25 Satire Examples From Literature

So long as we have had human nature, we have had satire. Many of our species’ earliest surviving examples of writing are satirical, from Ancient Chinese poets to Ancient Greek playwrights.

Satire exposes social flaws, mocks society’s leaders and elite, and provokes social change. Though satire may make people cringe even as they laugh, it is a strong social tool that connects people with similar beliefs through a combination of humour and horror. Satire can be found in all forms of art, media, and communication.

What Is Satire in Literature? 

Literary satire may include novels, short stories, poetry, opinion pieces, or essays—any form of writing that attempts to highlight a flaw in an individual, an institution, or a society. Satire may be funny and entertaining, or harsh and cutting.

Satire, however, is not just complaining (which many people do enough of). 

The point of satire is to entertain, through either humour or shame—and often both—while drawing attention to an issue and provoking thought, ideally leading to social change, though satire itself is only about highlighting issues, not providing solutions.

Because of this push for social change, the prevalence of satire in a society is a good measure of how open that society is. The more autocratic and thin-skinned a society’s leaders, the less tolerant of satire they tend to be, particularly of political satire. 

For example, early medieval European satire was limited to satirizing, or mocking, “non-Christian” behaviour. Just about anything else would be censured by the church, often by executing the author.

Satire Definition Literature

Literary satire is the written attempt to highlight a social or political issue, through a combination of humour, embarrassment, and exaggeration.

Types of Satire 

There are three major types of literary satire, each defined by the ancient writers who represent the oldest surviving examples of these types.

• Horatian: named for the Roman satirist Horace, Horatian satire is more light social commentary, humorous and entertaining. It pokes gentle fun at something while also provoking thought.
• Juvenalian: named for the Roman satirist Juvenal, Juvenalian satire is dark and biting rather than funny. It attempts to speak truth to those in power through savage ridicule or extreme exaggeration, and usually tries to promote some kind of social change or draw attention to what the author sees as a social evil.
• Menippean: named for the Syro-Phoenician satirist Menippus, Menippean satire mocks mental or moral attitudes rather than specific individuals or institutions. It can be light and humorous or dark and eviscerating.

Satire Examples in Literature

Satire has been with us for as long as we have had examples of writing. The following examples start from our oldest surviving satire and go until our modern world, but are by no means a comprehensive list, with so many strong stories to choose from.

Shijing: Confucious (editor)

Shijing, or The Book of Odes, is an Ancient Chinese collection of poetry, spanning from the 11th century to the 7th century BCE. Traditionally said to be edited by Confucious, the collection contains poems on a number of topics, including political satire, often criticizing long or endless wars, or mocking the incompetence of officials.

Lysistrata: Aristophanes

Aristophanes, a playwright of Ancient Athens, is one of the oldest known writers of satire, writing in the 5th-4th centuries BCE. His satire was biting, mercilessly mocking politicians and probing the foolishness of society, as in Lysistrata, where the title character Lysistrata convinces all the women of Athens to go on a sex strike to protest the Peloponnesian war.

True History: Lucien

Written in Ancient Rome in the 2nd century CE, True History is both satire and parody. The plot mocks the supposedly true accounts of epic poems or travelogues of other ancient writers claiming to have seen all manner of fantastic things. 

True History is also the oldest surviving example of science fiction, containing stories about extra-terrestrials and interplanetary war.

Kitāb al-Bukhalā’: al-Jahiz

A Muslim poet and intellectual of the 8th-9th centuries CE, al-Jahiz sprinkled satire throughout many of his works to, as he put it, leaven the lump of solemnity with humour. Kitāb al-Bukhalā’, or The Book of Misers, mocks the greed of minor officials like teachers and scribes, and even the greed of lowly beggars.

Reynard the Fox

A genre of stories by multiple authors from Medieval Europe, with the earliest surviving written version from the 12th century. 

Each story contains recurring anthropomorphic animal characters centred around the adventures of Reynard, a fox and trickster character. Reynard is a peasant hero, with the satire mocking the class system at the time, and the greed and social status of the clergy and aristocracy. 

