In my lens text “A Modest Proposal”, Jonathan Swift exposes a very dark and ironic sense of humor through the parodying genre of the satire. Traditionally, satire has a “formal character of its medium and particular reality of its attack” which we can clearly see in Swift’s writing when he proposes eating children to end poverty and overpopulation issues that Ireland is going through because of the inefficient English government. (Knight). In the reading, the author, narrator and main protagonist are the same person, Jonathan Swift. This is very common in the satire genre because the author is the one who has the power to adapt the text, which is often based on reality, on a way that it is clearly ironic and humoristic to the audience. According to Knight, another characteristic of satire is the that the protagonist ends up being the hero, which the author would also have the power to do. Knight explains in his article that “the comic protagonist applies a fantastic solution within which reality reappears in symbol, parody, and allusion.” Swift is giving giving us all of that when he proposes to eat children to stop poverty; we all know that is something very cruel, yet funny because it will actually be a solution for both, overpopulation and poverty. Beginning with the title, the text is filled with a sense of irony that is mostly pointed out when Swift talks about the Irish ruling classes describing them as unhuman, to the point of eating poor children. This irony is also one of the proper elements of this genre. (Knight)

My target text “I am Sorry That I Didn’t Write a Comedy Piece” by Wendy Molyneux also starts with a sense of irony from the title, since this is a satire and clearly a comedy piece. I think the main way that my target text differs from the lens text is the intention of the author and the main essence of the text. From my perspective, Molyneux is trying to describe things that mostly every woman experiences at some point of their lives like feeling fat, watching Grey’s Anatomy while feeling lonely, and wanting a baby. She is doing this with the purpose of finding women in the audience that identify with the text and therefore like it. As I mentioned before, the essence of the text is different, there is no dark humor or cruelty and she is not presenting a solution for any issue. However, both texts belong to the satiric genre; this means that they should have some things in common. As I explained in the paragraph above, one of the proper elements of the satire is that the author often attacks something. In this case, Molyneux is attacking Christopher Hitchens for saying that women are not funny in an article in Vanity Fair. She does it in a very sarcastic way by saying: “He’s probably right. And even if he isn’t, it’s great that we live in a country where you can say anything you want, like that women aren’t funny or that Christopher Hitchens is a huge douche who runs a successful child pornography business and has inability to get an erection unless he’s reading Nazi Literature.”(Molyneux, II-II).  I think our understanding of this genre can be severely affected by the authors’ different perspectives; whoever reads the first text will think that satire is very mean and cruel, but then people who read the second one will understand that the satiric genre is just trying to make people laugh. 
