Gulliver's Travels, Part Four

At first, I thought this story was just plain weird, but after having the class discussion on it, it makes more sense. My favorite shows are all satires. I love when something can make me laugh and step back for a minute to think, "wow that's so true!" My favorite satirical joke of any show is episode 7 from season 5 of "South Park."

The episode is called "Proper Condom Use." The kids are all fourth graders, and the parents decide that the school should give them sexual education because the parents didn't want uncomfortable conversations. The woman and man who teach the kids have never even had sex, so they explain it terribly. The woman is deathly afraid of it because of diseases, and the man is completely clueless. The kids get the completely wrong idea about sex, and in the end, the parents realize that you should be the one to teach your children about sex because you never what the teacher is telling your children. At the end of the episode, I was laughing at how stupid the parents of the town seemed and how right they are.

"Gulliver's Travels, Part 5" was a satire on the irish and the english aristocracy. The English viewed the Irish as inferior, and Jonathan Swift wanted to show how corrupt and close-minded the English were. "Their heads and breasts were covered with a thick hair, some frizzled and others lank; they had beards like goats, and a long ridge of hair down their backs, and the foreparts of their legs and feet, but the rest of their bodies were bare, so that I might see their skins, which were of a brown buff color." (p.1156) This description was of the Yahoos but it was actually of the Irish from the view of the English. Irish people are no different from anyone else, but the English categorized the Irish as savages as a way to justify taking over and colonizing them.