I'm with TBogg: I don't think this Meghan Daum column about Ann Coulter in the L.A. Times is funny or smart. Sure, it may seem clever to say this about Coulter:

imagine having a wit so dry that even you haven't yet realized you're a satirist.

But then Daum goes on to quote Davey Horowitz and a few others:

On "Larry King Live" last week, David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, declared Coulter "much funnier" than Bill Maher and Al Franken combined and decreed "Godless" "absolutely" a work of satire. Republican strategist Karen Hanretty appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" a week or so earlier and characterized Coulter's work as "tongue-in-cheek."

Even a few common citizens got the joke. A letter to the editor of the Arizona Republic criticized columnist Leonard Pitts for showing "his own ignorance by failing to recognize Coulter as a satirist, in the mode of Jonathan Swift." Here at home, a reader responded to L.A. Times columnist Tim Rutten's suggestion that Coulter was essentially in the pornography business with: "Coulter isn't selling pornography, she's selling satire — and doing it with great success."

It would be helpful if Daum understood that "satire" is not an exact synonym for "comedy" -- satire is an assault on a target that's intended to be taken seriously, even as it gets laughs. Horowitz and the two letter writers say "satire" as if that means we can just shrug off what Coulter says as nothing but madcap fun. That's wrong -- satire is meant to wound. There's really no such thing as an unwitting satirist.

Coulter knows exactly what she's doing: she's engaging in deadly-earnest character assassination, and she's doing it with punchlines (a) because that gives her the out of "It was a joke -- can't you take a joke?" and (b) because getting a mob to laugh at her targets is sick fun. Feel free to call that satire, but don't tell me that it's all harmless.

Then again, Daum gets off on the wrong foot right from her opening paragraph:

LIFE IS HARD for satirists. Like high school poets or people who get aroused when they put on furry mascot costumes, no one understands them. Back in 1729, Jonathan Swift was almost universally reviled when he suggested, in "A Modest Proposal," that the antidote to urban squalor was to eat the children of poor Irish immigrants and use their skin to make "admirable gloves for ladies and summer boots for fine gentlemen."

That's absolute bollocks:

Swift became a national hero of the Irish with his Drapier Letters (1724) and his bitterly ironical pamphlet A Modest Proposal (1729), which propounds that the children of the poor be sold as food for the tables of the rich.

--The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition

...in the 1720s he resurfaced as a champion of the Irish people.... 'A Modest Proposal' (1729), a bitterly ironic tract in which he suggested that the starving Irish sell their children as meat, further enhanced his reputation as 'the Hibernian Patriot.'

--biography at the Web page for the Knopf edition of Gulliver's Travels

Swift's readers understood what satire is. Daum doesn't.