What it means, how it works, and ten examples that changed how people saw their target
Satirical commentary is criticism delivered as a joke: writing, drawing, performance or broadcast that uses humour, irony and exaggeration to pass judgment on people in power, public institutions or the way a society behaves. It is comedy with a point of view about something real. A satirical commentator is not trying only to make you laugh. They want you to laugh and then see the subject differently, and the best of them manage it in a single image or line. This page defines the term in a paragraph and then spends the rest of its length on worked examples, because the idea is easier to recognise than to describe.
What satirical commentary is, and what it is not
Three ingredients have to be present.
- A real target. A government, a law, a newspaper, a public figure, a national habit.
- A judgment. The piece has an opinion about the target, usually that it is foolish, dishonest or cruel.
- Indirection. The judgment is not stated. It is shown through exaggeration, parody, irony or a straight face.
Remove the first and you have whimsy. Remove the second and you have a spoof with nothing to say. Remove the third and you have an opinion column.
The term overlaps with social commentary, which is the wider category: any work that comments on society, funny or not. A documentary about housing is social commentary. A sketch in which a minister announces that the homeless will be reclassified as outdoor enthusiasts is satirical commentary. We cover the broader idea in what is social commentary.
Ten examples of satirical commentary that worked
Each example below is set out the same way: what it was aimed at, how it did it, and why it landed.
1. A Modest Proposal (1729)
Target: the treatment of the Irish poor, and the confident economic schemes of the day that treated people as stock.
Method: Jonathan Swift wrote a calm, numerate pamphlet recommending that poor families sell their infants to the rich as food. The narrator is a reasonable man with a spreadsheet. He never raises his voice.
Why it worked: the tone. By borrowing the exact voice of the policy pamphlets he was attacking, Swift made readers hear what that voice had been saying all along. Almost every satirical news story published since uses the same trick.
2. The Plumb-pudding in Danger (1805)
Target: the carve-up of the world by Britain and France during the Napoleonic wars.
Method: James Gillray's print shows the Prime Minister, William Pitt, and Napoleon at a dinner table, slicing a globe-shaped pudding. Pitt takes the ocean. Napoleon takes Europe.
Why it worked: it reduced a war to greed at a table, and it needed no caption. The cartoonist Martin Rowson has called it probably the most famous political cartoon of all time, and it has been redrawn with new faces for two centuries.
3. Animal Farm (1945)
Target: the Russian Revolution and what Stalin made of it.
Method: George Orwell retold the story as a fable about farm animals who overthrow the farmer and are then ruled by the pigs. The single most quoted line: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
Why it worked: a children's-story form made the argument impossible to wave away as theory. It was also inconvenient. Several publishers turned the book down for fear of offending a wartime ally, which is a fair measure of how accurate it was.
4. Yes Minister (1980 to 1988)
Target: the British civil service and the ministers who believe they are in charge of it.
Method: a sitcom in which a well-meaning minister is managed, flattered and obstructed by his permanent secretary. The writers, Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, drew on sources inside government, and some plots were lightly disguised real events.
Why it worked: it was specific. Viewers learned how a decision is delayed, how a report is buried and what "courageous" means when a civil servant says it. The Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, called it her favourite programme. More in our guide to Yes Minister.
5. Spitting Image (1984 to 1996)
Target: everyone in public life, weekly.
Method: grotesque latex puppets. The show's best-known sketch has Thatcher at a restaurant with her Cabinet. She orders steak. "And what about the vegetables?" asks the waitress. "Oh, they'll have the same as me."
Why it worked: a caricature fixes one trait and makes it permanent. At its peak the programme drew 15 million viewers, and for many of them the puppet replaced the politician. See our page on Spitting Image.
6. The tub of lard (1993)
Target: a politician who agreed to appear on a programme and pulled out at the last minute, for the third time.
Method: when Roy Hattersley failed to turn up for Have I Got News for You, the producers put a tub of lard in his chair and credited it as "The Rt. Hon Tub of Lard MP". The host explained that the two had the same qualities and were likely to give similar performances.
Why it worked: it made a comment without an argument. The object sat there for half an hour and the audience drew the conclusion themselves. It is still one of the best-known moments in the history of the show.
7. Brass Eye (1997 and 2001)
Target: television news, moral panics and public figures who will say anything on camera.
