Why So Serious?

Satire blends verbal irony, humour, and parody into a subtle critique, usually aimed towards a social or political wrong. Accordingly, satire has captured the attention of scholars spanning multiple disciplines, naturally leading to divergent definitions and understandings of satire. This book takes an interdisciplinary perspective to consider the ways in which satirical discourse can also be viewed as a form of creative language play, which may serve as a useful criterion along which to discuss disciplinary variation associated with satire. Through the lens of humour theory and a theory of satire as discourse, satirical texts such as satirical news and satirical product reviews are analysed using corpus and computational text-analytic techniques. Results from these analyses are used to describe the manner in which both professional and amateur satirists deploy language play in different satirical texts. This use of play in satire is then considered in light of definitions and results obtained from different academic disciplines, and suggestions are provided for additional interdisciplinary approaches to studying satire. In all, this book highlights the scholarly benefits of taking a serious look at the playful side of satire.