Chapter 28 - Political Satire

Summary

It is perhaps surprising how little political satire Philip Roth wrote. Over a career that spanned more than fifty years, with more than thirty books – many of them explicitly political and explicitly funny – there’s really only one book that can be truly called a political satire. That book, 1971’s Our Gang, is considered by most of its readers (if it is considered at all) an unmitigated failure. A satire of Richard Nixon, written and published in a white heat of rage before Nixon had even committed his most notorious crimes, Our Gang is a curious work in Roth’s oeuvre. This essay will look at that failure, and the handful of other times political satire appears in his work, and try to explain why Roth never fully returned to political satire as a writing strategy.