One editorial note before we begin: The Onion and South Park are not on this list. Both are fine practitioners of satire, but I couldn't find an example from them that fit neatly into our theme. After all, morons who actually believe Onion stories to be true usually just get outraged by the events rather than hating the paper. South Park has certainly pissed people off, but those who were angered were typically the people being satirized. When South Park satirized Islamic militants for threatening death at the depiction of Allah, and then received death threats from Islamic militants, no one missed the point.

Writing online has taught me many things, but the one overriding lesson has been that the internet hates satire. Specifically, the more caustic forms of satire that rely on the reader to be an active participant with the good sense to know that everything is not what it seems. For those members of society who simply lack that capacity, satire becomes an exasperating, offensive, and even humiliating experience. And with those feelings, the satirically-impaired lash out against the artist, often accusing him or her of the very behavior that is being satirized. Isn't that awesome? No. It's kind of a depressing actually, but here are five of my favorite examples where the target just seemed to miss the point.

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift's 1729 Essay A Modest Proposal (Full Title, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public) is arguably the greatest piece of satire in English literature. In it, Swift addresses Ireland's poverty, overpopulation, and starvation by proposing a simple solution: eating the babies of the poor - after proper compensation to the parents, of course.

First, Swift notices the problem:

It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors, crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags.

Then proposes the solution:

[The children], at a year old, be offered in the sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.

What Did Morons Think Was Going On?

Allegedly, many people reacted in disgust to the notion of both cannibalism and infanticide because, apparently, killing babies and eating them is sort of a bad thing. Indeed, public reaction was so intense that at one point Swift's patronage was also purportedly in jeopardy of being lost for proposing such savagery.

What's The Actual Point?

A Modest Proposal skewers both apathy to the suffering of children and the wrongheaded and convoluted social programs in vogue at the time that purported to address the plight while seemingly oblivious to the realities of human suffering. By proposing cannibalism and infanticide, Swift stirred an immediate horrified reaction in any reader who wasn't, y'know, into murdering and eating babies. But after that immediate reaction, an active reader probably then had another thought: why if I'm so horrified by the notion of murdering children, am I content to let them slowly starve to death from extreme poverty? But, like I said, those were just the thoughts of active readers. Those not passively accepting content. Rest assured, there were plenty of people in 1729, half-reading the essay while raping their indentured servants and muttering the 18th century's equivalent of "fail."