Satire Examples in Short Stories: 6 Targets and How Each Story Hits Them
Quick answer: Satire examples from Gogol, Twain, Saki, Andersen, Premchand and Chekhov, each identifying the target, the method and the moment the comedy turns to judgement.
Satire uses comedy, exaggeration or irony to expose the folly or vice of a real target: a class, an institution, a habit of mind. It is fiction with an argument, and the argument is always against something. The stories that last are the ones whose targets outlive the occasion, so a Russian clerk's sneeze or a Danish emperor's parade still describes an office or a government the reader knows.
Six targets and how each story hits them
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol makes its target the Petersburg bureaucracy, a world in which a clerk's whole identity is his rank and a Person of Consequence practises looking severe in a mirror. Akaky's stolen coat is worth nothing to anyone but him, and nobody in authority will help. Gogol's ghost, stealing overcoats from officials, is the revenge the system never allows in life.
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain targets the pride of a town that boasts of its incorruptibility. A stranger leaves a sack of supposed gold and a test, and nineteen leading citizens each forge the same claim to it. Twain's method is arithmetic: he lets the reader count the hypocrites one by one at a public meeting.
Tobermory by Saki teaches a house-party cat to speak, and lets it repeat, in front of the guests, everything it has heard them say about one another. The target is the English country-house set and its two faces. Saki's judgement arrives when the guests unite in wanting the cat dead, which tells us what they value.
The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen targets courts and crowds together. The swindlers' claim that the cloth is invisible to the unworthy makes every viewer lie to protect their standing. The child who tells the truth has nothing to lose, and Andersen's point is that this is the only kind of person who does.
The Shroud by Premchand has a father and son, Ghisu and Madhav, collect money from the village to buy a shroud for the dead wife lying in their hut, and spend it on liquor and puris, reasoning that the dead woman would have wanted them fed. The target is not the two men. It is the village whose charity extends to the dead and never to the living.
The Death of a Government Clerk by Anton Chekhov reduces the whole apparatus of rank to one sneeze at the theatre and a clerk who cannot stop apologising to the general he sprayed. The general does not care; the clerk dies of caring. Chekhov's satire is on a system that has taught a man to grovel even when nobody asks him to.
How to use it in your own story
Satire needs a target the reader can recognise and a method that lets the target expose itself. The writer who explains the joke has already lost.
Common mistakes
The most frequent fault is contempt without comedy, a story that hates its target and forgets to be funny, which reads as an essay in costume. A second is the strawman, a target so exaggerated that no reader recognises it and the satire lands on nobody. A third is the narrator's smirk, asides that tell the reader how absurd the situation is. Writory judges score satire like any other story under Originality and Voice, and the entries that do well are the ones whose anger is disciplined by structure.
Where readers meet it today
Modern satire in short form includes Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron, Saki's heirs in Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse, George Saunders's Pastoralia, Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and Lorrie Moore's How to Become a Writer.
What writers can take from this
- Aim at a system, not a person.
- Let the target condemn itself in its own words.
- Straight face throughout; no asides.
- Give someone a real loss so the comedy has weight.
- If the reader has to be told it is absurd, rewrite until they can see it.
Try it yourself
Write a 600-word story set at a company's annual awards evening, narrated by the employee tasked with writing the minutes. The narrator must approve of everything, and the reader must approve of nothing.
Questions
What is an example of satire in a short story?
Gogol's The Overcoat, which targets a bureaucracy in which a clerk's identity is his rank and nobody in authority will help him recover a stolen coat. The ghost stealing officials' coats is the revenge the system forbids in life.
How do you identify satire?
Look for a recognisable target, an institution or social habit, and a comic method, exaggeration or irony or deadpan, that makes the target look foolish. If the story has an argument against something and is funny about it, it is satire.
What is the difference between satire and parody?
Parody imitates a style or work in order to mock it; satire attacks a target in the world. A parody of a detective story mocks the genre; a satire uses any form to mock a police force.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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