American satire
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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American satire is satire from the U. S.
Anglo-American satire
Ebenezer Cooke, author of "The Sot-Weed Factor," was among the first to bring satire to the British colonies; Benjamin Franklin and others followed, using satire to shape an emerging nation's culture through shaping its sense of the ridiculous.
Mark Twain was a great American satirist: his novel Huckleberry Finn is set in the antebellum South, where the moral values Twain wishes to promote are completely turned on their heads. His hero, Huck, is a rather simple but good-hearted lad who is ashamed of the "sinful temptation" that leads him to help a runaway slave. In fact his conscience – warped by the distorted moral world he has grown up in, often bothers him most when he is at his best. Ironically, he is prepared to do good, believing it to be wrong.
Twain's younger contemporary Ambrose Bierce gained notoriety as a cynic, pessimist and black humorist with his dark, bitterly ironic stories, many set during the American Civil War, which satirized the limitations of human perception and reason. Bierce's most famous work of satire is probably The Devil's Dictionary, in which the definitions mock cant, hypocrisy and received wisdom.
Titles
- Mr. Freedom (1970) - William Klein
American satirists
- Jello Biafra
- Ambrose Bierce
- Lenny Bruce
- Don DeLillo
- Kinky Friedman
- Matt Groening
- Joseph Heller
- Paul Krassner
- H. L. Mencken
- Thomas Nast
- Randy Newman
- Flannery O'Connor
- Chuck Palahniuk
- Tom Robbins
- Mark Twain
- Kurt Vonnegut
- "Weird Al" Yankovic
- Frank Zappa
