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Most of us claim to have, or like to think we have, a sense of humor. It makes us better 31 company and is an effective way of dealing with the various annoyances and frustrations that life brings, whether caused by people or by circumstances. We assume that it gives us the ability to laugh at ourselves, even when others makefun of us. Now, what is the difference between humor and satire, and is it true, as manypeople seem to think, that humorists are on the whole optimistic and sympathetic, while satirists are cynical and negative? I will be taking two writers - Henry Fielding, a writer of comedy, and Jonathan Swift, a satirist - to examine what the differences might be and how much a comic or satiric view of things is a matter of character and temperament, and to see how much the lives these two men led coincided with their respective visions. However, first I'd like to put forward a theory of sorts that would seem to reverse the general idea that humor is a positive and satire a negative view of the world. Humor is a way of accepting things as they are. Confronted with human stupidity, greed, vice, and so on, you shrug your shoulders, laugh, and carry on. After all, there is nothing to be done. Human nature is unchanging and we will never reform and improve ourselves. Satirists, on the other hand, begin with the idea that making fun of the follies of man is a very effective way of reforming them. Surely, in believing this they, rather than the humorists, are the optimists, however angry they may be.
