Writing a Satire Essay: Guide and Examples

Satire has many forms that can be used to write works practically about any topic. Knowing where to start can be tricky if you have never encountered similar tasks at school before. But there’s no need to worry! Our team has developed this helpful guide for such an occasion. We will explain the basics of satirical essays and provide valuable tips on making them.

This article will also provide plenty of topic ideas on popular themes to make your work less stressful. You’ll also get to check out several satire essay examples that can serve as an inspiration for your work. Use our guide to make your paper come out great!

😁 The Basics of Satirical Essays

The American historian Barbara W. Tuchman states, “Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.” This quote perfectly describes this exciting and controversial genre. But what is the definition of satire anyway? It’s the art of making something ridiculous, laughable, or discrediting. Satire is one of the oldest literary genres, dating back to Ancient Greece and the rhetorician Quintallian. It has different types, but their purpose is largely the same.

You can use satire to make fun of political ideologies, excessive militarism, or the pitfalls of modern society.

That’s precisely what many authors like George Orwell, Terry Pratchett, Joseph Heller, and Jaroslaw Hasek did in their works. They give a funhouse mirror look at real or fictional concepts and, sometimes, a mix of both.

Every essay type has an essential role, and this one is no exception. A satire essay serves the same purpose as its larger counterparts. It lets you poke fun or criticize things you find absurd. A paper can ridicule anything from the agony of bureaucratic procedures and nonsensical laws to the media climate and pop culture scene. It allows you to voice your opinion on these matters in a lighthearted and fun way.

🔎 Types of Satire

Essentially, you can use three types of satire in your essays. Check them out before approaching a new piece of writing. This way, you’ll better select the most suitable for your subject and writing style.

📝 Writing a Satire Essay

Writing a satirical essay has much in common with other examples of this genre. You need an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. This section outlines the steps that will help you in this process. Read on to learn how to perfect your satire essay!

• Step 1: Select a topic. Find a subject that’s preferably already ridiculous or ironic. Your goal is to make it look even more exaggerated. Political cartoons are an excellent place to find a suitable theme for your essay.
• Step 2: Make your point through a hyperbole. Keep in mind that a hyperbolizing doesn’t necessarily mean lying. Instead, exaggerate the facts to highlight how absurd they are. For example, you can talk about how Norway’s economy is thriving thanks to the sheer amount of salmon they consume yearly.
• Step 3: Present your ideas through irony. This literary device uses words and phrases to tell the opposite of what they mean. It allows you to show a disconnect between someone’s expectations and what happens in reality.
• Step 4: Make it humorous. Keeping up a light tone can be challenging. But you should still do your best, as humor is a great way to get people to side with you and accept your position on an issue. It can win people over faster than weighted and meticulously explained opinions.

💡 Best Satirical Topics for an Essay

A satirical essay can be about any theme you like, from literary works to global events. To keep you from losing your head in this sea of possibilities, we’ve decided to present some of the funniest and most engaging topics for your writings.

But before we get started, here are some ideas on how you can come up with a cool satirical topic for your paper:

✅ Personal Experiences. Reflect on the moments from your life that struck you as odd or downright hilarious. Maybe it’s when you mistook a raccoon for your neighbor’s cat. Funny experiences often harbor unique insights that, when shared, can resonate with others due to their unexpected humor.

✅ Social Norms and Expectations. Explore instances when societal norms clash with reality. Let’s imagine your coworkers dressed in regular clothes to work while you and your friend dressed in Halloween outfits. By dissecting these contradictions, you can craft a story that entertains and subtly challenges societal norms.

✅ Current Events and Trends. Take a satirical lens to recent happenings, whether it’s an obsession with a new TikTok trend or an outfit from Rihanna or Doja Cat that other influencers are rushing to copy. Amplify the absurdity of these events to highlight their often-overlooked humorous side while satirizing the public’s reactions surrounding them.

✅ Everyday Life Observations. Delve into the nuances of daily life that typically go unnoticed. It could be the funny habits of your soulmate or people’s behavior on public transportation or elevators. By magnifying these quirks, you can reveal the hilarity and peculiarity of the routines we take for granted.

School and Education Satire Topics

1. How to master Google search for your academic pursuits.
2. The art of procrastination: How to avoid studying until the last minute.
3. How to ace an exam without studying.
4. The myth of a perfect student and how it wrecks the lives of collegegoers.
5. A satirical look at the pitfalls of contemporary American education.
6. College application essays: The most needless thing and how to ace it.
7. Why you should spend years earning a degree you’ll never use.
8. Group projects and how to survive them.
9. Funny utopian school: Where homework is banned and recess is eternal.
10. The unfair world of homework assignments.

Technology and Social Media Satire Topics

1. The Me generation: How social media raises an army of narcissists.
2. Informational addiction: Truth or even scarier truth?
3. Why you should post everything online.
4. Artificial Intelligence: Our doom or salvation?
5. The virtues of being a social media star.
6. Social media and its effect on your personal life.
7. How to wreck your life with Facebook.
8. TikTok and the modern media contagion.
9. Top 10 apps that ruin your life.
10. How to live one day without technology and stay sane.

Historical Satire Topics

1. A satirical look at the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
2. The Third Reich’s WWII propaganda: A study in ridiculousness.
3. Fighting for peace: A short look at the arms race.
4. “Let them eat cake” and other phrases that changed history.
5. Historical influence of satire on the American Dream perception.
6. How the Cold War shaped American satire of the late 20th century.
7. Medieval gun control: Unsheathing the hilarity of sword registry laws.
8. The rise of authoritarianism and political satire.
9. 1812 and the folly of Napoleon.
10. Slavery in the land of the free.

