Wattpad brings you a guest post from Brian K. Henry, author of SPACE COMMAND AND THE PLANET OF THE BEJEWELLED CONCUBINES:
Satire has always been one of my favorite genres, probably because I’ve always thought society is so screwed up it could do with a lot of satirizing. The satirist makes their whole project from picking out the dumbest and most outrageous things going on in the world and helpfully pointing them out to you, the reader, usually through some kind of exaggeration or new perspective. A typical satire takes some element of contemporary life and uses a skewed look to reveal just how off-kilter it really is.
America has a great tradition of satirical writing, going back to one of the U.S.A.’s first full-time writers, Washington Irving, who wrote a comedic fictionalized history of New York, and even including Edgar Allan Poe. While Poe is famous for his horror stories, he also has wickedly humorous satirical pieces, such as “The Man That Was Used Up” about a heroic soldier who’s become nothing more than a heap of prosthetic body parts.
Mark Twain is probably the most consistently satirical writer in the American canon. Almost all of his work has some sardonic, mocking quality to it. This comes out most clearly in some of his short sketches, such as “Journalism in Tennessee”. Twain’s typical wry understatement is played to good effect here. When he reports for work at the editorial offices of the Memphis Avalanche, the editor urges Twain to juice up his writing and make it more “peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods.” But Twain soon discovers the editor’s journalistic boldness has its downside – the office is constantly attacked by a whole range of offended locals. Twain’s take on sensationalistic journalism seems just as relevant today as when it was written, with media headlines always needing to be bolder and sexier.
>
Another of Twain’s masterful satirical miniatures is “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”. In just a handful of pages, Twain eviscerates the writing style of this revered early American adventure novelist. His literary broadside descends from a long history of satirical putdowns of writers by their colleagues, which include Alexander Pope’s Dunciad and Henry Fielding’s Shamela.
Like Twain, Sinclair Lewis was a lifelong critic of hypocrisy and small-town, narrow-minded thinking. His novel Main Streetis the classic depiction of a stultifying, xenophobic Midwestern town. When bright and upbeat Carol Kennicott, the town doctor’s new bride, tries bringing some much-needed life to this hermetic world she’s quickly closed down by locals like the “soft, damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly hopeful” Mrs. Bogart. Again, maybe not as much has changed since the 1920s of Main Street as you’d think. Gopher Prairie’s residents even then were up in arms about the influx of immigrants with poor English skills – but their immigrants were the pesky Scandinavian residents of the “Swede Hollow” slum.
Gore Vidal is another satirist who’s always had an eagle eye for American parochialism. His wide-ranging career includes such satirical burlesques as Myra Breckinridge, a wild experiment in gender-bending for its time. Set in a Hollywood where the glamour of its heyday is fading, the novel’s narrated by Myra Breckinridge herself, a sexual renegade and movie obsessive with her share of bombshell secrets, who upsets all sorts of gender and sex role expectations in her rampage through Tinseltown.
In more recent years, Don DeLillo has been a key, wry observer of the cultural scene. In his 80’s classic, White Noise, DeLillo takes on everything from academic absurdity to ecological concerns and the obsessive fear of death. Protagonist Jack Gladney is the highly respected inventor of the field of Hitler Studies, but is constantly anxious about his status: nervous over his inability to speak German and the necessity to constantly fend off such rival cultural disciplines as Elvis Studies. The eerie practice sessions for unspecified toxic events in his hometown, in which the residents practice laying out in biohazard suits, and the characters’ obsessions with the minutiae of daily life (Jack’s wife gives adult education classes on how to stand, sit and walk) are prescient forerunners of today’s safety-minded milieu.
America’s long tradition of satire is alive and well in the internet age. While such master satirists as Stephen Colbert and Sasha Baron Cohen have taken the genre to broad audiences in TV and film, the written word may still be the source of the most potent satire. Wattpaders have a whole bizarre world ready for satirization and lots of great writers like the ones above to take inspiration from when setting out to write their own satirical takes on our current messed up world.
Check out Brian’s hilarious sci-fi adventure on Wattpad:
