satire

plural satires

1. uncountableA literary device of writing or art which principally ridicules its subject often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change or highlighting a shortcoming in the work of another. Imitation, humor, irony, and exaggeration are often used to aid this.

   1 more example

   Satire deflates and debases. It is an art which topples greatness, undermines pretension and punishes pride by revealing the low in the pretendedly high, the filth in the pure, the folly in reason. This belittling trick deploys telescopic lenses which picture the human as lesser and lower, or as a machine or beast, driven by depraved desires. Satire reduces what purports to be subtly superior to a repertoire of stigmatizing symbols and cardboard cut-outs, turning character into caricature, signalled by exaggerated physiognomical distortions - the huge nose, gaping mouth and bloated belly, or comparable animalistic traits. In this humbling of the complex into the simplistic, satire finally reduces the mind, soul or spirit to that flesh which always bespeaks inferiority on the Chain of Being.

   2003, Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Ch.9, at p.148

2. countableA satirical work.

   a stinging satire of American politics.

3. dateduncountableSeverity of remark.

   1 more example

   CAESAR. No, by the gods! would that it had been! Vengeance at least is human. No, I say: those severed right hands, and the brave Vercingetorix basely strangled in a vault beneath the Capitol, were (with shuddering satire) a wise severity, a necessary protection to the commonwealth, a duty of statesmanship—follies and fictions ten times bloodier than honest vengeance!

   1898, George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra