Humor to Inspire Change
Using pop culture to help your students better understand satire
Welcome to From the Teacher’s Desk, where we take turns further reflecting on our episodes and applications to the classroom.
Satire has always played an important role in American comedy. Over the last two centuries, American media (books, radio, movies, etc.) has used satire to criticize politics and societal trends. One cannot walk into a bookstore or open a computer or turn on the radio or television without being exposed to some kind of satire.
But asking students to quickly identify a piece as satire can be difficult. Teenagers may speak fluent sarcasm—that is where their understanding of satire stops. They can see a cartoonist or filmmaker mocking an element of our culture and laugh at it. The real challenge is getting them to see the creator’s rhetorical purpose in the humor.
American satire has a rich history going back to the 19th century. Mark Twain was more than the first truly American novelist. He was also the first truly American comedian, paving the way for celebrities such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. His prolific library of essays and short stories extends well beyond the stories of Tom and Huck. We English teachers carry on that legacy every time we teach our students the art of persuasion.
Use Images and Video Clips
When first introducing satire to your students, give them cartoon images and video clips. Be sure to use both classic and current examples to show them the long history of satire as a tool as well as point out the popular culture that they might not have recognized as satire. Challenge them to consider the historical and cultural context for the piece. Consider the SNL piece below that discusses NFTs and cryptocurrency.1
By analyzing shorter visual pieces, you can introduce your students to the terminology and key concepts of satire before asking them to read longer, more complex pieces such as “A Modest Proposal” or Huck Finn. This will give them a common language that you can then use throughout the remainder of your unit, referring back to the common examples from your introduction.
While it is old, this is the Google Slides presentation that Alicia mentioned during our Rosaline episode. Feel free to make a copy and adapt to your classroom’s needs (and don’t hesitate to include more current examples).
Challenge Them to Do Their Own Analysis
Start by having them do shorter print and video pieces, and then work them toward a detailed analysis of longer pieces. Near the beginning of every satire unit I’ve ever taught, I’ve given my students an approved list of sources that they can view and then sent them off to analyze different types of satire from different sources. All satire comes with bias, and an initial study of satire can be a good lesson in both the bias that drives a writer’s satirical argument and the effectiveness of the argument itself.
Once students have done a significant amount of practice individually, with groups, and as a whole class, they are ready for longer analysis. When I started teaching AP Language, I made a movie analysis the capstone for my Huckleberry Finn unit. (Link to an additional Huckleberry Finn satire analysis paper can be found here.) After weeks of discussing satire and rhetorical strategies, and analyzing how these were utilized in Twain’s work, they selected a movie from an approved list, including movies such as The Truman Show, Wall-E, and Shrek. (The full assignment with suggested films can be found here and adjusted to audience and new films as they come out.) It not only tested their understanding of satire, but it also connected modern comedy to a classic work that many of them otherwise would struggle to connect with.
Use Parody For Levity
During our Rosaline episode, Alicia points out that English teachers are often tasked with teaching the much heavier Shakespearian tragedies. The satire present in works such as Rosaline, The Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead allows students to laugh at the more ridiculous features of works that often carry such serious tones.
In my Monsters and Monstrous themes class, I show excerpts of Dracula: Dead and Loving It and Young Frankenstein while reading both respective classic novels. Giving students permission to laugh about the potentially silly elements of the books and plays we are reading in class sometimes gives them the emotional break that they may need from more serious elements of a literary unit.
No matter what route you take, remember that the key to quality satire is to make it an impetus for change.
The study of satire is meaningless if we are just teaching our students how to entertain others and be entertained. The best examples of satire make us think and can be found in everything from comedy to YA dystopian novels. They challenge us to reconsider previous ideas and ask questions of new and unfamiliar concepts. If students can leave our classrooms with a better understanding of how satire works on them and how to utilize it to work on others, we have given them another tool with which to change their world.
Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends, colleagues, and fellow lit thinkers.
Please remember to gauge your student audience before showing them any videos from any source.