Satire is one of the most powerful weapons in a writer's arsenal---and yet many writers don't realize the influence that a well-crafted satire can have on readers.

Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Dave Barry, Jay Leno, and David Letterman are familiar names to TV viewers. Their sharp-pointed comments and skits on world affairs, government officials, and celebrities can make or break the people they target. What they do is satire: they hold the target up for ridicule and make people laugh.

Satire sends the arrows and darts farther and plunges them deeper into the targets than all the outraged vocabulary of a protester. Old-timers in the political world know that when the public starts laughing at them, thanks to late-night TV or newspaper/blog columns, their careers can be headed for a plane crash.

Saturday Night Live didn't invent the concept of satire as an intellectual weapon. Take a look at Greek and Roman playwrights (Juvenal comes to mind). Jonathan Swift wrote a wicked satire entitled "A Modest Proposal" in which he offered up an outrageous idea to the British leaders. Swift, writing with a straight face (but tongue firmly in cheek), suggested that the Irish be trained to use their children as a cash crop.

Some of the Irish kiddies could be sold for cash to restaurants as a meat source for the menus. As Swift laid out the plan, the Irish would treat their children much more humanely if they knew that parents could make money from the rug rats. People who read Swift's essay were outraged, missing his satirical point: as long as the British government was going to be inhumane to the Irish, they might as well get something taxable out of kids sold for food.

Alexander Pope, along with his buddies John Dryden, Addison and Steele and Swift, saw the idiots and their boot-lickers in power in the British government. So they wrote some really wicked satire, under the guise of being quite respectable. Pope's famous mock-epic, The Dunciad" used the pattern of Virgil's real epic, The Aeneid, to show that darkness and ignorance ruled in London, rather than Virgil's dignity, light, truth, and integrity.

Pope also wrote a satire called "The Rape of the Lock" , portraying the huge public scandal created when a nobleman cut off a lock of hair of a British lady. The point was to show how the ruling nobility lived their lives on a very superficial level.

Mark Twain, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, satirized the daylights out of current culture and its attitudes toward black slaves. If you notice the characters of The Duke and The Dauphin, two con men who traveled the Mississippi River in search of new suckers for their fake road show, these two guys are still alive and well today---all over the world. Huckleberry, a boy with no formal education but a sharpened moral conscience, declares near the close of the novel that "I don't care if I do go to hell for it, I'll protect my friend Jim" who happened to be a runaway slave.

Here's a far-from-comprehensive list of performers who use satire well:

• Steve Martin
• Dave Barry
• The cast of Monty Python
• Woody Allen
• Jonathan Winters
• Oscar Wilde
• Peter Sellers
• Mark Russell
• Johnny Carson

So, you're asking, "If I want to exert my power as a writer, how do I use satire?"

Here are some pointers:

• If you're protesting a community outrage (graft and corruption in City Hall or the State Capital), define your issue carefully. Don't swat a fly with a shovel.
• Plan the satiric content carefully. Satire appeals to the brain while still arousing laughter. The Three Stooges are not satiric characters. We love them for their outrageous on-stage moves, but we wouldn't invite them to a MENSA meeting.
• British writers have always had a gift for the dry wit and humor that makes satire so powerful. Look up some of them and see how they did it and how they still do it.
• As the writer, try to take a nonchalant approach. Let your characters tell the story, without your appearing to move them like puppets. If you're writing an essay to poke fun, don't lay on the emotional language in thick coatings. In satire, understatement wins the day.
• Pay attention to careful word choice. The connotations (associated meanings) of your words must be selected as part of your strategy.
• Keep your own emotions under control as you make a fool out of your target. The tone of "I'm just telling you what I've noticed. You can make up your mind" goes farther than the outright or implied statement of "This jerk in City Hall deserves to be run out of town on a rail tonight."

People in power, often the potential targets of satire, are often arrogant and pompous, thinking themselves immune to criticism or as special beings above the laws that apply to the rest of us.

This is where you come in as a satire writer: You have the ability to deflate balloons, reveal the pomposity, and perhaps, in some cases, to bring down a corrupt leader--and it's all done without firing a shot.