ABSTRACT
The subject of protest must be worthwhile. It should encompass one or more of the central areas of man’s experience. Satire is, however, essentially a social mode; it has nothing in it of the transcendental. It has nothing of ‘the world forgetting, by the world forgot’. Religion in its essence, like death, at least in times before our own, was rarely the subject of satire. Men did not criticize God, whatever they did to His so-called followers. Faced with the serious demands that religion imposes on man, the satirist delights to make much of the discrepancy between profession and practice. Affectation and hypocrisy are ready topics for him at any time; they take on additional point when those who are guilty of such faults are committed by profession to a very different standard of behaviour. With religion, sex is a subject so serious that people need to seek relief in humour about it.
