The Rhetorical Limits of Satire: An Analysis of James Finn Garner's Politically Correct Bedtime Stories

By July 1994, Politically Correct Bedtime Stories had appeared for the third time on the New York Times bestseller list with sales exceeding 100,000 copies. One year later, there were almost 1.5 million copies of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories in print as it continued to excite public commentary. This popular book is an ideal case study for exploring the benefits and limits of satiric humor, the book's primary rhetorical strategy and the focus of this essay. We argue that because of its polyvalent nature, the use of ironic satire as a rhetorical strategy to debunk a position is unpredictable. In fact, as this essay demonstrates, some forms of humor may facilitate audience acceptance of the very ideas the satirist intends to disparage. In this case, Garner's use of satiric humor may have facilitated acceptance of moderate forms of political correctness.