Method: Chris Morris built a parody current affairs show and persuaded real celebrities and politicians to record solemn warnings about invented dangers, including a made-up drug called "Cake". A 2001 special on media hysteria drew around 3,000 complaints, then a record.
Why it worked: the victims supplied the evidence. Nobody had to be told that broadcasters and their guests were careless with the truth, because viewers watched it happen. Our page on Brass Eye has more.
8. "Omnishambles" (2009 to 2012)
Target: government by panic and press release.
Method: the word was coined for The Thick of It, a comedy about spin doctors and frightened ministers, in an episode broadcast in 2009. It described a situation that is a disaster from every possible angle.
Why it worked: it crossed over. On 18 April 2012 the Leader of the Opposition used it in the Commons to describe the Budget, and Oxford Dictionaries made it Word of the Year. When politicians start describing real events in language invented to mock them, the satire has become the commentary of record. See The Thick of It.
9. "No Way to Prevent This" (2014 onwards)
Target: the American response to mass shootings.
Method: in May 2014 The Onion published a short article headed "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens". After the next shooting it published the same article again, changing only the place and the number of dead. By the end of 2025 it had run 39 times.
Why it worked: the repetition is the comment. No new joke is written because nothing new has happened. It is the clearest modern case of satirical commentary doing something a news report cannot. More on the paper in our guide to The Onion.
10. The parliamentary sketch
Target: whatever happened in the House of Commons that day.
Method: a British newspaper tradition in which a writer attends Parliament and reports it as theatre: who squirmed, who bluffed, who read the wrong page. John Crace has written the sketch for The Guardian since 2014, and his portrait of one Prime Minister as a malfunctioning robot became a book title.
Why it worked: the sketch is allowed to say what the news pages cannot, namely that a speech was dull or a minister was plainly lying. It is satirical commentary as a daily job. We look at the wider craft in newspaper commentary and UK opinion pieces.
What the examples have in common
They borrow a trusted form
A policy pamphlet, a fable, a news bulletin, a restaurant scene. The audience knows how the form is supposed to behave, so every departure from it registers.
They keep a straight face
None of the ten winks at the audience. Swift's narrator is sincere. The newsreader in Brass Eye is grave. Deadpan is what turns exaggeration into argument.
They are precise about the target
Vague mockery of "politicians" changes nothing. Each of these names a specific behaviour: carving up territory, obstructing a minister, cancelling an appearance, repeating an excuse.
Good satirical commentary leaves the conclusion to the audience
The tub of lard did not come with an essay. The moment a satirist explains the point, the piece becomes a lecture. The full toolkit is in our guide to satire techniques.
How to write satirical commentary
- Start with the judgment. Write down, in one plain sentence, what you think is wrong. If you cannot, you are not ready.
- Choose a form the target uses. Their press release, their apology, their annual report.
- Change one thing. Keep everything else as it would really be. The single change is the joke and the argument.
- Use real detail. Correct job titles, plausible figures, the right jargon. Accuracy is what makes exaggeration sting.
- Delete the explanation. If the last paragraph tells the reader what it all meant, cut it.
- Check who gets hurt. Satire aims at people with power. If the piece is funny only at the expense of people without any, it is something else.
For more models to learn from, see our collection of satire examples.
Common questions
What is the difference between satire and satirical commentary?
Satire is the mode. Satirical commentary is satire applied to current events or public life with the aim of passing judgment on them. All satirical commentary is satire. A satirical novel about an invented kingdom is satire but only loosely commentary.
Is satirical commentary the same as an opinion piece?
No. An opinion piece states its view directly. Satirical commentary shows it by indirection and lets the reader arrive at it.
Can satirical commentary change anything?
Rarely a law, often a reputation. Its usual effect is to fix an image in the public mind that the target cannot shake off.
Does satirical commentary have to be funny?
It has to use the methods of comedy. Some of the strongest examples, including the Onion headline above, produce something closer to a wince than a laugh.
