Lampoon, Parody, or Satire?

Last week I mentioned that Jonathan Swift was known for his satire and parody, and then wrote those words would need to wait for another week. Well, another week has arrived, so let’s look at those words and see where they lead us.

Satire is the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc. (according to dictionary.com). Parody is a humorous or satirical imitation of a serious piece of literature or writing. I would add music and performance art to that definition, since Weird Al Yankovic and Saturday Night Live have been engaging in parodies for years.

Satire has been a word (and practice, presumably) in English since the late 1300s. It comes from the Middle French word satire which came from the Latin word satira, that means satire. It was used in Latin to refer to “a collection of poems in various meters on a variety of subjects by the late republican Roman poet Ennius.” That use related to poems about vices. The word in Latin was altered because of the word satyr, when people mistakenly thought there was a connection to the Greek satyr drama, from which we get satyr (a word for a future post).

Parody came to English in the 1590s from the Latin word parodia, which came from the Greek word paroidia, that was formed by combining para-, meaning beside, with oide, meaning a song or ode. Its first known use in English is by Ben Jonson.

Satire is defined as a written and serious form of assailing a vice or folly. Parody began (and remains) as a performance form (though it can now be a written work as well), and includes humor that is not part of the definition of satire.

Ambrose Bierce, in his “Devil’s Dictionary,” 1911, defines satire as

An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness. In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient, the humor that we mistake for it, like all humor, being tolerant and sympathetic. Moreover, although Americans are ‘endowed by their Creator’ with abundant vice and folly, it is not generally known that these are reprehensible qualities, wherefore the satirist is popularly regarded as a sour-spirited knave, and his every victim’s outcry for codefendants evokes a national assent.

According to Samuel Johnson, satire is differentiated from a lampoon in that satire has general reflections while lampoon is aimed at a particular person.

Lampoon is defined at dictionary.com as “a sharp, often virulent satire directed against an individual or institution.” It came to English in the 1600s from the French word lampoon, but where that word came from is unknown. French etymologists suggest it might be from lampons, that was a popular refrain in songs in the 1600s that meant “let’s drink.” It’s possible that drinking still plays a part in much lampooning that takes place these days.

So if you want to seriously address a vice or folly, particularly in writing, that is a satire. If you’re singing or writing poetry to poke fun at something, that would be a parody – particularly if it’s humorous. And if you are satirizing a particular person or a single institution, humorously or not, you are creating a lampoon.