The stories were also a way to translate difficult legal or political concepts into common language, a rare example giving the lower classes of medieval society an opportunity to understand how their system functioned.

Don Quixote: Miguel de Cervantes

Through the unhinged antics of the title character and his unwitting but very witty squire and handler, Cervantes mocks those who were still holding on to the medieval ideas of honour, knighthood, and heroism in the early 17th century world he saw as becoming more nuanced and mature.

The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century: Jane Webb

Written in 1827, the novel tells the story of an Ancient Egyptian mummy resurrected in the year 2126, into a future with advanced technology but seemingly little political progress: Webb’s satire mocks the apathy and empty promises of politicians and the gullibility of the public, as well as the industrial revolution obsession with technological progress.

Catch-22: Joseph Heller

A chaotic and hilarious critique of military inefficiency and the willingness of commanders to sacrifice lives, Catch-22 was so popular the title became an allusion, meaning a situation with no good solutions. Set during the second world war, the main character Captain John Yossarian has become disillusioned with the war effort and the circular reasoning used to justify the horrors of the war, a feeling that is reflected in the out-of-order narrative sequence of the book.

Oryx and Crake: Margaret Atwood

A satire of unchecked corporate greed, Oryx and Crake explores what happens when profit, particularly from biological experimentation, is prioritized over human survival. 

Atwood uses the results of an exaggerated apocalypse to highlight social issues and the social obsession with a techno-utopia.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation: Ottessa Moshfegh

The story of a young woman who, after graduating from university in New York in the early 2000s, finds herself unable to cope and attempts to hibernate for a year with the help of a corrupt psychologist. 

Through this story, Moshfegh satirizes society’s prioritization of medication over self-care, the constant desire for quick fixes and silver bullets.

The Sellout: Paul Beatty

Using the overtly exaggerated scenario of a black man in the southern United States attempting to resurrect slavery, Beatty satirizes the state of American race relations and modern racial politics, and the concept of American identity.

Bunny: Mona Awad

Dark satire with a touch of fantasy, Bunny mocks the privileged culture of university elite and academic culture, while exaggerating the consequences of toxic female friendships, through a story that blurs the lines of reality.

The Circle: Dave Eggers

A dystopian satire exploring the consequences of unchecked social media surveillance, Eggers both explores and mocks modern social pressure for individuals to share everything on social media, while corporations and governments hoard data and secrets. 

The Circle also skewers how modern tech visionaries are sometimes treated—and behave—like kings or gods.

Yellowface: R.F. Kuang

A witty and humorous takedown of the modern publishing industry, Yellowface explores issues of cultural appropriation, racism, and performative diversity through the story of a white writer attempting to pass off the manuscript of her talented but dead Asian colleague as her own.

Mean Moms: Emma Rosenblum

Rosenblum shines a light on the toxic culture of private school parenting and wealthy privilege through a story of darkly exaggerated consequences of revenge and jealousy, performative friendship, and entitlement.

Political Satire Examples

Animal Farm: George Orwell

While the characters are anthropomorphized animals, Animal Farm is dark satire exploring the consequences of unchecked power, greed, and in particular communism, substituting how the animals run their own farm in place of how human leaders run a country.

Charlotte Walsh Likes To Win: Jo Piazza

A bitter and eviscerating story about what it takes for a woman to compete in politics in modern America, Piazza highlights how toxic gender and sexual politics have become, while questioning the double standard of harsh moral judgement applied to the behaviour of female politicians versus their male peers.

Juvenalian Satire Examples 

Juvenalian satire is not, as it sounds, satire for children; it is dark and eviscerating satire, favouring shock and horror over humour, but still intelligent and witty.

A Modest Proposal: Jonathan Swift

Satire in 18th-century Britain was particularly dark and biting. A Modest Proposal pushed for social change by suggesting the utterly absurd idea that desperately poor Irish should sell their children as food for the wealthy English gentry as a solution to poverty. 

The satire was so dark and delivered with such perfect deadpan writing, however, that many report Swift was taken seriously at the time.

