The Onion co-founder recommends 5 satires that roasted the world (for the better)

In 1599, John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Bancroft, the Bishop of London, issued an edict that became the “most sweeping and stringent” instance of censorship in the early modern period. Now known as the “Bishops’ Ban,” it came with a list of books that should “be taken wheresoever they maye be found” and “bee presentlye brought to the Bishop of London to be brunte.”

The list included some unlicensed histories and plays, but satire dominated the auto-da-fé — notably works by Joseph Hall, John Marston, and Thomas Middleton. This made the true target of the Bishops’ ire clear. Less discernible is why the genre provoked such an aggressive response, as Whitgift and Bancroft provided no reason for the censorship.

Scholars have their theories: Maybe the Bishops feared the satirists of their day were being too open in criticizing the Elizabethan state. Maybe their attacks on powerful, influential people didn’t sit right with the Bishops. Maybe the works propagated cultural ideologies that the Bishops felt threatened social order. Possibly they were too raunchy for the Bishops’ delicate sensibilities.

Jonathan Swift, the Irish writer and essayist, once described satire as a “sort of glass [mirror] wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”

But sometimes, as was likely with our censorious Bishops, we do see faces we recognize in satire’s reflection. Everyone has vices, follies, and hypocrisies that may rightly be held up for ridicule. The same is true for the beliefs we hold, the people we follow, and the ideals we cherish. Nonetheless, we can all learn from the genre.

I recently spoke with Scott Dikkers, co-founder and former editor-in-chief of The Onion and the author of the How to Write Funny series. He told me that satire’s timeless lesson is to show “us how the world could be better and [provide] a record of how we didn’t follow that advice.” We all need to read and share books, he adds, “because it’s really our only hope.”

Inspired by the Bishops, but in a contrary spirit, I invited Dikkers to create his own list of satires. These books offer readers not only a chance to laugh at the absurdity found in the world but also help us consider how to amend it. For that reason, we proclaim these should “be taken wheresoever they maye be found and bee presentlye brought to thou bóchord, and reade.”

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1885)

During the U.S. Reconstruction, many Southern Americans reimagined the antebellum era through whitewashed narratives longing for the glory days. Enter Twain. To excoriate this down-home nostalgia bait, Twain chose to set Huckleberry Finn in the 1840s — 20 years before the Civil War began — to shine a light on the hypocrisy of a “sivilized” society that treated people so cruelly.

Twain’s criticism is felt strongest in the relationship between Huck Finn and Jim, a Black man fleeing his enslavement to find freedom in Ohio. True to Huck’s upbringing, the boy initially believes that Blacks are inherently inferior to Whites. Huck takes advantage of Jim’s lack of education and worries that helping Jim makes him no better than a “low down Abolitionist.” As they travel together, though, Huck comes to see Jim as the moral and honorable man he is.

“Isn’t it bizarre how now we have all these new classes of secondary human beings?” Dikkers says. “Instead of getting rid of that inherent [hate and] racism, we’ve transferred it.”

The novel’s edge is sharpest when critiquing America’s race relations, but Twain skewers plenty of other aspects of society — including its greed, as embodied in the characters of King and the Duke, and the South’s “honor culture,” as mocked in the bloody feud between the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons.

True to the satirical tradition, Huckleberry Finn often finds itself on lists of banned books. A mere month after its publication, the Concord library banned it for being “trash and suitable only for the slums.” Today, the American Library Association (ALA) has called it one of the “most-challened [books] of all time,” with the novel appearing on the association’s list of challenged books every decade since the 1990s (when it first began curating them).

“It’s a genius book and so beautifully written in the voice of Huck Finn himself,” Dikkers says. “We could all learn from this book, but, of course, it’s the one we ban.”

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

At the beginning of the 20th century, utopian idealism was all the rage. H.G. Wells’s Men Like Gods (1922), for instance, is set in an anarchic world where education, scientific discovery, and groovy vibes have replaced government. But between World War I and its bloodier sequel, such facile ideals lost their sheen. In fact, Huxley’s Brave New World originally started as a parody of Wells’s novel before evolving into something much more forward-looking.

