Satire, of course, is more than simple mocking. Mockers can be nihilists; if nothing is valuable, nothing is true, then everything becomes a target for mockery. Satirists are more than mockers and are definitely not nihilists. Satirists poke fun by comparing the "is" to the "ought," the "actual" to the "ideal." The whole point of the satirist's work is to prod the "is" closer to the "ought"; satirists are idealists.

—Robert Weldon Whalen, Sacred Spring: God and the birth of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna