Thursday, December 1, 2011

Satire


      Satire is when someone makes fun of another person to correct them. Satire is used to help someone better themselves using humor. A lot of cartoon have satire. An example of satire would be when I'm having a bad hair day and I can't really tell I'm having a bad hair day. A friend says "Hey nice hair You should really do it more often". It has a hint of sarcasm.

      "The the impotence of proofreading" by Taylor Mali is using satire because he got a spell checker but the spell checker didn't help him spell check anything it just helped him spell words right. He said "So I got myself a spell checker and figured I was on Sleazy Street" which it didn't help because he is still spelling incorrectly. A spell checker can't help you write stuff in your own words it just puts in a word it thinks you are trying to write. he also said "But there are several missed aches that a spell chukker can¹t can¹t catch catch". In that sentence we can see that a spell checker doesn't but things in the order we want it to be in as we can see he wrote things twice.

      In the "Osprey Devours Lion in massive food chain shake- up" the satire is that we usually don't see a lion like that. The osprey would be the one laying there devoured by the lion not the other way around. The lion is being satirized because he is the one that is supposed to eat animals like that especially if the animal is that small.

      Children are being satirized in"Advice to the Youth" by Mark Twain because according to Twain the youth don't respect their parents or their superior, go to sleep late and wake up late, we lie a lot with out knowing how to lie, are careless, and don't read. He gave us advice then says a comment about why the youth should do this like "Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment". Which basically means if the youth don't respect their parents they are proving them right about not knowing right from wrong. He also said "Once caught, you can never again be in the eyes to the good and the pure, what you were before". What this is saying is that once they lie and get caught you can no longer look as a good person. Mark Twain is satirizing the youth because they can give them all the advice in the world but they still won't take it.

       "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, the satire in this story is that nobody is really equal. In this story they try to make everyone equal by making someone pretty wear a mask or something that makes them ugly. "Their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in" this was what they did to ballerinas that were prettier then other ballerinas. Smart people couldn't think because if they did they would start hearing noises for example "Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear." The satire is they made every one equal by making them wear stuff and do stuff no one was really equal they just lowered people abilities.

       In "Reading Satirical Articles Can Get You Tortured, Sent To Gitmo" by Cernin the writer is satirizing the government, the police, and the FBI handled the situation. They sent an Innocent person to jail to be tortured all because of a joke. In the article it said "During his eight-year imprisonment, Mohamed has allegedly been flown to secret torture centres in Pakistan, Morocco, an American-run jail known as the Dark Prison near Kabul in Afghanistan and, finally, to Guantanamo Bay" they sent him to all these places without finding out the whole story. The article also said "Binyam Mohamed, a former UK asylum seeker, admitted to having read the ‘instructions’ after allegedly being beaten, hung up by his wrists for a week and having a gun held to his head in a Pakistani jail" they were so paranoid they did this to someone just because of a joke. The writer did this article to satirize the government, police, FBI, and the CIA, they are so paranoid they are torturing an innocent person.

         This cartoon satirizing the phones and people of today because they could have the same exact phone but because it's a "smart phone" its different. People are so focused on what people are say about the smart phones they aren't realizing it's the same phone. What this picture is saying so your is a smart phone but mines is a dumb phone?
      Satire is making fun of someone or something to make it better or help them. In "The the impotence of proofreading" by Taylor Mali used satire explain that if we buy a spell checker its still not going to help us put the words in the order we want them in so its still not really helping us spell check. In "Osprey Devours Lion in massive food chain shake- up" this article is satirical because it's weird to see a lion like it would usually be the osprey like that. In the "Advice to the Youth" by Mark Twain he is satirizing the youth because even if he would have given them advice they would have never taken it. In "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, the satire in this short story is even if we made everyone equal by lowering their abilities they still won't be equal. "Reading satirical Articles can get Tortured, sent to Gitmo" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, the writer is satirizing the government, the police, the FBI, and the CIA for being so paranoid they accused an innocent person of being a terrorist. We can see that satire is every where from news, to cartoons, and even in books.