ABSTRACT
Although there have been only a few great satirists, there are a great many people with satiric temperaments. Swift, Voltaire, Cervantes, Gogol, Juvenal, Heine appear at rare intervals, but millions of men and women who never create satire on paper or stage are, in attitude and personality, satirists. Many of them in the ordinary activities of their lives see things from the perspective of satiric criticism or comic distortion; lacking the technical skill to make written literature out of their reactions, they express themselves orally instead. Satirists themselves have usually maintained that it is the conventional apologists for the status quo, the majority pretending that things are better than they really are, who are guilty of distortion and should be charged with abnormality. By inclination, by attitude, and by behavior there are far more humorists and satirists than are listed in histories of literature, and most large social groups contain easily recognizable amateur clowns.
