The powerful have always feared the satirist more than the soldier, because the soldier attacks the body while the satirist attacks the story — and it is the story, not the body, that keeps a tyrant in place. Nasreddin's jokes about judges and governors were not simply funny; they were the only honest speech available in a court that punished directness. Satire is what truth looks like when it has learned to survive.
Each step builds on the last.