Thank You For Smoking Satire Essay

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Satire is the 'safest' way to contradict another person’s statements/ actions/ beliefs through use of humour, irony, exaggeration, and ridicule. Satire highlights key topical issues in society and identifies their flaws. It inspires some, and it'll offend some. Such is life. It's not easy being the perpetrator of a damaging ideal, only to have a mirror held up with the ugliest parts of our humanity reflected back.

Thank You for smoking, released in theatres March 2006, is dark satire disguised as a light comedy. It follows the professional life of Nick Naylor, a charismatic spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies whose main priority is not to prove that “if it's your job to be right, then you're never wrong.” Thank you for Smoking satirizes the stupidity and how oblivious the general public is through amplifying the flaws in: education, media, and the American Flag.

Ironically, Nick Naylor’s speech in the opening classroom scene highlights the hypocrisy of education principles: both the teacher and Nick are equally guilty of cynically manipulating the children in class. In the classroom Nick treats the child as if she were an adult, this highlights how stupid adults are too. Nick Naylor exposes hypocrisy in education by manipulating the students in the class to question authority by telling them “who says?” The scene where Joey challenges
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Nick Naylor’s hypocrisy is exposed by Heather Holloway’s focus news article; through the article it amplifies the irony of the media and how it manipulates the general public. In an opening scene Nick Naylor highlights that “Most importantly [they] have got spin control.” This shows ironically that the media openly manipulates the general public. Nick; however, is manipulated by Heather Holloway but ironically feels cheated; the same way he is able to cheat the public everyday. Ironically, this amplifies how the media is able to seamlessly manipulate the

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