ABSTRACT
Melville Clark’s list is sufficiently comprehensive – ‘wit, ridicule, irony, sarcasm, cynicism, the sardonic and invective’. All these hurt, because satire aims to hurt, but, as with the bull-fighter, so with the satirist, his competence lies not in his ability to do his job but rather in the skill he deploys in doing it. If we regard the list above as a series of weapons, wit, as it is so often said to be, is the rapier and invective is Churchill’s ‘flail’, or perhaps more accurately the bludgeon. To quote Dryden, ‘a man may be capable, as Jack Ketch’s wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, a bare hanging; but to make a malefactor die sweetly was only belonging to her husband’ (Discourse Concerning Satire).