American Psycho: Bret Easton Ellis

A bleak, dark, and at times bloody and graphic satire about a Wall Street executive who moonlights as a serial killer. 

American Psycho draws attention to excesses of wealthy corporate culture, corporate greed and detachment, and consumerism in the 1980s.

My Sister, the Serial Killer: Oyinkan Braithwaite

A brutally dark comedy told from the perspective of a younger sister who, three times in a row, helps her older sister clean up the body of a murdered boyfriend. 

My Sister, the Serial Killer satirizes the patriarchal obsession with female beauty and gender roles, mocking the male gaze, while at the same time showing the dangerous consequences of social complicity and family loyalty taken too far.

Satire Cartoon Examples

A Rake’s Progress: William Hogarth

Considered the grandfather of political cartoons, Hogarth dramatized the splendor but the underlying poverty and lewdness of early 18th century London. 

A Rake’s Progress is an eight-painting story of an heir whose moral collapse leads him to gamble away his fortune, ending up in the asylum Bedlam.

Calvin and Hobbes: Bill Watterson

Observing the world from an overly sarcastic 6-year-old’s perspective might be funny enough, but through Calvin, Watterson’s long-running comic series deeply satirizes public education, gender roles, mass media and in particular modern consumerism. 

True to form, throughout his career Watterson refused to license his characters for sale in the form of toys or other products.

Persepolis: Marjane Satrapi

A dark yet funny graphic novel series. 

Satrapi uses her own coming-of-age experience during the Islamic Revolution in Iran to satirize the overt absurdities of religious fundamentalism and the clash between more open Western culture—particularly pop culture—and autocratic rulers seeking control and power by weaponizing cultural traditions.

Funny Satire Examples 

Discworld Series: Terry Pratchett

It’s hard to pick just one of Pratchett’s novels as an example. This wonderfully comedic series takes place on Discworld, a world that is literally flat, floating through space on the backs of four elephants who are themselves standing on the shell of a massive turtle.

Through humour and exaggeration, Pratchett skewers just about everything about modern Western society, including politics, inclusion, gender roles, science, religion, and almost anything else you can think of.

Queenie: Candice Carty-Williams

Carty-William’s story about a young black woman caught between her Jamaican heritage and her British home explores racism while delivering brilliantly funny satire about today’s publishing industry and the modern dating scene.

Satirical Techniques 

If you’re looking to write satire, first look to the real world. What are current social and political trends? What issues do you see in your hometown, your country, in the news, or on social media? 

The best satire speaks to the times by reflecting either what people are currently saying and doing, or what they aren’t saying and doing. You want to make people think about the world as it is, and how it could be.

However, a single satirical novel that attempted to mock the entire world and everything that’s wrong with it would end up an unfocused mess. 

Instead, aim for one specific issue, or a few overlapping issues. Pick something meaningful to you, something you truly care about, as that passion will carry through into your writing.

Then, use these techniques to help build your satire:

• Humor is one of the strongest weapons of the satirist. Making people laugh engages their attention, even if they’re cringing as they’re laughing, as some of the best humorous satire does. Make sure your humour has a point, though: make them laugh, then make them think.
• Use irony to show the difference between how people think about something and the reality, often demonstrating what people can’t, or won’t, say.
• Hyperbole, or a grossly exaggerated scenario, can help ridicule the world as it is, drawing attention to flaws by magnifying them or exploring the consequences when those flaws are left unchecked.
• In the same vein, exaggerated understatement can draw attention to flaws by what’s missing, helping people again see the consequences of flaws running unchecked
• Consider a storytelling technique called allegory, in which a story can be read literally in one way, but has a deeper meaning when read another way. Layering meaning into your story will help it stand out, as well as keeping readers thinking.

Careful, however, to ensure your satire is read as satire and not taken seriously. Authors like Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, among others, found themselves accused of the very social ills they were trying to draw attention to.

Examples of Satire Conclusion

Satire is a powerful social tool for keeping power in check, showing the excesses and ills of society. 

Through humour and darkness, craft your satire to entertain while it prods and provokes, leaving your readers thinking—or better yet, turning their thoughts into action—long after they put your book down.