His prints inspired writers to create their own texts around, say, A Rake's Progress and A Harlot's Progress. And to this day cartoonists frequently pay homage to him by borrowing his complex compositions. Thus his Gin Lane became Cocaine Lane by Martin Rowson 250 years later.
With the creation of Punch magazine in 1841, cartoons became popular and were soon musts for popular newspapers. Even Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and other writers called on cartoonists to add spice to the serialization of their novels in newspapers.
"London was an extraordinary city," Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, a popular satirical fortnightly, notes in a catalog essay accompanying the exhibition, "and it has an extraordinary amount of what satirists thrive on: `Vice, Folly and Humbug."' They were again the targets of London's postwar boom in satire, begun in the early 1960s by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller in a landmark stage show called Beyond the Fringe. The floodgates opened: Cook helped found Private Eye and created a nightclub in the Soho district of London called the Establishment, the sort of place where that great American satirist Lenny Bruce could perform without protests.
Soon satire reached television through BBC shows like That Was the Week That Was, fronted by David Frost, which were so successful that Saturday night became known as Satireday night. And here, for the first time, queen and country (even dear old Shakespeare) were routinely spoofed.
These shows were followed by the Monty Python's Flying Circus series, which, while dwelling on the absurd, led to the 1979 screen satire of religious excess, Life of Brian. The 1980s brought the Spitting Image series, in which royalty, politicians and celebrities were mercilessly lampooned using puppet heads.
Today, with reality shows ruling television, satire is kept alive in England largely by Private Eye, which not only sends up royalty and government (Prime Minister Tony Blair is depicted as a self-righteous Church of England priest) but also, and perhaps most usefully, serves as a watchdog over the country's newspapers by exposing their misreporting and ridiculing their obsession with celebrities.
Satire is hardly dead. It can also be found in France with Les Guignols de l'Info, a puppet show on television, and with Le Canard Enchaine in print.
On American television it surfaces in late-night talk shows and, most successfully, in Comedy Central's Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Movies too, from Wag the Dog to Thank You for Smoking, keep up the tradition.
Yet Satirical London reminds how much more satire can do.
In today's Western democracies, where the concentration of political, religious, economic and media power smothers debate, satire can be positively remedial by challenging stereotypes, prejudices and groupthink.
In that sense, it is not enough to satirize manipulation of power; those who permit this state of affairs -- that's us -- also deserve to be ridiculed. Satire cannot fix things, but it proffers a timely jab in the ribs.
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