I’m not entirely sure today is really August 22; it could be some sort of satirical comment on the month of August or the number 2. I can’t quite figure out which, but here’s my evidence: not one, but two famous satirical writers were born this day, many years apart, on different continents.
The American satirist Dorothy Parker was born first, in 1893 in New Jersey. She’s still pretty well known as a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, actors, and other creative people in New York City who started informally meeting for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel. It turned into a daily ritual from about 1919 to about 1929. It was the talk of the Jazz Age in the US, mostly because several of the group wrote newspaper columns, and the banter around the table was so witty and entertaining they took to simply quoting the remarks in their columns. The wittiest, and most cynically satirical, was usually Parker.
During the years of the Algonquin Round Table, Harishankar Parsai was born in Jamani, India in 1922. He worked as the rough equivalent, for the time, of a technical writer after earning a Master’s degree in Hindi, then quit his job, moved to Jabalpur, and started publishing a magazine, Vasudha. It was a literary magazine, but Parsai’s contributions were usually satirical — and original; he won the Sahitha Akademi Award, which is given to the most outstanding books published in India. After the magazine shut down, Parsai continued writing for the rest of his career. His 1995 obituary in The Hindu described him as “revolutionizing the art of satire writing in Hindi.”
A good satire can have an outsize effect on a literate culture, and the works of both Parker and Parsai are still influencing their respective literary worlds. Definitely not a case, as Parker commented when US President Calvin Coolidge (who was famously taciturn) passed away: “how could they tell?”