Politics and Government Satire Topics

1. The wonderful world of the two-party system.
2. Political promises: A study in honesty and integrity.
3. A satirical look at the theatrics of political ads.
4. The department of bureaucratic ballet: A satirical look at the government’s efficiency.
5. How the US bureaucracy became the monster everybody loves to hate.
6. A crash course in gaining political power without the fuss of democracy.
7. Political dodgeball: Avoiding questions made easy.
8. Ingenious solutions: How politicians promise to solve everything with catchy slogans.
9. How to survive your next Thanksgiving dinner.
10. How political division brings a country together.

Social Issues Satire Topics

1. Ten ways to avoid pressing social issues and feel good about yourself.
2. Why pulling yourself by the bootstraps no longer works.
3. Eating your way to a healthier life.
4. The luxury guide to poverty: How to embrace destitution with style.
5. How to become an effective cyberbully.
6. The selfie pandemic: A guide to self-obsession.
7. Unemployment reality shows: Who wants to be a broke millionaire?
8. Remaining private in a globally connected world.
9. How to become a cut-throat millionaire.
10. The great overpopulation and its humorous consequences.

Literature Satire Topics

1. How to bore your audience while looking important.
2. Outdated language: Making dictionaries cool again.
3. Crafting complex plots with just simple literary techniques.
4. A masterclass in confusing storytelling.
5. How to write a novel that people won’t buy.
6. The art of long-winded narrative in Stephen King novels.
7. Endings that made you throw books out the window.
8. Breaking the fourth wall and hilarious in-text solutions.
9. How to talk about books without reading them.
10. A guide to nonsensical plot twists.

🤩 Fantastic Satire Essay Examples

As we all know, theory is good but practice makes perfect. This is why we want to offer you these satire essay examples. Carefully reading through them will help you understand the elements they use and what makes them work. We suggest that you also try your hand at writing essays on these topics – compare them to our samples and see where you can improve!

1. Failed Leadership Can Only Be Whipped by Satire
   George Orwell used Animal Farm to critique totalitarian regimes that oppress the masses. The work pokes fun at many authoritarian movements, from fascism to communism, with a strong and charismatic leader usurping the top position and gaining full power. But most prominently it’s an attack on the October Revolution and the rise of Joseph Stalin as the leader.
   
   On a broader scale, Animal Farm serves as a satire of communism that ultimately didn’t meet the high expectations that the USSR’s citizens anticipated. Each character symbolizes a class or type of individual with strong and weak character traits. The novel’s antagonist, Master Jones, represents the bourgeoisie that exploits workers to death. The animals, a.k.a the proletariat, revolt and overthrow his iron rule.
   
   While things seem better for a while, thanks to the efforts and philosophy of a pig called Old Major, everything quickly turns for the worse. That soon results in many tragic events and the farm falling into the hands of another pig named Napoleon. He usurps the prime position much like Joseph Stalin did from Leo Trotsky. Any mentions of his political rival are met with brutal retaliation.
   
   Pretty soon, nobody remembers the original ideas that spearheaded the revolution.
   
   Ultimately, the pigs take over the farm and start to resemble humans. It is a masterful allegory of the oppressed becoming the oppressors. Animals become rulers of the farm, but most live in the same squalor they started with. Of course, nobody who is “more equal than others” ever complains.
   
2. Political Satire and Stephen Colbert
   Political satire has been around almost since the dawn of American independence. Over the past couple of decades, it has become a favorite subject of many shows, including the subject of this essay — Stephen Colbert. His The Colbert Report is a prime example of how to criticize the political climate with the right amount of humor and heart.
   
   Colbert’s approach to satire pulls no punches as he famously mocked former President George Bush Jr. during a White House Correspondent Dinner. He criticized Bush’s actions, lifestyle, beliefs, and foreign policy decisions. He especially criticized the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties.
   
   Stephen Colbert used an ironic approach to discuss such issues to draw attention to them. While this was done lightheartedly, many people sided with Colbert. That allowed him to influence public opinion without being directly involved in politics. And Colbert always encouraged his viewers to do the right thing.
   
   Even though The Colbert Report ended in 2014, the man himself remains popular with American audiences. His current Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert enjoys millions of subscribers on YouTube and hundreds of millions of views. His previous program is still popular, with new people discovering it daily.

Thank you for reading our article. Hopefully, it helped you create a perfect satire essay. And if you need to find more ideas for your work, try out our essay topic generator!

❓ Satirical Essay FAQ

📎 References

1. What is Satire? || Definition & Examples. – Evan Gottlieb, Oregon State University
2. 7 Satire Techniques With Tips. – Indeed
3. The Process for Setting up a Satire Essay. – Loudoun County Public Schools
4. What Is Satire? How to Use Satire in Literature, Pop Culture, and Politics—Plus Tips on Using Satire in Writing. – MasterClass
5. Satirical Writing. – Del Donno, Lone Star College-University Park
6. How to Write Satire. – Alex Baia
7. 4 Ways to Come Up With a Great Essay Idea. – Oxford Royale Academy
8. How to Use Satire, Sarcasm, and the Power of Contrast to Expand Your Writing Repertoire. – Dawn Bevier, Medium
9. Writing Satire Is Harder Than You Think. – Jeff Goins, Writer
10. Choosing a Topic. – The On-Campus Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University