Black American novelists, filmmakers and other writers are using comedy to reveal — and combat — our era’s disturbing political realities. By Adam Bradley LAST SPRING, DURING the Broadway revival of ...

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 captures the madness of systems that trap us in logic loops we can’t escape. More than a war novel, it’s a timeless satire of ambition, bureaucracy, and absurd order. Every ...

A reader responds to Renée Loth’s column about banned books, lamenting that she had to explicitly state it was satire.

Once upon a time, the First Amendment right to free speech was a given and not debatable. In 1968, the Smothers Brothers comedy duo sent an apology to President Lyndon B. Johnson after regularly ...

I have often had occasion to bemoan the sad lot of the satirist in contemporary society. Satire depends for its bite on a discrepancy between the satire and reality. The satirist presents an ...