The best satires for crazy times

Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the best satire ever written about the cruel hypocrisy of American racism.

A white boy, Huck, narrates his voyage on a raft down the Mississippi River with his friend Jim, an escaped slave. Twain’s satire exposes the absurdities of slave society – and through Huck’s character development the novel shows how common sense and compassion can liberate us from the lies society tells.

Huck, at first tormented by what he perceives as his own moral failing (because his love and respect for Jim violate antebellum norms), learns to think for himself and to see the corruption of a racist society. As he assists Jim in his quest for freedom, Huck also frees himself.

Oh, and Huckleberry Finn is very, very funny. Mark Twain’s wit slices through racist idiocy like a knife, and keeps you laughing all the way down the great Mississippi.

I loved Slaughterhouse-Five when I read it as a teenager, and I still adore this great anti-war novel.

Like Twain, Vonnegut uses satire to weaken the hold of false moralities. His targets are war, trauma, cruelty, and death. Not surprisingly, given these concerns, the humor is dark, although it is lightened by the author’s wisdom and compassion.

Vonnegut uses techniques like metafiction and non-linear time to satirize conventional notions about everything from free will and predestination to the notion that there are good wars. It is one of the best and most provocative satires ever written, and I urge anyone who has not read it to run, not walk, to the nearest bookseller. 

Candide is wonderful for many reasons, but above all because it is an equal opportunity parody.

Voltaire spares no one as he spoofs the usual suspects, such as religion, colonialism, and the nobility, but also the Enlightenment’s excessive optimism, philosophical speculation, and rationalism. Voltaire’s greatest setups are favored upon young Candide’s mentor, Dr. Pangloss who, in the face of every monstrous, absurd tragedy that befalls Candide, insists that all is well in this “best of all possible worlds.”

I also love that this crazy, tragic farce ends with a cautiously optimistic invitation to “cultivate our garden,” – to leave philosophical speculation to the philosophers, and instead to focus on concrete efforts to make the world a better place

If you don’t find Make Russia Great Again hilarious, you have no sense of humor.

Here’s my executive summary: Former Trump Chief of Staff, a naïf named Herb Nutterman – think Chauncey Gardner without the acumen – narrates the book from prison, where his service to the very stable genius has landed him. The leader of the free world saw Nutterman as eminently qualified to run the White House because he was his “favorite Jew,” and had loyally served him for 27 years as a resort manager.

Got the gist? OK, that’s all the executive summary you need for now. Just read the book. It’s outrageously funny. 

As a recovering college professor myself, I treasure this hilarious spoof of academia. Schumacher’s witty pasquinade on the professoriate will delight all readers, but it will be especially delicious for those of us who know from experience just how nasty politics becomes when the stakes are so low.

The novel consists of a series of academic letters of recommendations written by a frustrated, caustic, and yet somehow endearing English professor whose mordant sense of humor infuses every letter with irony and irreverence. Each letter is what many professors might have wanted to write (I know I did!) but didn’t because we preferred not to test the job security assurances of the tenure system.