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Research has shown that political satire programs offer both important information about contemporary politics and offer very humorous, entertaining content. This study seeks to understand how these satire programs bolster both internal political efficacy and political participation. 400 college students at two Northern California universities participated in this research. The study found that affinity for political humor can predict levels of internal political efficacy. Exposure to liberal satire was negatively correlated with affinity for political humor and political participation, and exposure to conservative satire was significantly correlated with internal political efficacy. Internal political efficacy was also positively correlated with political participation. Lastly, there was significant difference between Democrats and Republicans in terms of their exposure to political TV satire.

This paper explores the presentation of family in the controversial FOX Network television program Family Guy. Polarizing to audiences, the Griffin family of Family Guy is at once considered sophomoric and offensive to some and smart and satiric to others. Though neither judgment of the show is necessarily mutually exclusive, the intention of this study is to reconcile those disparate viewpoints in order to measure the show's purposefulness. After all, if Family Guy succeeds in its satire, it is full of social purpose, offensiveness notwithstanding. This thesis focuses on arguably the main point of contention in Family Guy: the family. Those critical of the show denounce the Griffins for their less-than-exemplary behavior. Proponents of the show—while not exactly disagreeing with that perception of the Griffins—differ in their approach, as they consider the Griffins satiric characters meant to be models of misbehavior. Reformative in nature, satire attacks vice and folly directly and indirectly, and it is in its combined use of direct and indirect satire that Family Guy, at times, misses the mark. By directly satirizing other families in its trademark cutaway transitions, Family Guy places its own family, the Griffins, in a position of superiority, which complicates matters when the Griffins indirectly become objects of satire. Especially regarding the relationship between Griffin family patriarch Peter and his daughter Meg, Family Guy oftentimes presents an imbalanced “satire” that would best be described as “abuse.”

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1956 H55 / Master of Science

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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate through an examination of the satirical elements in Sir John Vanbrugh's eight complete plays and his fragmentary last play that his central motivating force was a desire to entertain London society and divert them from "their wives and taxes."

This dissertation treats Persius’ book of satires as a physical object, as a text to be read aloud, as a literary artefact that has a fundamental total structure, and as a text that is interested in its genre and in how satire can position itself against tired philosophical and literary traditions and tropes. It seeks to diversify the intellectual contexts in which the satirist may be situated—both literary and philosophical, ranging from Hipponax to Ovid, Plato to Cornutus. In the first chapter, we struggle to track down a poet who compulsively avoids identification in his Prologue. It turns out that he is best identified by a reactionary Hipponactean meter and very misleading birdsounds. Without addressee or self-identification or occasion, the poem is labeled a carmen at the same time that we are told that carmina are to be distrusted. In the second chapter, the poet introduces his libellus to us—or, rather, it turns out that he is not interested in us at all—he talks to his book or to some fiction that he has invented for the occasion of Satire I. The book itself may be read or not, he doesn’t mind. The poet focuses his attention on the poetry-reading practices of others in performance, alighting upon their every intimate body part, but denies us a view of him—he is merely the concealed spleen. In Chapter Three, the poet continues his exploration of performative speech (prayer, this time) in Satire II, while maintaining his self-concealment. We see only his inner, highly unappealing raw heart on a platter. A body part further to the spleen is added to our plate: the heart, uncooked. His last words hint at what he has to offer; but we’ll be sorry that he does soon enough. Chapter Four shows that in the central poem, Satire III, the poet swings vastly in the other direction. Rather than a disembodied critique of others, the poem’s opening lines are highly focalized through the poet’s experience. He exposes more of his body than we would ever wish to see—splitting and gaping open, it becomes a giant pore. At the same moment, his book comes physically into our view, but it is as split as he is. The hardened critic turns out to be a leaky vessel, a failing proficiens who cannot catch up to his Stoic lessons. In the fifth chapter, the poet picks up another book, Plato’s Alcibiades, which shares his interest in the morally underdeveloped youth and the hazards of ethical progress. In Satire IV, his rendition of that dialogue, Persius offers a theory of dialogue as fiction that frames his engagement with philosophy. The result is that the Stoics may find that they have a very bad student on their hands, one who raises the specter of Socrates’ misbehavior and failures. The sixth chapter expands the discussion of Persius’ relation to the Platonic corpus in Satire V, which sustains and develops Platonic questions of desire, slavery, and praise, and confuses its own genres. Finally, Chapter Seven addresses Persius’ retreat, projected death, and reincarnation in Satire VI. He reflects upon the fate of his body. He is unconcerned about what happens to bodies and poets—and, implicitly, their texts—after death. The poet’s book and the body are merged in their insignificance.

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Systems of Order: The satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh is a study of Evelyn Waugh’s satire. It offers a contextual reading of eleven works by Waugh, presenting revisionist readings of familiar novels and according attention to previously neglected works. It aims to sketch out the main features of Waugh’s satire, including Waugh’s lexis and the use of certain key images and motifs. Comparative analysis of Waugh’s satirical novels with works by contemporary writers such as Clough Williams-Ellis, Wyndham Lewis, Stella Gibbons and T.S. Eliot brings into sharp relief the techniques and targets of Waugh’s satire. ¶ This thesis argues that despite Waugh’s tongue-in-cheek denial of satire’s efficacy in a complacent modern world, he did indeed write satire of a peculiarly twentieth century kind. Waugh’s apparently anarchic novels reflect, behind the detached insouciance of their narrators, the moral standards which the novels ostensibly claim are absent in the modern world. ¶ In Waugh’s writing, satire is effected through the creation of systems of literary order. The structure and patterning of his novels, and his masterful use of the rhetorical techniques of satire, mete out punishment on a formal level. Waugh’s satirical novels dramatize the tension between truth, order and civilization, and their oppositions, disorder and barbarism. Systems of Order suggests that from the very first, Waugh’s satiric project aimed toward the repudiation of modern disorder.