Three satirists par excellence...

I'll wrap up my exploration into satire by paying homage to three great satirists.

Jonathan Swift

Of course everyone knows about this great Irish writer and his satire, Gulliver's Travels (1726), a tour de force into our pettiness and/or ignorance about daily-life discourse from politics and international relations to mathematics and science (incidentally, his first publisher was so worried about the manuscript's contents provoking official ire that it tried to censor parts of it).

I found this school project on YouTube that tried to relate Swift's satirical "takeaways" to modern media examples (you have to excuse the spelling slip-ups):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TYvgwfYmd8

But did you know Swift also wrote a proposal that, to solve the problem of poverty which saw a rising trend in homeless children, the Irish should eat them? This short piece of work, "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents, or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick" (1726), is a satirical criticism of Irish and English mishandling of the economy. Here is an online reproduction:

http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/swift/modest.html

And here is an online discussion note:

http://www.enotes.com/modest-proposal-criticism/modest-proposal-jonathan-swift

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Hans Christian Andersen

What child has not been entranced by this great Dane's fairy tales? But adults know too that a number of his stories are also satirical. The Emperor's New Clothes is easily recognised as a still contemporary example, and needs no elaboration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wng-eSUk9I0

But I used to wonder why Andersen, who had never been to China, would write the seemingly silly tale, The Nightingale, with all its distortions about imperial China's court life. But it was in fact a satire on his contemporary writers and others' fascination with things Chinese, as they perceived 19th century China to be!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHtsjobjnEA

http://hca.gilead.org.il/nighting.html

What's more, this classic fairy tale can become a modern commentary about China's politics and society, about how many -- in the rest of the world -- still have distorted perceptions of China and its people, and about how the yearning for freedom cannot be artificially "created". Wow!

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George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)

Finally, no one beats Orwell's iconic work, Animal Farm, for its political satire on totalitarianism. Here's the hour-long-plus 1955 animated movie. See it only when you have 1:13:10 to spare...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC3u0BZr-x0&feature=related