In one sentence
Satirical commentary is a verdict disguised as a joke, and the ten examples here lasted because the verdict was right. Swift's pamphlet is nearly three hundred years old and still describes how officials talk about the poor. The method has not changed: take the form your target trusts, keep a straight face, alter one thing, and say nothing more. https://prat.uk/what-satirical-commentary-is-and-what-it-is-not/
Satirical commentary is criticism delivered as a joke: writing, drawing, performance or broadcast that uses humour, irony and exaggeration to pass judgment on people in power, public institutions or the way a society behaves. It is comedy with a point of view about something real. A satirical commentator is not trying only to make you laugh. They want you to laugh and then see the subject differently, and the best of them manage it in a single image or line. This page defines the term in a paragraph and then spends the rest of its length on worked examples, because the idea is easier to recognise than to describe.
What satirical commentary is, and what it is not
Three ingredients have to be present.
- A real target. A government, a law, a newspaper, a public figure, a national habit.
- A judgment. The piece has an opinion about the target, usually that it is foolish, dishonest or cruel.
- Indirection. The judgment is not stated. It is shown through exaggeration, parody, irony or a straight face.
Remove the first and you have whimsy. Remove the second and you have a spoof with nothing to say. Remove the third and you have an opinion column.
The term overlaps with social commentary, which is the wider category: any work that comments on society, funny or not. A documentary about housing is social commentary. A sketch in which a minister announces that the homeless will be reclassified as outdoor enthusiasts is satirical commentary. We cover the broader idea in what is social commentary.
Ten examples of satirical commentary that worked
Each example below is set out the same way: what it was aimed at, how it did it, and why it landed.
1. A Modest Proposal (1729)
Target: the treatment of the Irish poor, and the confident economic schemes of the day that treated people as stock.
Method: Jonathan Swift wrote a calm, numerate pamphlet recommending that poor families sell their infants to the rich as food. The narrator is a reasonable man with a spreadsheet. He never raises his voice.
Why it worked: the tone. By borrowing the exact voice of the policy pamphlets he was attacking, Swift made readers hear what that voice had been saying all along. Almost every satirical news story published since uses the same trick.
2. The Plumb-pudding in Danger (1805)
Target: the carve-up of the world by Britain and France during the Napoleonic wars.
Method: James Gillray's print shows the Prime Minister, William Pitt, and Napoleon at a dinner table, slicing a globe-shaped pudding. Pitt takes the ocean. Napoleon takes Europe.
Why it worked: it reduced a war to greed at a table, and it needed no caption. The cartoonist Martin Rowson has called it probably the most famous political cartoon of all time, and it has been redrawn with new faces for two centuries.
3. Animal Farm (1945)
Target: the Russian Revolution and what Stalin made of it.
Method: George Orwell retold the story as a fable about farm animals who overthrow the farmer and are then ruled by the pigs. The single most quoted line: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
Why it worked: a children's-story form made the argument impossible to wave away as theory. It was also inconvenient. Several publishers turned the book down for fear of offending a wartime ally, which is a fair measure of how accurate it was.
4. Yes Minister (1980 to 1988)
Target: the British civil service and the ministers who believe they are in charge of it.
Method: a sitcom in which a well-meaning minister is managed, flattered and obstructed by his permanent secretary. The writers, Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, drew on sources inside government, and some plots were lightly disguised real events.
Why it worked: it was specific. Viewers learned how a decision is delayed, how a report is buried and what "courageous" means when a civil servant says it. The Prime Minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, called it her favourite programme. More in our guide to Yes Minister.
5. Spitting Image (1984 to 1996)
Target: everyone in public life, weekly.
Method: grotesque latex puppets. The show's best-known sketch has Thatcher at a restaurant with her Cabinet. She orders steak. "And what about the vegetables?" asks the waitress. "Oh, they'll have the same as me."
Why it worked: a caricature fixes one trait and makes it permanent. At its peak the programme drew 15 million viewers, and for many of them the puppet replaced the politician. See our page on Spitting Image.
6. The tub of lard (1993)
Target: a politician who agreed to appear on a programme and pulled out at the last minute, for the third time.
Method: when Roy Hattersley failed to turn up for Have I Got News for You, the producers put a tub of lard in his chair and credited it as "The Rt. Hon Tub of Lard MP". The host explained that the two had the same qualities and were likely to give similar performances.
Why it worked: it made a comment without an argument. The object sat there for half an hour and the audience drew the conclusion themselves. It is still one of the best-known moments in the history of the show.
7. Brass Eye (1997 and 2001)
Target: television news, moral panics and public figures who will say anything on camera.
