Tracking his subject wherever it leads, Test finally locates satire living like ""a stranger in the basement"". Even then it won't be trapped. Defining satire is like ""trying to put a shadow in a sack"", he observes. What he brings upstairs - ""the fiercest form"" - is an encylopedic, historical analysis of satire. The schema Test develops to analyze satire consists of four elements: aggression, play, laughter and judgement. He extends his account to examples beyond literature, from Aristophanes to Horace to Mencken to film, TV, political cartoons, and roasts. Since the material resists a unitary theory, Test writes, his approach has been to broaden it ""in the hope that a satellite dish may capture what a microsope has failed to"". Test uses material from myth, folklore, anthropology, popular culture and related fields to expand on RObert C. Elliot's seminal work, ""The Power of Satire"". He attempts also to establish a mythic source for satire and to provide a new vocabulary for outmoded literay terms, and he offers a full discussion of the nature of irony in satire.