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Satire has three main types: Horace, Juvenal, and Menippea. Horace’s satire is gentle and humorous, while Juvenal’s is harsh and critical. Menippea is scattergun and mental. Examples include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
There are three main types of satire: Horace, Juvenal and Menippea. While each type is distinct from the other in some factors, any satire can contain elements of all three. Horace’s satire teases softly, Juvenal aims to destroy and provoke, and Menippea spreads his mental barbs on a wide number of targets. These types are not to be confused with the different satirical devices, such as wit, sarcasm and irony.
Horace’s satire is the kindest of the types of satire. It doesn’t aim to find the bad in things; instead, it is done from a warm, almost loving point of view. The emphasis is on humor and making fun of human dysfunction. While the subject of amusement may be social vices, it is usually an individual’s follies that are made fun of. A key element of Horace’s satire, unlike most other types, is that the audience also laughs at itself and at the subject of the mockery.
A good example of Horace’s satire is the works of Jane Austen. Her novels, such as Pride and Prejudice, are mild mockery of the gothic novels produced by other female writers her age. In Pride and Prejudice, she turns her Horatian satire on people and how they are viewed by the rest of society. This includes Mr. Darcy’s noble landowner, William Collins’ priest, and soldiers like George Wickham.
Juvenile satire is the harshest kind of satire, and it does not hold its targets in its hooked lacerations. Social vices, individuals, companies and organizations can be the targets. The purpose of such rants is to provoke an angry reaction from the audience directed at the subject. As a result of this intention, humor is pushed into the background and biting social criticism and polarized opinion come to the fore.
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is a good example of juvenal satire. The object of the mockery is people’s need for power and rule, and it also scoffs at how far people go to gain power and how this lust changes them. It’s also an unsentimental look at the boys’ relationships and how awful they can be.
The Menippean satire is named after Menippus and closely resembles Juvenal’s ideas on satire; however, it lacks the focus of a primary objective. Rather than a single target, it takes a scattergun approach that aims poisonous spikes at multiple targets. Besides not supporting narrative and being more rhapsodic, Menippean satire is also more mental. That said, this type of humor is usually more low key at the same time.
While prime examples of the types of satire produced by Horace and Juvenal survive, the same cannot be said of Menippus. A good example of Menippean satire is Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The entire novel is a haphazard collection of satires on people Carroll knew or knew, and on Oxford itself, both as a city and as a way of life.
