Satire and parody are among the conspicuous casualties of contemporary cultural radicalism and its grim-faced P.C. brigades. Yet it was not so long ago that these refreshing rhetorical arts still thrived. One thinks, for example, of David Lodge’s Small World (1984), a delicious send-up of the trendy Lit-Crit establishment that supplanted traditional literary studies with an unlovely smorgasbord of deconstruction, neo-Marxism, cultural studies, radical feminism, and kindred other disasters.

One of the chief values of good parody or satire is to be a goad to conscience. By holding the ridiculous up to ridicule, these verbal esprits can help to recall us to sanity. In this sense, parody, like satire, is an incentive to reflection and reform. That is why its disappearance or attenuation is a moral as well as an aesthetic loss.

The problem is that if parody or satire is to be effective, there mu ...

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