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Some people might think that the 1st memes invented were Keyboard cat, Philosoraptor and the numa-numa guy. That would be very, very wrong. Imagine you lived in a Kingdom that was one of the most powerful and influential in the world but, it had fallen on hard times. The king was, by all accounts, a corrupt incompetent dolt. The people were hungry and the spoiled, foolish Queen, when told there was no bread for the peasants said let them eat cake. While this might sound uncomfortably familiar to modern Americans, this was the climate that gave rise to the French Revolution. It was also the fertile ground for the French satirists who I submit were early generation memers. What people fail to understand about memes is they are much more about ideas than humor but the combination of the two makes them that much more powerful. What we call memes is an evolution of an ancient idea called satire more succinctly defined as the illustration of the absurd with absurdity. Every middle schooler naturally knows about satire because that is when they inevitably meet an incompetent and bungling bureaucracy. One must take care with satire as to be a proper smart ass, you must first be smart. Otherwise, you are just an ass. There were many French satirists. I would like to focus on a gentleman named Voltaire. Voltaire and the French satirists used their wit to point out the myriad hypocrisies and inequities of their political and social situations. Like Charlie Hebdo, many of the French Revolutionary era satirists faced rather deadly blow-back from those that failed to see the humor in their work. This was an amazing era and one that the modern democracies owe much to because many of the things we see as foundations of democracy were first discussed by the thinkers during this era. They were seeing the end of the monarchy as a practical form of government and looked forward to imagine what the next step would look like. See if you recognize any of Voltaire’s ideas: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Judge a person by their questions, rather than their answers. To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. Common sense is not so common. It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere. Prejudices are what fools use for reason. As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities. When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion. Superstition sets the whole world in flames; reason quenches them. Voltaire would have been hell on wheels if he had internet access. Be suspicious when you hear people in power discount the ideas of others. Those silly memers that poke them right in the hypocrisies have quite the history. So, when you see memers banned from facebook or twitter, what you are really seeing is da man swatting the Socratic gad-fly that stung him in a sore spot. Only a fearful tyrant censors speech. He is afraid that you will tell the people just what a putz he really is.

Sue Townsend rightly has the reputation as one of our finest comic novelists. Adrian Mole is one of the great comic characters and Sue Townsend did the most refreshing of things, she allowed him to age naturally. What we often forget is was what a good satirist she was too. This book steals the format from her other creation, Adrian Mole. This is the secret diary of Margaret Hilda Roberts, aged 14¼, living above her father’s grocer's shop in Grantham. This is Margaret Thatcher as a girl, long before she met and married Denis. Here Sue Townsend presents all the character tropes that Thatcher was renowned for – the workaholic, surviving on two hours’ sleep a night, the disdain for the working class, the distrust of the BBC and the inability to see the benefit of art – and she presents them in the character of a fourteen-year-old girl. This makes them seem absurd and very strange. Sue Townsend subtly questions these qualities, are they really positive characteristics? This book is also populated with caricatures of political figures from the same time. They are broad caricatures and often presented as other children in Margaret Hilda Roberts’s life, but the in-joke of recognising the real politicians just adds to the fun. This book is fun too, Sue Townsend’s wonderful sense of humour is plainly on display here and her jokes hit the mark (more than once I laughed out loud). The only problem with this book is that it’s so short and ended too soon. Find it here on Amazon

Satire is a difficult form to get right. If it is too humorous then it might not be biting enough; if the satire hits home then it can be dry and even dull, and then it can be humourless and miss its target. These two short stories take a satirical aim at religious persecution and antisemitism in particular. Holocaust Tips for Kids is a young teenage American boy’s view of the Nazi Holocaust. It reads like that teenage boy’s scrapbook, facts and reportage sit all beside the boy’s own writing on how he would survive a modern holocaust. This takes broad swipes at Hollywood action-adventure films, using their logic to fight a holocaust. Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown is written in the form of the classic American Charlie Brown story, using almost all the many characters from that world. Here there is a war, in the Charlie Brown world, between the believers in Schulz, the creature of them all, and the Giant Pumpkin God. The characters quickly fall into the different factions, seeing the others as heathens and therefore justifying their own actions. Shalom Auslander has captured both these separate worlds extremely well. In the first story, he captures both the voice and logic of a teenage boy. In the second story, he unnervingly captures the tone and sound of the Charlie Brown stories. Unfortunately, Auslander’s satire is nothing new and fires at targets that other writers hit bull’s-eyes on long before him. The skill of his writing impressed me, tonally these two stories are so different and yet each of them perfectly captures the voice they are written in. But the satire here is nothing new, we have heard it all before by other writers. I wish Auslander had taken aim at different, new targets here or had found something new to say. Find it here on Amazon