The Wonders of Satire

So, I've found that I haven't had the easiest time trying to figure out exactly what the meaning of "satire" is. I mean I've done my research and everything, but it still feels as if I don't get the full meaning of it...even though I'm pretty sure I actually do. I decided to let my writing show me if that's true or not.

As I was looking up examples of satire, I found all types of things, such as Saturday Night Live, Scary Movie, Austin Powers, etc..all of these made me notice how each of them purposely did a parody of something original, this was also something I learned in class. I didn't notice that these kinds of things were examples of satire until I took a moment to think about what exactly they were making fun of. (yes, I did have to actually think about that) Anyway, as all of this was running through my mind, it brought me back to my english class last year and the books we read in there. Everytime we read a book as a class, my English teacher would always have the movie version of the book if there was one, and we'd follow along with the movie as to where we were in the book. Come to think of it, it was actually a good way of learning, because you could never get the full essence of a story by watching the movie instead of reading the book, but the movie at least made it easy to remember key points in the story.

Specifically, one of the books I remembered that reminded me a bit about satire was The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare. As they did in my English class the year before, everyone dreaded reading Shakespeare, however, I can say that it is still one of my favorite books that I've ever read to this day. Like usual, as we were reading this book in class, my teacher would put the movie on and we finished the book and the movie around the same time of course. Once the book was finished, and we took our test on it and everything, my teacher decided to show us the movie Ten Things I Hate About You, which was what brought me to thinking about satire.

For those of you that have not heard of The Taming of the Shrew or have not read it, it is the story of two sisters, the youngest being the pretty, graceful, nice one that all the men wanted to marry and the oldest being the loud, rude, mean one that basically scared all of the men away-the "shrew". (However, in reality I'm sure we all know everyone has some sort of shrew to them..) The father of the two girls wouldn't allow the youngest to marry until the oldest did first, which no one thought was going to happen that is until a greedy, gross, rude man version of a "shrew" came along and at first decided to marry the oldest sister for her father's money, but eventually the two learned to love each other and made the story turn out to be less of the tragedy that we know Shakespeare to write. If you're considering reading it and want to find out a little bit more, which I advise you should, look here.

Anyway, like I was saying before, the best example of satire that popped into my head after thinking about this play (or at least what I think is an example of satire) is the movie Ten Things I Hate About You which was a more modern version of The Taming of the Shrew, telling the story of high school boy drama between two teenage sisters, (which I'm sure many can relate to) creating a parody out of the whole story. For example, instead of the youngest sister not being able to get married without the oldest getting married first, the movie made it so that the youngest sister couldn't go out on dates unless the oldest sister started dating too.

In my opinion, the movie was very funny and definitely did a perfect job of explaining the story of The Taming of the Shrew and if one saw the movie of the original story and the movie of the parody, well, I sure hope they would agree.

I guess trailers will just have to do..
The Taming of the Shrew (1967):

 

10 Things I Hate About You (1999):

This movie still told the story of The Taming of the Shrew, but in a way that kind of mocked it and the funny story it is, which is exactly what satire does. It exaggerates points made in stories, articles, songs, speeches, poems-you name it, by mocking how much they're made out to be more than what they are. Twain does this throughout his story, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by showing the reader what the idea of slavery did to people and their personalities back in the time the story takes place. There were mixed feelings about it all over the place, even Twain had mixed feelings about slavery at one point during the time period where it had not been banned yet, some of these he shows through the character of Huck. Throughout the whole course of the story, the reader is able to see many different perspectives and reactions to the issue, although many of them never really seemed to make sense. Like the way Miss Watson was almost this saint- religious, praying all the time, going to church, but if you're so loyal to God, then why do you own a person due to their skin color? I think this is a point that Twain tries to make very often during his book, not just through Miss Watson, but other characters too, making the whole story relate to satire.

Wow, I guess writing this blog actually did help me get an understanding of what satire was...well good, that's what I hoped for!

Sources:
The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
www.yourdictionary.com
www.youtube.com