What is the difference between lampoon and satire?

Hint: Satire is the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or mockery to reveal and condemn people's incompetence or vices, especially in the sense of current events. While satire is generally intended to be amusing, its primary goal is also to provide constructive social critique, using wit to draw attention to both specific and broader social issues.

A sharp, frequently virulent satire directed against an individual or institution; a work of literature, art, or the like, severely ridiculing the character or actions of a person, society, or the like.

Complete answer:
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts in which vices, follies, abuses, and flaws are mocked with the aim of pressuring people, businesses, governments, or society as a whole to change.

A lampoon is a piece of writing or a speech that uses humour to harshly criticise someone or something. It's a vicious satire in prose or verse that makes a gratuitous, often unfair, and malicious assault on an individual.



Note: Although a lampoon is a written personal parody, it is generally a malicious and violent censure written only to embarrass and distress people. A satire is a poem, usually poetical, that exposes vice or folly; a sharp or serious expose of what in public or private morality deserves rebuke; an invective poem, such as Juvenal's Satires.

Powerful irony or sarcasm is a characteristic of satire —"in satire, irony is militant," writes literary critic Northrup Frye — but other elements such as parody, burlesque, exaggeration, juxtaposition, contrast, analogy, and double entendre are also common in satirical speech and writing. This "militant" irony or sarcasm always declares support for the very things the satirist is criticising.