 Satire is the art of making someone or something look ridiculous, raising laughter in order to embarrass, humble, or discredit its targets. As a literary genre, satire is one of the oldest. The term was coined by the classical rhetorician Quintilian, who used the root of the Latin word satura, which means full, and was familiar to many Romans from the phrase lanks satura, which described a medley of fruits, and apparently conveyed the miscellaneous quality of early satire. Eventually, more specific kinds of satire became associated with the works of three different Roman authors, whose names are still in vogue to describe the varieties in satire they established. First of all, the Horatian satire tends to be good-natured and light-hearted, looking to raise laughter and to encourage moral improvement. A famous example of Horatian satire is the 18th-century poet Alexander Popes' poem The Rape of the Lock, which, despite its serious-sounding name, was an attempt to bring back together two real-life feuding families by humorously exaggerating the severity of the cause of their rift. A contemporary example of Horatian satire, in my opinion, would be many Saturday night live skits, especially the ones in which famous actors impersonate famous politicians, thereby raising a laugh at the latter's expense, but usually doing it in a relatively gentle way, in which everyone is in on the joke together, including the person being caricatured. Then we've got Juvenalian satire. That tends to be more bitter and dark, expressing anger and outrage at the state of the world. A famous example of Juvenalian satire is by another 18th-century writer, Jonathan Swift. His amodous proposal is a prose pamphlet that initially appears to be a serious well-intentioned attempt to suggest a solution to what was a major problem at the time, the impoverished state of Ireland, due in no small part to absentee English landlords, who owned a lot of Irish land but reinvested very little of the profits back into the Irish economy. As the narrator begins to explain his plan to invigorate the Irish economy and make all the poor Irish families useful again, however, the reader slowly begins to see that the narrator's proposal is actually for Irish women to sell their babies to be eaten by their Anglo-Irish landlords. A modest proposal is thus an angry denunciation, not just of the rapaciousness of the English landlords and their lack of care for their Irish tenants, but also of the kind of bureaucratic mindset that becomes so enamored with its own problem-solving that it forgets that real humans will be affected by its plans. A modern example of juvenileian satire would be the parodies of contemporary advertising done by groups like Adbusters, in which they peel away the shiny veneer of advertising to show the heartless glee that lies underneath a lot of corporate capitalism. Finally, there is Manipian satire, reserved for prose works that still resemble that original connotation of satire as a miscellany, or containing multitudes. A canonical example of the Manipian satire is Lawrence Stern's 18th century novel, Tristam Shandy, published in nine volumes between 1759 and 67. While technically the life story of the eponymous narrator, the novel's far less interested in any kind of linear plot than it is in accumulating incidents and characters and materials, the gently mock and comment on the absurdities of what was then modern life and love. Manipian satires are relatively rare these days, but many so-called postmodern novels, with their encyclopedic range and fondness for esoteric digression, bear a past in relation to the form, from Thomas Pynchon's massive Gravity's Rainbow to Zadie Smith's breakout White Teeth. Regardless of which type of satire is being deployed, it must take aim at a target that is larger or more powerful than the author, otherwise instead of satire we have mere cruelty or bullying. So satire is very context dependent. And it also depends on the audience recognizing it as such. For a satire to be effective it must be received as satire. There's always the risk that the satire will be read straight or superficially. This was the case, for example, with the reception of David Fincher's 1999 film adaptation of Chuck Polanier's novel Fight Club, which satirizes both consumerism and toxic masculinity. Many viewers of the movie apparently didn't understand that it was a satire, however, since in its wake a number of real-life fight clubs sprang up across the country. Something that shouldn't have happened had audiences fully understood that the film was making fun of the kind of masculinity that's so desperate to prove itself it'll happily engage in underground bare-knuckle fighting. Satire is a powerful weapon when used effectively and appropriately. But it's also a risky one too. Which is probably a big reason why it remains so fascinating for authors and audiences alike.