Satire has been deemed a technique used in literature, philosophy, politics, etc. It is aimed to criticize a certain trend, community, celebrity or others in a hidden meaningful way. Many satirists have influenced in the history and impacted people’s mind. From these satirists, we offer you a list of the top ten greatest satirists.
10 Plato:
Plato satirizes through the dialogues. Aristophanes is made fun of in the Symposium as an ill-mannered person, who can tell a pleasurable story but is unable to deliver a deep thought. In the majority of the dialogues, every time Socrates is paragon of virtue, deals with someone, the other is satirized. The speaker almost is not aware about the fact that they are being satirized. Plato employs satire to emphasize his philosophy of virtue.
9 Chaucer:
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is one of the supreme poems in English. It lets us have an opportunity to look into the medieval mind and the social condition of a large scale of the society. Chaucer is interested in noticing some follies. Chaucer was a dexterous satirist as he shows every fault.
8 Erasmus:
He was one of the most influential minds of the European renaissance, and an establisher of the reformation, who is known for his collection of biblical texts. His work is prominent, as there is no one who can flee the poking satire. Because everyone is satirized, no one feels abused.
7 Juneval:
His book of satirical poems starts with a lament. Juvenal is traditional and attacks what he believes that it is as moral decompose. He makes fun of the people who subject to the emperor, how hard it is to sweet-talk efficiently, female morals and people without widespread human feeling. Juvenal underwent for his criticism, so he exiled for his humor.
6 Jonathan Swift:
Jonathan Swift is a great satirist famous for his Gulliver’s Travels. Each of the places Gulliver visits reflects some faults or social maladies of present-day society. The wittiness in Gulliver’s Travels is razor-sharp.
5 Voltaire:
Voltaire was one of the greatest satirists. Candide is one of the most famous books he wrote. It deals with the story of a young man, called Candide, who is influenced by a teacher of Optimism, called Pangloss. The book may be interpreted as a contracted assault on the work of Leibniz. However, it satirizes the native optimism of justice, Christian prejudice and class distinctions, as the overflow of disaster is deposited on the protagonists.
4 Bierce:
His ‘Devil’s Dictionary’ offers you satirical definitions of words, which adding to making you laugh, it makes you be in awe how much true they are. The Devil’s Dictionary still popular and is the wonderful companion if you wish to pierce an enemy’s arguments.
3 George Orwell:
The concept of communism is attractive. George Orwell was highly focused on his fellow man, and modeled with communism as a stick in the face of fascism. The Spanish civil war taught him that communism can fall down into totalitarianism. Orwell’s Animal Farm explains what dangers communism can cause. The humor in the novella is dark, but it is just expressing the time it was written in.
2 Lucilius:
He is gladly criticized people, literature, and society with his satirical hexameter verses. Lucilius desired finding his motivation in the political scandals and existing events. We reach only little of his writings, but he was famed as much as necessary in his own time to get pleasure from popularity.
1 François Rabelais:
He made use of vulgar jokes. The violent satire exist in his writing banned his books from publishing. His choice to utter his comments on society in bizarre led him be called the “heretic” label. One of his major works is positively Gargantua and Pantagruel, it is a series of books that record the fantastic life of a giant called Pantagruel and his father. The works were accepted throughout Rabelais’s time, even if it is the Sorbonne refused them for being unorthodox.
You can enjoy reading their works, as they are characterized of successful manner of satire.
