Satire Research Articles

“ Sans la liberté de flatter , il n’est pas d’éloge blâmeur ”: Jacques Martin and French television satire in the 1960s and 1970s

The comedian and television presenter Jacques Martin (1933–2007) is well-known to the French public even a quarter century after his disappearance from their screens. Despite having been the author/originator of many of the most watched and influential shows on French television in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond, Martin is curiously little studied in academic literature, even though much of his work can be seen to prefigure later trends in television programming. Focusing on his satirical comedy shows of the 1960s and 1970s (at the expense of his extensive other work presenting popular culture on the petit écran during the period) this article examines his satirical project and suggests that the surprising lack of interest in his work is due to the subaltern status of the popular culture that inspired and infused his programs.

The Characteristics of Molière’s Comedy Writing —Centred on Harpagon’s Characterisation

The works of the French classical comedian Molière are of exceptional value. In his satirical comedies, Molière often creates sensible, vivid, contemporary, and real characters through descriptions of detailed behavior and the setting of coincident and conflicts. Harpagon, for instance, has become a global synonym for miserliness due to Molière’s extreme focus on this single character trait. Critics of his time labeled Harpagon as a “flat character”, yet it is precisely this “flatness” that makes the character memorable. Molière possessed a serious spirit of realism and a democratic tendency, using comedy as a means to educate the public. Through characters like Harpagon, he exposed the bourgeoisie’s cruelty, hypocrisy, and greedy exploitation of the lower class, delivering sharp and pungent satire. Molière’s ability to craft such characters not only entertained but also conveyed powerful social critiques, solidifying his importance in literary and social history.

Intertextual satire in media discourse

Abstract The paper investigates intertextual satire in media discourse from the cognitive linguistic perspective. Within the frameworks of conceptual blending theory and the theory of precedent-related phenomena, we examine the cognitive processes of producing and understanding intertextual satire. By modelling conceptual integration networks, we aim to specify the cognitive mechanisms and operations involved in decoding intertextual satirical articles, drawing on examples from Private Eye magazine. The study demonstrates that the basic cognitive mechanism involved in creating intertextual satire is blending, and, in contrast to ironic utterances, which involve two contexts, in intertextual satire one and the same scenario unfolds in three contexts: real, fictional, and satirical. Thus, the blend that occurs as a result of combining real and fictional scenarios is verbalised and obvious to the recipient. The emergent structure, based on the blend, represents the intended (non-verbalised) meaning of intertextual satire, namely indirect criticism of the real situation under focus.

Liquid racism in Greek online satirical news

The present study explores the infiltration of racism in humorous texts which at first sight appear to have antiracist intentions, in particular in satirical news coming from popular Greek websites and targeting majority people for their racist practices towards migrants. The analysis reveals that distinguishing between antiracist and racist interpretations is not an easy or straightforward matter: humour seems to blur the boundary between racism and antiracism. In this context, the concept of liquid racism (Weaver, 2016) is exploited to account for the ambiguities of humorous discourse when it involves racist and antiracist meanings. Furthermore, given that this paper is part of a special issue on “Humour and the public sphere”, the latter understood in Habermas’s (1989/1962) sense, I will venture some observations concerning the (in)compatibility between Habermas’s conceptualisation of the public sphere and humour/satire. Perhaps a broader and more inclusive definition of the public sphere than the one initially proposed by Habermas is called for, which will allow for the ambiguities of satirical humour.

Деконструкция сатирической пьесы В. Маяковского «Клоп» в романтическо-утопическом и постмодернистском вариантах в китайской рецепции

The study aims to identify the influence of V. Mayakovsky’s satire on Chinese drama. The paper examines the works of Chinese authors created under the influence of V. Mayakovsky’s satirical play “The Bedbug”. In Tian Han’s play “The Ballad of the Ming Tombs Reservoir” and in Jin Shan’s eponymous film, the idea of moving into the future determines the plot and the compositional structure. Meng Jinghui’s drama “The Bedbug” (the 2000, 2013 and 2017 productions) repeats the main plot of V. Mayakovsky’s play and retains many lines from the original work. This is the first staging of Mayakovsky’s play in China. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that Mayakovsky’s influence on Chinese drama is for the first time being considered from the cultural and historical perspective and reflects the dynamics of perception of Mayakovsky’s satire in China starting with a romantic-utopian view, associated with the concept of the “Great Leap Forward” (Tian Han), to a postmodern view (Meng Jinghui). The study of the Chinese-language material on the reception of Mayakovsky’s satire, which remains unexplored in Russia, will make it possible to expand the understanding of the attitude to the creative work of the Russian futurist poet and playwright abroad not only among literary scholars, but also the reading public. The study found that the satirical comedy by the Russian poet of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries in the deconstructed versions reflects the problems of the formation of Chinese society in the 20th-21st centuries.

