In December 1817 the radical publisher William Hone was tried three times, on three consecutive days, because he had parodied the church's prayers to make political points about the corruption of Parliament and the state. One of the publications for which he was prosecuted, The Sinecurist's Creed, parodied the Athanasian Creed in order to attack those who had been given a well-paid job in return for political loyalty to the government:

Another of the offending pamphlets, The Late John Wilkes's Catechism, parodied a religious catechism to offer instructions ‘to be learned of every Person before he be brought to be confirmed a Placeman or Pensioner by the Minister’. Its central character, Lickspittle, is taught to become ‘the Child of Corruption, and a Locust to devour the good Things of this Kingdom’ by doing the ministry's every bidding. It offered ‘ten commandments’, which included the injunctions ‘Thou shalt not take the Pension of thy Lord the Minister in vain’ and ‘Thou shalt not say, that to rob the Public is to steal’. The catechism also included a parody of the Lord's Prayer:

A third offending publication, The Political Litany, similarly used a parody of conventional religious responses in order to attack corruption.

At the heart of this volume is the opposition between two terms, corroding and binding, between the capacity of satire and laughter simultaneously to subvert authority and confront iniquity while also solidifying communities of readers. Nowhere was this opposition more carefully, anxiously or contentiously studied than the golden age of English satire, between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the deaths of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope in the middle of the eighteenth century. These debates targeted the nature of satire: what it was and what it was supposed to do. During this same period, a second philosophical dispute also opened up on the margins of literary, sociological and psychological theory about the nature and function of laughter. Both sides of these debates were eagerly and antagonistically argued: satirists were high-minded public moralists or they were vindictive lampooners; laughter was a form of splenetic superiority or merely a pleasing response to an innocuous incongruity.

This chapter is an attempt to trace those debates. But it is also an attempt to account for the ticklish relationship between satire and laughter more broadly from the perspective of recent psychological theories. In both eliciting laughter and solidifying communities, I claim, satirists were also offering a deeply affective experience for readers. According to most theorists then and today, satire was supposed to correct vice – either the vices of the satiric victim or those of the reader. But such a theory of satiric correction presupposes that readers and targets, having read a work of satire, will proactively apply the lessons of the work to themselves. Richard Morton has offered the pithiest articulation of this thesis: ‘The aim of satire was reformation through perceptive ridicule. The satirist saw what was wrong with the world; the reader reciprocated by agreement and amendment.’ Critics of satire, however, have had severe doubts, both then and today, that there is any simple or straightforward transaction between reading satire and reforming vice. Readers might have laughed at satiric works and their victims, but many questioned whether those chortles so readily translated into an easily imbibed lesson or practical self-correction.