SUMMARY
Satire as a vehicle for literary expression is a social art. It concerns itself with attacking the ills in the society in order to sanitize it. The use of satire as an artistic weapon against vices in our society is an age-old phenomenon. The ancient Greeks employed it in deriding unwholesome tendencies in humans. In the Roman empire also, writers like Horace, Vigil, Juvenal and others employed satire as a medium of attack on the emperors' excesses. When satire is applied to a literary work, it intends to expose the problems or flaws in a society, so as to produce changes. Satire is meant to reform.
Tewfik Al-hakim and Femi Osofisan's works are successful works of satire in the Horacian tradition in making its audience laugh, not only at the characters' ridiculous personalities, but also at their actions, deeds, ideas as well as the society which they personify. Therefore, Tewfik and Osofisan have succeeded in exposing the idiocy of our leaders and also the immorality among individuals in a society, in order to ridicule them.
The playwrights carefully recorded the society's problems, both political and moral. Both Al-hakim and Osofisan are certainly uneasy about the endemic problems of corruption, immorality, hypocrisy and so on, which has become an integral part of our existence. As writer, they have used literature to expose the ills in the society. They use devices such as caricature, sarcasm, exaggeration and so on, with which they sought to restore normalcy in a society that is apparently disintegrating everyday.
