Satire vs. parody — the difference

A term you'll meet in comic and critical modes.

Both satire and parody use humor to criticize, but they aim at different targets. Confusing the two — especially in essay writing — flattens analysis. The distinction is worth getting right.

Satire: an attack on vice or folly

Satire is a mode of writing that uses humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to criticize human vice, folly, or social institutions. Its goal is corrective — to expose the target as foolish, hypocritical, or dangerous, and thereby to shame it (or its audience) into change, or at least into recognition. Satire is fundamentally about something in the world: politics, religion, social class, human nature.

Examples:

Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (1729) — a satire on English indifference to Irish poverty, written in the deadpan voice of a rational policy-maker recommending that the Irish eat their babies. The target is real and political; the technique is irony and shock.
Voltaire's Candide — satire on Leibnizian optimism and on Enlightenment-era European complacency.
Orwell's Animal Farm — satire on the Soviet revolution and Stalinism.
The Onion, The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live's political sketches — modern satire on contemporary politics and media.

Parody: imitation of a specific style

Parody is a comic imitation of a specific work, author, genre, or style. Its target is not vice in the world but the conventions of a particular kind of writing or performance. Parody borrows the form of its target — the diction, the structure, the stock devices — and pushes them just past the point where the form starts to look ridiculous.

Examples:

Don Quixote — parody of the romance of chivalry (with vast complications, but the seed is parodic).
Northanger Abbey — Austen's parody of the Gothic novel.
Spaceballs, Galaxy Quest — parodies of Star Wars / sci-fi conventions.
Weird Al Yankovic — parody of specific pop songs.

How they overlap

Many great works do both. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is satire on human folly but also parody of travel narratives. Don Quixote is parody of chivalric romance but also satire on the people who took such books seriously. The two modes combine naturally: parody of a genre often becomes satire on the worldview that genre embodies.

The diagnostic test

Ask: what is being attacked?

If the target is something in the world — a politician, a social class, a moral failing, an institution — and the humor exposes it as ridiculous or vicious: satire.
If the target is the conventions of a specific work, author, or genre, and the humor comes from exaggerating those conventions: parody.

A piece can be both — parodying a style to satirize what that style represents. But the analytic move is always to identify the target precisely. Without that, you have only a vague sense that the work is "making fun of" something.

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