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Practice Reading: Fill in the Blanks (Dropdown) ID: #5466 Humour 2
Instructions
Most  of  us    to  have,  or  like  to  think  we  have,  a  sense  of  humour.  It  makes  us  better  company  and  is  an  effective  way  of  dealing  with  the  various  annoyances  and  frustrations  that  life  brings,  whether    by  people  or  by  circumstances.  We  assume  that  it  gives  us  the  ability  to  laugh  at  ourselves,  even  when  others  make    of  us.  Now,  what  is  the  difference  between  humour  and  satire,  and  is  it  true,  as  many  people  seem  to  think,  that  humourists  are  on  the  whole  optimistic  and  sympathetic,  while  satirists  are  cynical  and  negative?  I  will  be  taking  two  writers  -  Henry  Fielding,  a  writer  of  comedy,  and  Jonathan  Swift,  a  satirist  -  to  examine  what  the  differences  might  be  and  how  much  a  comic  or  satiric  view  of  things  is  a  matter  of  character  and  temperament,  and  to  see  how  much  the  lives  these  two  men  led  coincided  with  their  respective  visions.  However,  first  I'd  like  to  put    a  theory  of  sorts  that  would  seem  to  reverse  the  general  idea  that  humour  is  a  positive  and  satire  a  negative  view  of  the  world.  Humour  is  a  way  of  accepting  things  as  they  are.  Confronted  with  human  stupidity,  greed,  vice,  and  so  on,  you  shrug  your  shoulders,  laugh,  and  carry  on.  After  all,  there  is  nothing  to  be  done.  Human  nature  is  unchanging  and  we  will  never  reform  and  improve  ourselves.  Satirists,  on  the  other  hand,  begin  with  the  idea  that  making  fun  of  the  follies  of  man  is  a  very    way  of  reforming  them.  Surely,  in  believing  this  they,  rather  than  the  humourists,  are  the  optimists,  however  angry  they  may  be.

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