Lysistrata Satire

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The Era of Soft News In today’s world, society moves as quickly as it can while exerting as little energy as possible. This idea is particularly applicable to the way media is created and circulated. While hard news, which is essentially news that covers serious political or business related topics that is reported in an immediate fashion, used to be the standard for receiving information, it seems that the current generation prefers to obtain information through soft news instead. There is no set definition for soft news, but its delivery is generally associated with more passivity, humor, and personality. Given this new preference, the question then becomes whether or not this version of news is adequate enough to educate young Americans …show more content…

In fact, one of the most influential political satirists was the Greek writer Aristophanes, who wrote a number of satirical plays. The most popular of his plays, “Lysistrata”, is a comedy about the women of Athens withholding sex from their husbands in order to end the Peloponnesian war. While the play was first performed in 411 B.C.E, it is still prevalent in today’s democracy, and has been adapted into a variety of topics within the media. For example, just last year a film titled “Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?” was released, and its plot centered on a Texas town where the women familiarly withhold sex from their husbands in order to persuade them to detach from their obsession with …show more content…

Johnson to contact the show in the middle of the night to complain about its presidential satire. Eventually, the show was pulled from the air when they performed a CBS-banned sermonette satirizing Jonah and the Whale. Though the show had turbulence with the president’s administration, on their last show they read a letter from the president himself which read, “It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists. You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.” Despite the fact that the show was taken off the air, it created a platform for future television satirists to delight the world with political comedy that has become essential in modern