Satire Essay
Analyse the ways in which satire can engage and provoke its audience
Satire aims to expose to its audience the shortcomings of humanity through an assemblage of wit and mockery; it provides momentum for change and reform through ridicule. Robert Sitch’s television program ‘The Hollowmen’ seeks to expose the nepotistic and often superficial nature of Australian politics through the use of political satire, showing us that Australian politics is “inherently without values or moral grounding’ (Louise Staley). While ‘Fat Chance’ exposes the artificial nature of policy making, ‘The Ambassador’ seeks to accrue the idea that government policies are designed not for the good of the people, but instead to suit the government’s agenda. Contrastingly, Jamie Babbit’s 1999 film ‘But I’m A Cheerleader’ takes this mockery of comfortable, self-serving egotism and extends it to a witty depiction of Middle-American homophobia which is ultimately derived from society’s need to constrict sexuality and gender roles based on the ingrained stereotypes of the human psyche.
Ultimately, both texts provoke an understanding from respective audiences through satirising the absurdity of authoritarians and the malaise of citizens, be they in the form of the government or society as a whole.
The verisimilitude throughout Sitch’s episode ‘Fat Chance’ provides his audience with a fundamental understanding of the progression of the Australian government from efficient to perfunctory in the political landscape’s obsession with quantity over quality regarding policy making. The endorsement of “superficial responses to the latest whims of the general public” is central to this episode, ultimately undermining the manipulated Australian society’s belief in the apparently faultless contemporary world of politics. In ‘Fat Chance’, Sitch has established the burden of the myopic statements of the Prime Minister which consequently results in the production of synthetic policies in order to appease the
Satire aims to expose to its audience the shortcomings of humanity through an assemblage of wit and mockery; it provides momentum for change and reform through ridicule. Robert Sitch’s television program ‘The Hollowmen’ seeks to expose the nepotistic and often superficial nature of Australian politics through the use of political satire, showing us that Australian politics is “inherently without values or moral grounding’ (Louise Staley). While ‘Fat Chance’ exposes the artificial nature of policy making, ‘The Ambassador’ seeks to accrue the idea that government policies are designed not for the good of the people, but instead to suit the government’s agenda. Contrastingly, Jamie Babbit’s 1999 film ‘But I’m A Cheerleader’ takes this mockery of comfortable, self-serving egotism and extends it to a witty depiction of Middle-American homophobia which is ultimately derived from society’s need to constrict sexuality and gender roles based on the ingrained stereotypes of the human psyche.
Ultimately, both texts provoke an understanding from respective audiences through satirising the absurdity of authoritarians and the malaise of citizens, be they in the form of the government or society as a whole.
The verisimilitude throughout Sitch’s episode ‘Fat Chance’ provides his audience with a fundamental understanding of the progression of the Australian government from efficient to perfunctory in the political landscape’s obsession with quantity over quality regarding policy making. The endorsement of “superficial responses to the latest whims of the general public” is central to this episode, ultimately undermining the manipulated Australian society’s belief in the apparently faultless contemporary world of politics. In ‘Fat Chance’, Sitch has established the burden of the myopic statements of the Prime Minister which consequently results in the production of synthetic policies in order to appease the