Is There A SWIFT Today?

[dulcinea]

The wittiest comment about H2Ogate was that it had the lamentable effect of making people like Kurt Vonnegut and Muriel Spark write bad satires under the delusion that they were the Swifts of the 70s. Trying to be another Jonathan Swift is indeed a tough task, since everybody who try to ape his style only succeed in demonstrating that they don't have any sense of humour.
I may be asking an unanswerable question:
are there any modern writers who truly compare to Dean Swift?

[John F]

No.

[jbuck919]

Swift is considered the greatest prose stylist in English, after maybe Shakespeare when he was writing prose. So in a sense you are asking the wrong question, because not every age produces the conditions possible for rising to such heights. No one will ever achieve what Shakespeare did as a dramatist, but that does not mean that we cannot enjoy as works of dramatic art the plays of Edward Albee and Tom Stoppard. Similarly, no one writing in English will embody satire in as fine a literary form as Swift, but that does not mean we cannot appreciate satirical authors of considerable artistry such as Vonnegut.

[John F]

Besides, those who specialize in comedic satire today don't write it, they speak it on TV and others write it for them.