"Satire also allows you to make fun of every different aspect. It allows you to make fun of both sides. It allows you to make fun of everything, really, so you can do it in a harmless way" (Neill Blomkamp). Satire is the use of irony, humor, or exaggeration by writers and is used to demonstrate the absurdity and corruption of an individual or society. Mark Twain notably uses satire to express his criticisms of American society in his novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain uses humor and irony to reprehend religion, American civilization and the legal system.
To begin, a prominent theme in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the mockery of organized religion. Mark Twain uses satire to ridicule organized religion and this is shown through Miss Watson's character. Miss Watson is supposed to be a honorary Christian woman that is instilling good Christian values into Huckleberry. However, Miss Watson owns slaves which are condemned in the
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In the novel, Huckleberry's drunk and abusive father, Pap is granted custody of his son. In the novel it states, "The judge and the widow went to law to get the court to take me away from him and let one of them be my guardian; but it was a new judge that had just come, and he didn't know the old man; so he said courts musn't interfere and separate families if they could help it; said he'd druther not take a child away from his father" (Twain 31-32). The court awards Pap with custody of Huckleberry despite his flaws, purely because he is the biological father. Twain uses irony to display this flaw in the American legal system. Huck had two respectable Christian women whom could have made better guardians than an abusive alcoholic. Twain uses satire to point out this flaw in the legal system by assigning an unfit parent as guardian instead of someone who would have made a better guardian purely because of family