In the year of our Ford 632, the World State has engineered society into a strict caste system enforced through a mix of biological conditioning and educational indoctrination. The lowest caste, the Epsilons, are mass-produced in artificial wombs where they undergo oxygen deprivation to limit their intelligence. Meanwhile, the Betas are raised on bromides that teach them to be thankful for the super-smart Alphas’ care. Citizens are further kept content, and in check, thanks to a mind-numbing supply of sex, entertainment, and soma, a drug so euphoric that the police use it to suppress riots. Basically, Rome’s “bread and circuses” strategy updated for the technocratic future.

“It’s a densely satirical book,” Dikkers tells me. “Every sentence is like a new, mind-blowing satirical point.”

Another target of Huxley’s satire is Fordism. During the early 20th century, Fordism represented more than building cars on assembly lines. It was the lens through which capitalists viewed how to manage society and life. Workers should dedicate themselves to mass production and consumption. Businesses should focus their efforts on maximizing profits. And more is always better.

Huxley’s anti-Fordist sentiment is represented by John, a citizen born in the “Savage Reservation” of former New Mexico. Initially infatuated with this “brave new world,” John’s humanist values soon clash with the technocratic state. Where the state promotes comfort and consumption, John searches for purpose and freedom. In lieu of mindless orgies, he wants love and companionship. Although it doesn’t end well for John, his story asks the reader to consider what they pursue in life and why.

“It was all in Brave New World. It’s really impressive that he could see so much ahead of time,” Dikkers says. “We should all read it once in a while to reset and think, ‘What do I want my life to be about?’”

Like Huckleberry Finn, the ink had barely dried before Brave New World was banned in Ireland on accusations of being anti-religious and anti-family. Huxley also claims the hat trick of appearing on the ALA’s 100 most challenged books every decade since its inception.

The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberley (1955)

Perhaps the outright funniest book on Dikkers’s list, The Mouse That Roared answers the question: What would you get if Dr. Strangelove was written and produced in partnership with the Marx Brothers?

“Wibberley is a master of irony,” Dikkers says.

The story centers on the small European Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a country that never industrialized because its economy runs entirely on the production of Pinot Grand Fenwick wine. But when a Napa Valley knock-off threatens to disrupt Fenwick’s wine trade, the prime minister decides the only course of action is to declare war on the United States — while secretly hoping the superpower will pour a fortune’s worth of foreign aid into his country after crushing its still bow-and-arrow-based army.

Things don’t go according to plan. U.S. officials misplace the declaration of war and are therefore oblivious to the invasion. The ignored Fenwick army attacks and unintentionally wanders into a top-secret government lab where they capture Dr. Kokintz and his new “Quadium Bomb,” a doomsday device several times more powerful than any nuclear weapon.

From there, Wibberley’s story looks at what happens when geopolitical roles reverse. As the title suggests, the three-by-five square-mile duchy is suddenly perceived as a threat to the hegemonic ambitions of the U.S. and Soviet Union. Their bluster of world leadership and grand empires gives way to a whimpering, humiliating deference. But Fenwick doesn’t become a new superpower. Led by its matriarch, the Duchess Gloriana, it pushes for world peace and nuclear non-proliferation. The country even forms a coalition of small nations called the “Tiny Twenty” to promote and sustain that peace — an idea that’s definitely having a moment of late.

“The book puts the idea of political power, patriotism, and nation-states in the perfect light,” Dikkers says, “and that is that they are absurd, flawed, silly.”

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1969)

Anti-war novels tend to be somber reads. The classics that define the genre, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1939), grip you by the throat with their depictions of violence and innocence lost. War is insanity and futility, making it a perfect subject for satire. And no better book captures that than Vonnegut’s masterpiece.

“I think Slaughterhouse-Five should be on every list of the great works of satire for its absolute excoriation of war and just how bizarre and wrong a thing it is,” Dikkers says.

The novel tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran who may be hopping across time after being abducted into an extraterrestrial zoo or experiencing a psychological episode as a result of his PTSD. Through his unreliable narration, the story jumps around to various points in Billy’s life: one moment he’s a college student, the next he’s at the Battle of the Bulge, the next he’s being abducted by the Tralfamadorians and being taught to see the space-time continuum the way we view a valley from the mountaintop. He has even experienced his own death.