Method: Chris Morris built a parody current affairs show and persuaded real celebrities and politicians to record solemn warnings about invented dangers, including a made-up drug called "Cake". A 2001 special on media hysteria drew around 3,000 complaints, then a record.
Why it worked: the victims supplied the evidence. Nobody had to be told that broadcasters and their guests were careless with the truth, because viewers watched it happen. Our page on Brass Eye has more.
8. "Omnishambles" (2009 to 2012)
Target: government by panic and press release.
Method: the word was coined for The Thick of It, a comedy about spin doctors and frightened ministers, in an episode broadcast in 2009. It described a situation that is a disaster from every possible angle.
Why it worked: it crossed over. On 18 April 2012 the Leader of the Opposition used it in the Commons to describe the Budget, and Oxford Dictionaries made it Word of the Year. When politicians start describing real events in language invented to mock them, the satire has become the commentary of record. See The Thick of It.
9. "No Way to Prevent This" (2014 onwards)
Target: the American response to mass shootings.
Method: in May 2014 The Onion published a short article headed "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens". After the next shooting it published the same article again, changing only the place and the number of dead. By the end of 2025 it had run 39 times.
Why it worked: the repetition is the comment. No new joke is written because nothing new has happened. It is the clearest modern case of satirical commentary doing something a news report cannot. More on the paper in our guide to The Onion.
10. The parliamentary sketch
Target: whatever happened in the House of Commons that day.
Method: a British newspaper tradition in which a writer attends Parliament and reports it as theatre: who squirmed, who bluffed, who read the wrong page. John Crace has written the sketch for The Guardian since 2014, and his portrait of one Prime Minister as a malfunctioning robot became a book title.
Why it worked: the sketch is allowed to say what the news pages cannot, namely that a speech was dull or a minister was plainly lying. It is satirical commentary as a daily job. We look at the wider craft in newspaper commentary and UK opinion pieces.
What the examples have in common
They borrow a trusted form
A policy pamphlet, a fable, a news bulletin, a restaurant scene. The audience knows how the form is supposed to behave, so every departure from it registers.
They keep a straight face
None of the ten winks at the audience. Swift's narrator is sincere. The newsreader in Brass Eye is grave. Deadpan is what turns exaggeration into argument.
They are precise about the target
Vague mockery of "politicians" changes nothing. Each of these names a specific behaviour: carving up territory, obstructing a minister, cancelling an appearance, repeating an excuse.
Good satirical commentary leaves the conclusion to the audience
The tub of lard did not come with an essay. The moment a satirist explains the point, the piece becomes a lecture. The full toolkit is in our guide to satire techniques.
How to write satirical commentary
- Start with the judgment. Write down, in one plain sentence, what you think is wrong. If you cannot, you are not ready.
- Choose a form the target uses. Their press release, their apology, their annual report.
- Change one thing. Keep everything else as it would really be. The single change is the joke and the argument.
- Use real detail. Correct job titles, plausible figures, the right jargon. Accuracy is what makes exaggeration sting.
- Delete the explanation. If the last paragraph tells the reader what it all meant, cut it.
- Check who gets hurt. Satire aims at people with power. If the piece is funny only at the expense of people without any, it is something else.
For more models to learn from, see our collection of satire examples.
Common questions
What is the difference between satire and satirical commentary?
Satire is the mode. Satirical commentary is satire applied to current events or public life with the aim of passing judgment on them. All satirical commentary is satire. A satirical novel about an invented kingdom is satire but only loosely commentary.
Is satirical commentary the same as an opinion piece?
No. An opinion piece states its view directly. Satirical commentary shows it by indirection and lets the reader arrive at it.
Can satirical commentary change anything?
Rarely a law, often a reputation. Its usual effect is to fix an image in the public mind that the target cannot shake off.
Does satirical commentary have to be funny?
It has to use the methods of comedy. Some of the strongest examples, including the Onion headline above, produce something closer to a wince than a laugh.
In one sentence
Satirical commentary is a verdict disguised as a joke, and the ten examples here lasted because the verdict was right. Swift's pamphlet is nearly three hundred years old and still describes how officials talk about the poor. The method has not changed: take the form your target trusts, keep a straight face, alter one thing, and say nothing more. https://prat.uk/what-satirical-commentary-is-and-what-it-is-not/
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