Satire

Satire can be defined as a practice of  making fun of human weakness or character flaw. It is made to be humorus while also derivving a reaction of contept from the reader or veiwer. Satire can easily be found in our daily lives on the television, on the internet and also from what we are reading whether that is your favorite book to curl up in bed and read at night or just the daily newspaper you like to enjoy with your coffee. Satire can be very difficult to understand unless you actually analyze it and look for it's signs. Before writing this blog i never even thought once aboout what kind of humor i was witnessing i only thought, "hey if its funny i'll laugh" and thats about it. I am still having a difficult time understanding the true meaning of Satire but once im finished writing this i hope it will be easy to grasp for myself and you, the reader.

One show that uses satire very well and is very popular is Saturday Night Live. One skit on SNL that can show satire in a very humorous way is when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler imitate Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton. If you haven't seen this video you can watch it here.
 
In this skit, Tina and Amy take actual speeches things that Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton have said and exaggerate them. They turn these serious political speeches into funny and humerous skits for the audience to enjoy. This humor sometimes can gets to be too harsh and it fills the veiwer with comtempt and sorrow for the person being made fun of, however you still somehow squeak out a laugh.

This Saturday Night Live skit shows satire in two different ways. One way is in a parody. A parody is when someone imitates another in a serious matter in order to make fun of them. This is shown through the imitaion of Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton in the way they act, talk, the way they dress and the things they say. This picture indicates the way that Tina Fey completely mimicks the way Sarah Palin looks. Fey is on the left and Palin is on the right.

 

The second form of satire in this skit is exaggeration. This is when something is increased beyond the normal for effect. This is shown in the video through the exaggeration, or stretching  of the truth, of the Senator's own words. One example of this is when Tina Fey, posing as Sarah Palin, says, "I can see Russia from my house!" This is exaggeration because Sarah Palin always talked about how she lives in Alaska and how much she loves it and  because it is so close to Russia, it became a funny, satirical comment used very often.

These uses of satire are very similar to the ones shown in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. An example of exaggeration in Huck Finn is in the beginning of the novel when Huck describes all of Tom Sawyer's adventures and when they start their robber's club. This club was all phony and the adventures were all fake. For example, they raided a pre-schools picnic instead of killing a bunch of Arabs. A way that Parody is shown in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is when Huck and Jim come in contact with the Grangerfords and Shepardsons. They are a parody of the Hatfields and Mccoys who were historical feuding familes, that were around when Mark Twain was writing Huck Finn.

Satire is a very complicated and confusing subject and can be hard to explain however the example of Tina Fey posing as Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler as Hilary Clinton can break it down and show how it makes fun of human weakness and flaw. In Huck Finn, Mark Twain uses satire very srategically and it can be very humourous but also brings out contempt in the reader which is sometimes needed.