Well, what the heck, the only good nodeshell's a dead nodeshell right?
Satire is a special kind of humour (or humor), which involves not just providing the reader/audience/target with something different from what they expect, but actually modifying something created by someone else into something different.
Without going into the defintions of satire too much, here are some tips I have found useful when satirizing. Whether what I end up with is decent or tripe is up to the reader to decide.
General tips:
- Be subtle. Make small changes, not large ones. Ideally, it should be on one level obvious that it is satire, and on another level the reader should be left wondering if you were serious
- Keep as much of the original as possible; however, do not let your point get watered down. Trim out parts that have little or no relevance, but keep as much as you can afford to.
- Have a point. This is important. Don't satirize to satirize because you will likely meander offtopic and your meaning will be lost (unless you're good, in which case why are you reading this?), which defeats the whole purpose.
- Try to appeal to all audiences. Target your writing for all types of people, in order to get the broadest readership range possible. Include in your satire references that only certain types of people will get. This helps the target audience connect with your satire. Be careful not to make anything rely on them. The piece should make sense to anyone who does not understand the reference, and more sense to someone who does.
- Don't try to appeal to all audiences. Figure out who your target is; what kind of person are you writing to? Who cares what you have to say? Who should care? Target the people who are most likely to read and be affected by your writing.
To clarify the above, an example. If you're satirizing right-wing conservatives ('Republicans' in the US), don't target to the conservatives, because they will throw your argument away. Don't target liberals ('Democrats'), because while preaching to the choir is a morale boost, it does nothing else. You should target fence-sitters - people in the middle, and people who lean only slightly in either direction.
However, you should not target any one kind of fence-sitter. You should try to make your writing as appealing to a journalist as to a mechanic, as valid to a janitor as to a wall-street executive. Try and appeal to as many people as possible. Don't force it, but at the same time, don't toss them aside. The more people read your work, and the more of them understand and can connect, the more of a following you and/or your cause will get.
Maybe I'll add to this node later, but that's all I have for now.