satire
n. A kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies are expounded with imperfect tenderness.
 | | |  | | |  | | |  | | |  |
Cynical Quotations
You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.
— Art Buchwald
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
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 soul-spirited knave, and his ever victim's outcry for codefendants evokes a national assent.
— Ambrose Bierce
| | | | | | | | | | | | |