English · Chapter 38
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Humour and Satire is a Language Development unit of the Grade 11 Compulsory English textbook. Its theme is laughter and what laughter can be made to do: the pleasure of a joke well told, and the sharper use of comedy to expose folly, hypocrisy and abuse of power. The unit trains comprehension on a reading text that is itself comic or discusses comic writing, builds the vocabulary of comedy, teaches the grammar of question tags and negative questions, and puts both to work in speaking and writing tasks. NEB questions reward the student who can define humour and satire separately, name the devices a satirist uses, and argue a position on the limits of comedy.
Confirm the exact title and author of this unit's reading text against your own copy of the textbook, because these notes develop the substance the unit's reading treats rather than a particular title.
Humour is the quality that makes us laugh or smile, and the unit's first work is to separate it from sharper things that borrow its shape. Humour at its broadest is kindly, inviting the reader to enjoy human oddity, including the writer's own, and wishing nobody harm. Wit is humour made quick and verbal, a remark clever in its wording that lands in a few syllables. A pun is wit at the level of a single word, playing on two meanings of one word or on two words that sound alike.
Irony is the gap between what is said and what is meant, or between what a character expects and what occurs. Verbal irony calls a downpour lovely weather. Situational irony arranges for the fire station to burn down. Irony needs an alert reader to notice the gap, and it fails on one who takes it literally. Sarcasm is verbal irony turned into a weapon and aimed at a person; it belongs to speech more than to print, since it depends on a tone of voice the page cannot carry. Sarcasm is meant to wound; irony can be gentle.
Parody imitates the style of a particular writer, work or form closely enough to be recognised, then exaggerates it until the style looks ridiculous. Caricature does the same with a person, seizing on one habit and swelling it out of proportion, which is why the cartoonist's pen is its natural instrument. Farce is comedy of situation rather than of language, built from mistaken identity, coincidence and physical mishap.
Satire is the use of all these devices for a purpose beyond laughter. The satirist holds folly, vice, hypocrisy or corruption up to ridicule so that an audience sees it plainly and is ashamed of it. Satire therefore has both a target and a standard, since it laughs at what is wrong by implying what would be right. Its instruments are irony, exaggeration, understatement, parody and caricature, and its proper subjects are those with power, because a satirist who attacks the weak is merely a bully.
Nepal has an old and living tradition of this kind of comedy. Verse and prose satire have long commented on rulers, officials and social custom, and street theatre and festival performance carried mockery of authority to audiences who could not read. The comic sketch on stage and on television remains one of the few forms in which uncomfortable truths about public life are said out loud and laughed at together.