Leonid Gaidai’s full-length debut, or ‘The Accusatory Cinema of Thaw’: the history of the transformation of the script The Dead Affair into the film A Groom from the Other World (1958), followed by the literary script The Dead Affair

ABSTRACT The introductory article to this publication chronicles the production of Leonid Gaidai’s film A Groom from the Other World: from the idea of the script for the satirical comedy The Dead Affair to the final cut. The comedy about a bureaucrat should have been the full-length debut of the future outstanding comedy filmmaker, but appeared only as a short film. The article brings to scholarly attention documents, minutes of discussions and letters, and provides the cultural context in which the cinematic image of the ‘new bureaucrat’ should have emerged. Without an exact understanding of how Gaidai worked on this film, it is difficult to imagine the formation of the director and the relationship of his future work with Soviet censorship. A Groom from the Other World became a serious professional experience for Gaidai, where he perfected his principle of work with the actor and found people who were creatively close to him: the screenwriter Moris Slobodskoy and the actor Georgii Vitsin. The appendix to this publication comprises the full script of The Dead Affair.

Satirical Strategies Employed on NTV’s the Wicked Edition: A Comprehensive Analysis

Comedy has long been appreciated as a powerful form of communication that not only entertains but also offers a platform for addressing serious societal challenges The language used in comedy, particularly in satirical comedy, is essential in implicitly conveying social commentary. The Wicked Edition show, is known for its use of satirical language to address societal issues indirectly. This study looks into the relationship between language, satire, and social criticism, with an emphasis on the satirical approaches used in the show. The study illuminates the purposeful and intended use of satire as a powerful tool for communication, entertainment, and social criticism by conducting a thorough investigation of verbal humor, irony, sarcasm, and hyperbole. The Wicked Edition show skillfully employs humorous strategies to communicate essential messages, engage the audience in thought-provoking conversations, and inspire reflection on societal expectations and behaviors. The show successfully analyzes sensitive topics such as politics, government policies, work ethics, and community responses to the Covid-19 pandemic through the use of irony, sarcasm, and hyperbole. Furthermore, this study delves into the socio-pragmatic aspects of the language style employed in The Wicked Edition show, emphasizing on the incorporation of both monologue and dialogue structures. By employing the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), this study seeks to analyze the implicit meanings conveyed through the comedian’s linguistic style.

Reflection on “Discussion and Criticism” of Satirical Comedies in the 1950s

Reflection on “Discussion and Criticism” of Satirical Comedies in the 1950s

Wacana Introver dalam Konten TikTok (Analisis Wacana Kritis Teun A Van Dijk)

Introvert stereotypes that has developed in society construct them as flawed personalities. This negative perception is closely linked to the “Extrovert Ideal” which places a higher value on extroverted personalities. Over time, introvert stereotypes have continued to evolve, especially with the widespread of social media usage, like fTikTok. This research aim to explain how introvert discourse developed in TikTok content. This research used a qualitative research methods and a critical discourse analysis technique ofTeun A. van Dijk. The research reveals that there is a discourse of resistance against introvert stereotypes such as introvert as quiet, shy, reclusive, and antisocial individuals, also the stereotype of introvert as an illness. The resistance against introvert streotypes manifest in three ways, satirical comedy, raising social awaress, and asserting introverts self-expression on social media.

Comprehensive Study of Arabic Satirical Article Classification

A well-known issue for social media sites consists of the hazy boundaries between malicious false news and protected speech satire. In addition to the protective measures that lessen the exposure of false material on social media, providers of fake news have started to pose as satire sites in order to escape being delisted. Potentially, this may cause confusion to the readers as satire can sometimes be mistaken for real news, especially when their context or intent is not clearly understood and written in a journalistic format imitating real articles. In this research, we tackle the issue of classifying Arabic satiric articles written in a journalistic format to detect satirical cues that aid in satire classification. To accomplish this, we compiled the first Arabic satirical articles dataset extracted from real-world satirical news platforms. Then, a number of classification models that integrate a variety of feature extraction techniques with machine learning, deep learning, and transformers to detect the provenance of linguistic and semantic cues were investigated, including the first use of the ArabGPt model. Our results indicate that BERT is the best-performing model with F1-score reaching 95%. We also provide an in-depth lexical analysis of the formation of Arabic satirical articles. The lexical analysis provides insights into the satirical nature of the articles in terms of their linguistic word uses. Finally, we developed a free open-source platform that automatically organizes satirical and non-satirical articles in their correct classes from the best-performing model in our study, BERT. In summary, the obtained results found that pretrained models gave promising results in classifying Arabic satirical articles.

