QUESTION: Good Satire to link with Swift's Modest Proposal?

[Rachel]

I am teaching "A Modest Proposal" and I have been searching for modern written satire that would correlate. Any ideas?  Let me know!

[Sean]

Anything Steven Colbert.  Also Community?  Would that qualify?

[Lori Rogalski]

Have them write their own satires!  My students have written excellent satires on everything from  Starbucks addicts

 to Rod Blagojevich and obsessive ND fans.  Teenagers seem to have a natural gift for satirical expression. 

Or, if you'd be willing to let them view "spoken" satire, any appropriate Stephen Colbert clips you can find work great- he's the king of modern satire! 

[Johanna Denis]

Do you have a rubric for this? I would really like to try this.

[Elizabeth Simpson]

The Onion!!

[Ryan Goble]

My wife - Nicole Trackman - has some perfety alligned stuff from the Onion so I will try and get her to respond, but bouncing off Sean I think you'll find this to be a PRETTY GOOD :) connection...

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[Nicole]

Hey-  So here is the Onion article that I use: 

http://www.theonion.com/articles/industrial-revolution-provides-mil...

this works really well, as my students have just finished discussing the literary and historical times leading up to Swift.  I give them this Onion article as a print out- with only the date and issue number- so they can't automatically see where it is from.  I ask them to read and annotate it in class. We start off the class by discussing the article as a serious piece (it is hard to keep a straight face as they tell me how appalling and terrible it is)  :)  Then, of course, it clicks- someone gets it and reveals that this just cant be true.  So, we look at the piece again- as an example of satire.  Specifically, we look at:  the subject of the article, the audience of the article, the purpose of the article, the context of the article (economic/ historical) and the speaker.... this segues nicely into an introduction to Swift and A Modest Proposal.  :)

[Dana Huff]

I second this. I was just preparing to post it. It's great to pair with "A Modest Proposal," and I use it, too.

[Martha York]

Have you tried the short story  Sending Grandma to the Ovens by Colin Cohen?  It is very modern and goes along with today's medical issues.