But the fulcrum of Billy’s life is the bombing of Dresden. Through his time-hopping, readers witness that the traumatic experience wasn’t confined to a single chapter; its influence infected Billy’s entire story. Readers also see how the violence of war continues through its social and political fallout, long after victory has been officially declared.

In true Vonnegut fashion, the humor is wry and the wit acidic. But he doesn’t shy away from the horrors of war either, and some of the passages wouldn’t feel out of place in Remarque or Trumbo’s more somber commentaries:

“There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design.”

While discussing Vonnegut, Dikkers said he also had to give a shout-out to the author’s second novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959). This bonkers tale that blends wealthy space travelers, an interplanetary war, alien messages, and a quantum-phenomenal dog into a story that explores free will.

“[It’s] my favorite in terms of an entertaining read,” Dikkers tells me. “He captured something about fame and celebrity and pop culture that I’ve never seen anyone capture. It’s not political; it’s more social satire, but I just love it.”

He recommends it as a bonus sixth option for readers who enjoy some paint-it-black humor with their satire.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)

No one reading this will be a time-traveling veteran, a Shakespeare enthusiast in a drugged-out future, or a duchess with her own doomsday device (I assume). But satire doesn’t have to be so panoramic. Sometimes, it can point to the ridiculousness of everyday living. This is the case of A Confederacy of Dunces, a simple story about a man who has to go to work. (Kind of.)

The man is Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, slovenly, overeducated thirty-something with an aversion to all things modern. After a run-in with a police officer, Ignatius and his mother hide out in a strip club waiting for the heat to die down. On the way home, his now-drunk mother crashes her car and forces Ignatius to get a job to help her pay for the expenses. His inability to hold down even simple jobs led to picaresque misadventures that he tries to spin to impress his frienemy, Myrna Minkoff.

Ignatius is no hero. In many ways, he’s a loathsome character — the kind of person you avoid spending the evening with because you know he’ll tell the same egotistical, self-serving stories before the drinks are even ordered. He’s more a cautionary tale of what happens when we let our obsessions, especially our self-obsession, control us.

For instance, while Ignatius has a master’s degree and thinks himself a modern philosopher, he’s a poor reader. Like a twisted Don Quixote, his reading has filled his head with a “mass of fantastic invention” that he doesn’t put to use beyond self-aggrandizement. The lessons he takes from the classics are figuratively, sometimes literally, masturbatory and help no character in the book, including himself, improve their lives.

That said, there’s something sympathetic in Ignatius. For all his many faults, he is clearly a depressed person who feels trapped in a world he can’t handle and that doesn’t care about him. The same is true for the people he encounters on his misadventures, many of whom wear disguises throughout the novel to either hide or transform themselves.

“Not all books have to be earth-shaking, like they could change-the-world type books. This is certainly not a book that [will do that], but there’s something magical about it. It defies everything,” Dikkers says.

Dikkers finds the story behind the Confederacy equally fate-defying. After Toole’s suicide, his mother set about getting the novel published. Despite countless rejections, she finally succeeded in 1980, eleven years after her son’s death. Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction posthumously in 1981.

Setting the world on fire

You may have noticed that while none of Dikkers’s selections overlap with the Bishop’s — Marston’s Sourge of Villanie (1599) isn’t the easiest read these days — they are nonetheless older books. So, I had to ask: Why select books satirizing the world of yesterday if the genre’s role is to poke fun at the problems we face today?

“They satirize the human experience, which is universal. It’s not going to change in a hundred years,” Dikkers answers. “[These books] remain incredibly relevant now, and it can be comforting to read books from the past and realize we’re not alone. People in other periods of history have gone through what we’re going through right now. So far, I don’t think we’ve bested these classics.”

It’s also nice to realize that while we haven’t solved these problems, and occasionally even regress, we have made progress. It gives hope that we can learn the lessons the genre has to offer and enjoy a laugh at the absurdity of it all while we’re at it.

“Any thinking person, any feeling person can look at this world and say, ‘Oh my god, what a horror,’” Dikkers says. “The first step toward a satirical message is: Here’s the horrible world that we live in. Here’s how stupid people are. Why aren’t we doing better? What could we do better?”

This article is featured on Big Think.