On the Importance of Satire

Tancred suggested this morning that I write a post on the importance of satire to explain to readers why I sully his newsfeed with pieces intending to be funny, which “double as critiques of contemporary absurdities,” as a certain friend put it. And lest anyone doubt, he fully supports and enjoys my contributions to his blog and allows me my own policy when it comes to deleting comments I deem unworthy.

As someone once noted, in order to be funny and rhetorically effective, satire needs to have a certain amount of truth in it. The difficulty that now besets us, however, is that so long as there is truth in a piece of satire, a poor, unsuspecting bumpkin somewhere is going to be blind to the joke and miss out on all the fun.

So please, people, get a grip when I mock our opponents by linking articles from leftist (=sinister, usually) sources that are so absurd that they clearly deserve little more than public ridicule and contempt, if their authors refuse to recant their misguided views publicly.

As a side note, however, apparently I am not the only author whose satire and parodies are not always appreciated. C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters was once upon a time also so misunderstood that one reader cancelled his subscription to The Guardian, because he just didn’t get it.