#aflashfromthepast

[puns4priya]

You Can Never Be Sa-tired Out

Well, we all enjoy satire. Who doesn’t love a good laugh right? But the question that comes up is; do we really give a thought to the issue that is raised? The Egyptian era demonstrates how satire uses humour and irony to ridicule people and society.

Satire has been used for centuries, even the pharaohs are probably still giggling in their tombs at one another. In the Egyptian tale of ‘Princess Ahura’ the girl convinces her father Merpentan to let her marry her brother Naneferkaptah: I said to him (i.e. her father): "Let me marry the son of a general, and let him marry the daughter of another general, so that our family may increase!" I laughed and Pharaoh laughed. Of course, this would be absurd in a modern society but the idea itself is humorous and could sway an audience into laughter. Comparing this to modern society we can see how times have changed because a marriage like this would be illegal by laws put in place.

Sticking with this era it’s clear to see how different social classes will find different things funny. While the oppressed working classes would see the funny sides of their "betters", upper class scribes must have thought the descriptions of the various tradesmen in the ‘Satire of the Trades’ to be hilarious:  I do not see a stoneworker on an important errand or a goldsmith in a place to which he has been sent, but I have seen a coppersmith at his work at the door of his furnace. His fingers were like the claws of the crocodile, and he stank more than fish excrement. This sort of satire reveals the social ladder of people in that society and belittles the social lower class to make the middle/upper class seem more superior.

Through the examples demonstrated from the Egyptian era we can see how satire has been used for centuries to sway a person/ people to believe or change their mind about something and that satire is not just used solely to make someone laugh it’s to make you think about what is being ridiculed.