Ja’miezing’s Podcast Persona: Intertextual and Intercommunicative

An online persona is a public presentation of a human or non-human actor such as organisations and locations, digital objects, artificial intelligence, and media texts. This article provides an analysis of the online persona of the Australian satirical comedy podcast, Ja'miezing. Written, directed, performed, and produced by comedian Chris Lilley, Ja'miezing is a narrative podcast series that features the intimate details of the post-high school life of the character Ja’mie. The podcast launched following Lilley’s online cancellation which resulted in his previous mockumentary television shows being removed from Netflix and the Australian Broadcast Corporation’s video-on-demand service, ABC iview. The study builds on the five dimensions of persona – public, mediatised, performative, collective, and value – by drawing on contributions from podcast studies to better understand the unique features and practices of podcast personas. It seeks to untangle the complex interplay between the intertextual and intercommunicative connections of podcast producer, host, character, platform, and audience micropublics as they contribute to the online presentation of the podcast’s persona. The article highlights the potential of podcast personas as a unique form of a non-human online persona that requires further investigation. This approach also has implications for how to consider other forms of mediated communication with online personas.

Computational emotion classification for genre corpora of German tragedies and comedies from 17th to early 19th century

Abstract This article presents a method of emotion analysis for German drama from the 17th to the 19th century that significantly goes beyond previous research approaches in computational literary studies. It is based on annotations of 17 dramatic texts resulting in 11,939 annotations which were used as training material to fine-tune a German language BERT model that achieves an average accuracy of 73% for the single-label emotion classification of fourteen emotion types in cross-validation. We apply the emotion classification on a corpus of 141 comedies and 92 tragedies to compare these genres. For tragedies, the mean proportion percentages of ‘suffering’ and ‘abhorrence’ are higher than for comedies. Inversely, mean percentages of ‘anger’ and ‘joy’ are higher for comedies than for tragedies. A new finding is the surprisingly high proportion of ‘anger’ in comedies. Emotion distribution of the last scenes in dramatic texts also proves the quality of the classified data in terms of literary studies. In addition, the emotion distribution for several subgenres of comedy is investigated including non-canonical works of wide circulation which reached the recipients directly through the depicted emotions in the Kasperl Plays. Comedies from 1740 to 1770 are characterized by a pairing of higher amounts of ‘friendship’ and ‘love’. Satirical comedies from the same period stand out due to high rates of ‘anger’ as well as ‘suffering’. The very successful Kasperl plays turn out to be characterized by a comparatively large percentage of ‘schadenfreude’ and ‘joy’.

The influence of N. V. Gogol's satire on Sha Yesin's comedy "If I were Real"

The subject of the research in the article is the peculiarities of the influence of N. V. Gogol's satirical comedy "The Inspector" on the work of the Chinese playwright of the XX century Sha Yesin "If I were real". The methods of comparative and structural-semiotic analysis using elements of cultural analysis are used in the work, the method of interpretation of a separate text, the analysis of individual stylistic elements is also used. In this paper, we will be interested in productive reception, which, unlike reproductive reception, is associated with the entry of N. V. Gogol's satirical works as foreign texts into the work of Chinese writers. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the name of the famous Chinese playwright and screenwriter Sha Yesin and his comedy "If I were Real" are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time in the aspect of the reception of N. V. Gogol's satirical traditions. The peculiarities of the influence of N. V. Gogol's satirical traditions on Sha Yesin's comedy "If I were Real" are due to the internal political situation in China in the 1970s of the XX century and the influence of national traditions of Chinese literature. In this regard, Sha Yesin followed the traditions of Gogol's satire to the extent that it was necessary to express the main idea of the comedy of the Chinese playwright, in connection with the trends of the time that coincided with the ideological content of the "Auditor" – exposing the vices of officials. To solve the set artistic task, Sha Yesin consciously followed the plot of Gogol's comedy, which explains the borrowing of plot techniques from the "Inspector" ("the deceiver involuntarily", "double exposure", "incriminating letter"). Comparison of N. V. Gogol's comedy "The Inspector" and Sha Yesin's play suggests that the reception of Gogol's satire allowed Sha Yesin to create an original comedy that enriched Chinese literature.

