Satire is an ironic literary creation detailing the defeat of decency and virtue and the triumph of folly or vice. The work may utilize any literary form — either fictional or nonfictional — relying heavily upon parody, paradox, and anti-climax, and is usually infused with wit and high spirits. Because of its mix of jaunty vigor and bad news, there is no evident catharsis, the works being open-ended and disjunct. The implication at the close is that things will continue to get worse.

Critics have stressed the negative and the aggressive, nihilism and attack. But the emphasis should be placed on satire’s powers of teasing, unsettling, and making fun, as well as stressing satire’s enormous charge of creative energy.

Satire, then, is an imitation, through action or narration, of an uneven, incomplete action or actions, by means of language, as a result of such imitation there is also effected through laughter and unpleasantness the frustration of catharsis.

The first principle and, as it were, the soul of satire is the plot. Satiric plots frequently eschew probability and necessity, events often being episodic and fragmentary, denying customary regularity and orderliness of form.

Satiric characters are people worse than ourselves, riddled with vices and follies. And satiric plots show good people passing from good to evil fortune, and evil men passing from bad or indifferent fortune to good; such actions arousing shock or aversion, and failing to satisfy people’s general sympathies with good people and their hopes of encountering poetic justice.

Most satire is intellectual or literary, mimicking earlier traditions, styles, and plots, teasing and entrapping the spectator by promising but failing to deliver acceptable comic or tragic or romantic plots and styles. Satire’s goal is to amuse and vex its audience, setting it to thinking about justice and injustice, goading it to ponder the accepted ideas and popular standards of literary content and form, language and style.