1 CHAPTER – 1 What is Satire? The ancient Romans were the first to define the literary genre of ‘Satura’. Our modern word ‘Satire’ derives from this Latin word, but the Roman satura was quite different from what we visualise as satire today. The saturae of Horace and Juvenal read more like mild lectures than social commentary. While they provide some social critique and are somewhat humorous, they are not intended to provoke any sort of social change, and they are too open to qualify as satire in the modern sense. Satire is commonly defined as a literary genre in which comedic forms, as well as ridicule and overstatements, are used to focus on human weaknesses and social problems. Satire have been known to incorporate other elements like irony and ridicule to denounce something morally wrong, such as a vice or injustice, through means of mocking that injustice with the aforementioned narrative and comedic techniques. Satire became popular during the era of Enlightenment, the American Satire dates back to at least the 1700s with publications such as Benjamin Franklins “Poor Richard’s Almanack”. Numerous examples of it are still being put to use today. There are actually four types of satire: formal satire, indirect satire, Horatian satire and Juvenalian satire. Formal satire, like Alexander Pope’s ‘Moral Essays’, is usually in the first person and it uses a direct address, whether to the audience or the subject of the criticism. Indirect satire, by contrast, relies on a fictional narrative, like Lord Byron’s “Don Juan”. Horatian satire tends to have a gentler, playful and sympathetic