Satire did not start as a style. It started as a Roman claim. Quintilian wrote satura quidem tota nostra est, satire, at least, is entirely ours, the one literary form Rome would not concede to the Greeks. The line runs from Aristophanes mocking Socrates on the Athenian stage, through Lucian's deadpan dialogues of the dead, to the Romans who made it a genre: Horace, who teased; Persius, who scowled; and Juvenal, who burned. Difficile est saturam non scribere, it is hard not to write satire, he wrote, and meant it as a diagnosis of his city.

Then the form went quiet for a thousand years and came back swinging. Erasmus put on the mask of Folly herself. Rabelais wrote giants. Swift proposed eating children with a straight enough face that people still miss the joke. Voltaire burned a garden's worth of optimism. The line crosses the ocean into Twain, who could not be solemn if you paid him, and Mencken, who was paid handsomely to be the opposite of solemn about everything Baltimore held sacred. It runs straight into the twentieth-century comic essay and the Harvard Lampoon pipeline that fed the writers' rooms of American late night.

Scrolls & Trolls sits at the teenage end of that line, with no illusions about the company it is keeping and a great deal of affection for it. The point of naming the lineage is not to claim a seat at the table. It is to insist that the table exists, that comedy about power is a serious and ancient craft, and that the right response to reading Juvenal in Latin at sixteen is to pick the craft up and use it on your own century.