The Daily Beast, known for his conservative-libertarian bent.
• Dave Barry: Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist for The Miami Herald. He makes fun of everything from Florida to his colonscopy to specialty coffees, usually with an absurdist, exaggerated brand of humor.

Radio

• On his radio show, Howard Stern will satirize any number or things he doesn't care for, most notably the hypocrisies of Media Watchdogs.
• Absolute Power (BBC) was a satire on spin-doctoring in modern politics, and media manipulation. The Sound-to-Screen Adaptation shifted its focus: still satirizing media manipulation, but more in the context of the nature of celebrity.
• Brian Gulliver's Travels is a six-part Setting Update of Gulliver's Travels on BBC Radio 4. It updates the satire to be about 21st century Britain, giving us, for example, Sham, the land of alternative therapies.

Theatre

• Chicago is a satire of media sensationalism and the American justice system, depicting the circumstances of a murder trial as if it were a theatrical production. Roxie's press conference is portrayed as a ventriloquist performance with her lawyer Billy puppeting her, the media is treated like a "three-ring circus," and Billy's fraudulent arguments in the trial are likened to a skillful tap dance.

Video Games

• Everything made by 2D Boy and Tomorrow Corporation is a satire of some aspect of corporations. The satire even extends to the website itself!
  • World of Goo is a satire on corporations ruining the environment.
  • Little Inferno makes fun of mobile game monetization tactics.
  • Human Resource Machine and Seven Billion Humans are about automation and how corporations dehumanize their employees.
• Bad Day L.A. makes fun of how dysfunctional modern society is.
• Far Cry 3 is a satire of video game violence.
• Going Under: The game is a satire of corporate and start-up culture. In the setting, failed start-ups go under literally, being sunken under the earth, have their members turned into monsters, and become dungeons. A lot of the dungeons poke fun at the kind of projects they do (an app to facilitate the Gig Economy, a dating app, a new cryptocurrency, etc), but a lot of the story also point out the excess of start-ups, their poor management, hiding flaws behind corporate speak, the conflict between bosses and workers, and stealthily supports worker unionization.
• No game represents the worst aspects of the political and sociocultural lens of The New '10s than Grand Theft Auto V. To give you an idea, the vast majority of the characters in this game are caricatures with the most deplorable and toxic elements of the stereotype they embody. Their own ignorance blinds them to the utter self-parody they represent, something that, even after almost a decade since this game was released, doesn't seem too far removed from real life.

• Harvester makes a bloody and cruel joke of suburban American life during the 1950s.
• The Magic Circle pokes fun at video game developers, by showing a game that's been in Development Hell for 20 years.
• Mr. Saitou: The game pokes fun at several aspects of Japanese work culture, such as sticking unwanted employees on mind numbing tasks rather than firing them and being pressured into drinking and socializing with colleagues after work.
• The Ratchet & Clank series, particularly its earlier installments, contained very tongue-in-cheek satire of consumerism.
• Sim Nimby is a satire of anti-development activism, particularly where affordable housing is concerned.
• The Stanley Parable is another jab at game developers, particularly ones who try to railroad the player onto their preferred method of playing their game. Stanley himself is also a Take That! at players who try to find meaning through their choices, or who use video games as a means of escape from their dull, boring lives.

Visual Novel

• Ace Attorney is designed to be a satirical spoof of Japan's infamously rigged legal system, which, while creating its own set of rules and supernatural happenings, covers many of the issues Japanese citizens have with their legal system.
• Doki Doki Literature Club! satirizes the relationship between video game players and characters by invoking Video Game Caring Potential, then having bad things happen to the characters, and then having dialogue reacting to this as in Video Game Cruelty Potential, showing that kind of thinking as horrifying rather than fun.^note The creator has also called it "satire" of the genres it's initially a pastiche of, but that mostly matches the definition of parody.

Web Comics

• Working Doodles
• Port Sherry (Here) delivers horatian satire on a lot of things.
• I'm My Own Mascot often contains horatian satire of nerd culture and fandoms in general.

Web Original

• The Onion: Arguably the most famous satire site on the web, whose brand of fake news stories inspired a lot of copycats:
  • ClickHole: A spinoff of The Onion, poking fun at clickbait sites like Buzzfeed.
  • Babylon Bee: A conservative Christian version of the Onion.
  • Reductress: Another fake news website poking fun at women's magazines.
• RedLetterMedia frequently pokes fun at the film industry or nerd culture.
• Strong Bad Email often deals in horatian satire, largely due to Strong Bad thinking of himself as being more juvenalian.
• Ministry Of Harmony satirizes news stories from China in a Juvenalian style.
• TJ Omega has his Plastic Addict series which does this of the bad toys he reviews during them. He's repeatedly pointed out that they're not to be taken seriously and are meant to be entertaining.
• Kakos Industries satirizes the concept of Evil itself, it being seen as something that is never solidly defined but is treated as though it can be bought, sold, measured, and enhanced among the Evil, Inc. the show takes place in. Bear in mind that the podcast functions as a news style Work Com while having this as the central plot.
• The extremely short Young Adult one-shot manages to satirize recurring tropes in young adult book series, mainly in the popular The Twilight Saga, Harry Potter and Divergent series.
• Climate Town does satire on the two-faced nature of politicians, the fossil fuel industry and other corperations that are contributing to climate change while lining their pockets.
• The Cinema Snob started out as one of film critics that use biased and stupid arguments against exploitation\genre films (inspired by Roger Ebert's review of Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning). Eventually it also became one of The Movie Buff who is equally pretentious.
• DarkMatter2525: Many if not most of the videos involve this, running with common apologetics claims to show what they entail in Real Life. For instance "How To Be Like God", which displays how defenses like respect for free will, being simply "mysterious" etc. would seem if a person did them (i.e. a huge sadistic jerk who lets you die rather than give help he could easily provide).
• Jreg: Centricide makes fun of political extremists, by putting them on the same team to fight against the centrist threat.
• videogamedunkey occasionally delves into this. A couple notable examples are "Anthem Legends: Exodus," which parodies cliched copycat video games, as well as his video on "Twitter".
• Sword Art Online Abridged, in addition to parodying the source material, also satirizes the video game industry and its questionable practices. For example, the very first joke in the series mocks game companies that aggressively force adverts in players' faces and use micro-transactions to extort money for features that should be in the game from the beginning (such as, in this case, removing the ads). The titular game itself is shown to be an invoked Obvious Beta with many Game Breaking Bugs that occurred because it was Christmas Rushed, paralleling real games like Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) that fell to the same fate. It also attacks "crunch time" and overworking developers by showing that this led to many of the bugs plaguing the game. In addition, real companies like Bethesda and Ubisoft are made into targets of ridicule by being the publishers who are responsible in-universe for the games releasing in their terrible state, as well as fostering toxic work environments that overwork their best developers (Akihiko Kayaba) and allow sexual predators to do as they please (Noboyuki Sugou).