Research Review of Dr. Waheed-ur-Rahman Khan’s Humorous Writing in the Humorous Tradition of Urdu

Humor is the beauty of creative literature, which is based on this atmosphere and on the delicate symbols in which it is created. The writer uses Farce to give more meaning and importance to his ideas. If we speak of the origin of the farce in literature, we find its beginning from Ameer Khusro. His work of keh-mukerni, doskhney and Alnamal. Where the elements of humor were created with the use of broken sentences. Through this genre, Sajjad Husain, Ahmad Ali Shoq, etc. used humor as a socio-political critic and tried to develop harmony among civilizations. For Awadh Panch, the era that was of raptures, attacks, and accidents. At this time, we see the line of many poets and prose writers who oppose pessimism and escape and fight these circumstances with satire and humor. But when we see the tradition of satire and humor, we find many famous examples and names in the history of satire and humor. Now, Ali Raza Ahmad and Waheed Ur Rehman are serving in this field. In this article, the comical writings of Waheed Ur Rehman will be critically assessed as a new humorous author in the tradition of Urdu literature.

Research Review of Dr. Waheed-ur-Rahman Khan’s Humorous Writing in the Humorous Tradition of Urdu

Humor is the beauty of creative literature, which is based on this atmosphere and on the delicate symbols in which it is created. The writer uses Farce to give more meaning and importance to his ideas. If we speak of the origin of the farce in literature, we find its beginning from Ameer Khusro. His work of keh-mukerni, doskhney and Alnamal. Where the elements of humor were created with the use of broken sentences. Through this genre, Sajjad Husain, Ahmad Ali Shoq, etc. used humor as a socio-political critic and tried to develop harmony among civilizations. For Awadh Panch, the era that was of raptures, attacks, and accidents. At this time, we see the line of many poets and prose writers who oppose pessimism and escape and fight these circumstances with satire and humor. But when we see the tradition of satire and humor, we find many famous examples and names in the history of satire and humor. Now, Ali Raza Ahmad and Waheed Ur Rehman are serving in this field. In this article, the comical writings of Waheed Ur Rehman will be critically assessed as a new humorous author in the tradition of Urdu literature.

“Will you ever win?”

Slap Shot’s Lily Braden is the origin of what I term the “willful wife.” The “willful wife” is a unique character of the hockey film genre as she appears in nearly every popular post-Slap Shot hockey film but is incredibly rare in other sports films. I define the willful wife as the girlfriend/wife of an athlete, in literature or film, who is unhappy with her partner’s devotion to sport, and so demands that he be a more attentive boyfriend/husband and/or father; however, later in the story, the willful wife then either illogically drops her demand or forgets about her previous relationship problems and reconciles with the athlete-protagonist. This article argues that Slap Shot is often considered a comedy rather than a satirical comedy, and as a result, Lily’s satirical journey in the film has been misread, which has led to the sexist legacy of the willful wife in the hockey genre. The resulting popular hockey film genre reproduces Lily’s “willful wife” storyline without any of her story’s satire or politics and in doing so, the genre ignores Lily’s critique of (dominant) heteropatriarchal hockey culture that relies on devaluing and demeaning women.

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

Cпор об образе Остапа Бендера в советской теории литературы

The satirical novels by I. Ilf and E. Petrov exposed both the flaws of current affairs and the common lifestyle of the old regime, constructing modernity in order to make it the subject of a more complex satirical rebuke. This mechanics of timely discarding social constructivism was not always transparent to Soviet critics, as demonstrated by the dispute between two prominent scholars, V. Ya. Propp and Yu. B. Borev. Propp considered the novels about Ostap Bender an unsuccessful example of the comic, finding in them a mixture of genres, unmotivated intermediate denouements, stretching and implausibility. It is proved that Propp in many respects continued the aesthetics of Vladimir Soloviev, who in his struggle against Leo Tolstoy's positions brought the comic and the grotesque closer together. Borev, on the contrary, considers Ostap Bender almost as Tolstoy's character, comic in his misguided goal-setting, but not in his innermost features. The two scholars diverge in their understanding not of satire, but of humor and its position in the aesthetic construct. Interpreting this dispute is useful in specifying the relationship between ongoing social construal and habitual aesthetic experience in different types of humor.

On the Satirical Comedy of the Mid to Late 1950s

On the Satirical Comedy of the Mid to Late 1950s

Social Criticism in Modern Australian Drama as Represented in David Williamson's Satirical Comedy Don's Party (1971)

Social Criticism in Modern Australian Drama as Represented in David Williamson's Satirical Comedy Don's Party (1971)