Western Animation

• The Venture Brothers satirizes adventure shows like Jonny Quest by showcasing just how psychologically scarring being a boy adventurer can become.
• The Simpsons is one huge satire of late 20th and early 21st century Western society.
• Family Guy, often in the most controversial sort of manner.
• The more recent seasons of South Park usually use satire as their primary source of humor.
• Futurama frequently satirizes aspects of modern life, from our waste and consumerism, technological evolution to our short-sightedness to relentless and irritating evangelists.
• MAD is a spiritual and satirical successor to Mad TV, in the form of an animated sketch series; it even had the nerve to ridicule James Cameron's Avatar in the very first episode.
• Invader Zim did an excellent job poking fun at human life; even the aspects of daily life in the far-future have devolved into a tortured mockery of itself in a most Juvenalian manner.
• Yin Yang Yo! often satirizes feminism by bringing up the hypocrisy done or said by radical feminist Saranoia, and to a lesser extent Yin. The episode "A Walk in the Woods" satirizes childhood obesity where Yin and Yang stayed indoors surfing the Internet all day and eating junk food.
• Tiny Toon Adventures mocks and laughs at American Retro Pop culture alongside old fashioned media censorship policies as well.
• Animaniacs: The show loves to take aim at and spoof many of the most popular topics of the day, including poiltics, history, and Warner Bros itself.
• Pinky and the Brain
• Daria
• Recess
• Rocko's Modern Life has the one-hour special Rocko's Modern Life: Static Cling which satirizes, what else, modern life: the O-Phone upgrades constantly and people charge into the store for a new one and Rocko's old job is gone, replaced with a 3D printer that makes the comic book for you.
• Looney Tunes pokes its cartoonish fingers at early 20th Century pop-culture, both American and foreign.
• Beetlejuice
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: This element wasn't as prevalent after John Kricfalusi left the show, though certain episodes, such as "Stimpy's Cartoon Show" and "Reverend Jack", satirized what working under John K.'s tenure was like.
• Beavis and Butt-Head
• The Amazing World of Gumball often does this; for example, "The Upgrade" takes a huge swipe at the concept of Planned Obsolescence.
• The Patrick Star Show: Following the show's Growing the Beard, episodes sometimes have a satirical bent to them, mainly about the entertainment industry.
  • "Get Off My Lawnie" takes on stan culture. Granny Tentacles accidentally becomes a famous TV star, resulting in her getting an unwanted army of Loony Fans who break into her house and think everything she does is part of her "character" on the show. After chasing her relentlessly, they beg her to say her famous Catchphrase Insult: "SAY WE HAVE NO LIVES!" At the end, once Granny Tentacles finally embraces her fame, her fanbase has moved on to an incredibly vapid thing to obsess over: an old man painting a fence.
  • "Bubble Bass Reviews" is an Affectionate Parody of 2010s Video Review Shows, and how hostile these reviews can be towards people who work on the shows. Bubble Bass flat-out calls Patrick and Squidina the "enemies of the state" and rants that they be thrown in jail just because they make a show he doesn't like. At the end, Patrick and Squidina make their own review show on his review show, proving that he can't handle the same thing when it's done to him.
  • "The Patrick Show Cashes In" is one on the treatment overly marketed franchises receive. It revolves around Patrick and Squidina licensing a variety of questionable and dangerous products. Even though the first Parody Commercial ends with the kids being bandaged and fainting, they continue to sell the products because they make money. However, the episode does have a legitimate moral that TV shows aren't about making money but instead Doing It for the Art.
  • "Movie Stars" has a brief joke about franchise milking when SpongeBob and Patrick go to see "the new Mermaid Man & Barnacle Boy Pets Movie: 'Mermaid Worm & Barnacle Barnacle: Episode 6: The Bubble Blowers Revenge, Part 2'!" The title is so long that SpongeBob can barely say it in one breath. Squidina also assumes that blatant Product Placement in films doesn't work, only to see that Cecil has immediately fallen victim to it.
  • "Dr. Smart Science" has some choice words about pop psychology and pseudoscience. Patrick preaches astrology on his show, describing, "if you've ever thought, 'coming up with my own personality is too hard,' you're gonna love this!" He then launches into a prediction for Sagittarius: they will be very unlucky unless they purchase his products and healing crystals. An old man excitedly dials in, planning to cancel his doctor appointment.

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