Comedies can also create problems for an audience since comedy can be used to cover up serious situations as well as lighten the impact it may have on an audience. 

In Literature, the genre of satire is commonly used to both poke fun for a laugh out of a reader and make significant social comments. This is seen in both Candide and Importance of Being Earnest. Both authors engage the readers by comedy and also take social, economical, and political jabs at the features of current society. These jabs are significant in dealing with serious social problems because when a novel is masked in its comedy, comments the author is making come across strikingly harsh. They reveal the true purpose of the novel, because most satires are not written to simply tell a story. In the case of Candide, Voltaire makes comments towards the current times of the enlightenment through the development of the characters in the story. When the situations characters are in are exaggerated as they are in Candide, ideas such as the enlightenment appear extremely foolish. In the novel, Dr. Pangloss states to Candide “here is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunégonde...you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts." With Pangloss continuing the state the idea that they are in the best of all possible worlds, the exaggerated situations begin to weigh in on his ideas, making them more and more ridiculous as they progress. In Importance of Being Earnest, many comments are made about society. Algernon says the way that Jack flirts with Gwendolyn is “perfectly disgraceful” and the way the she flirts with his is “almost as bad”. By showing how serious the characters are about the social scripts at the time, they begin to seem fairly ridiculous. Both these novels create problems in expectation and belief in that the readers expect the author to have certain beliefs when writing their stories, but then their actually beliefs are revealed through the fact that the novel is a satire.

Expectation and belief also often to appear to be made a clouded kind of ideal to the audience. Expectations as seen in the writing are often opposite of what an author truly thinks is correct, therefore matching the goal of satire in the first place. Expectation and belief in the case of satire are very interesting topics due to the fact that often the underlying meaning of the work as a whole gives a reader a larger insight to the true topic at hand.

" The only really safe name is Ernest." ) as a way to force the reader into thinking about trivial aspects of their own society. With both of these authors, they use comedy to present ridiculous problems, forcing the audience to contemplate the moral arguments behind the issues that are brought up. 

  Oscar Wilde, through the ridiculous expectations that Cecily and Gwendolyn have for their future spouses criticizes the expectations of marriage. When Algernon asks Cecily whether she would love him if his name were not Earnest, she says that "I might respect you, Ernest, I might admire your character, but I fear that I should not be able to give you my undivided attention." Yet, when under the false belief that his name is Earnest,  Cecily showers Algernon with love and affection. Jack was confronted with the same problem of Gwendolyn not wanting to love him if his name was jack because "... Jack is a notorious domesticity for John!  And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John." The importance to Cecily and Gwendolyn about the name of the men they supposedly love is Wildes's way of helping his audience to realize the absurdity of marrying based on accepted superficial characteristics (like the wealth and title of a man) by exaggerating the triviality of the characteristic that is being held important in the play. 

      In "Candide", Voltaire exaggerates the role of philosophy in the lives of the common man to criticize the damaging sentiments it spreads. During the enlightenment, philosophy was beginning to permeate all aspects of everyday life. The control that philosophers exerted over many people was accepted by European society, but Voltaire viewed it as damaging. In “Candide”, Pangloss teaches the study “metaphysico–theologo–cosmolonigology”. While advocating for free will, Pangloss is also “...convinced that everything is for the best”. His two beliefs debilitates the people he influences like Candide, stripping him of his free will while preaching it. While Candide can do anything he wants, for example, saving John the Anabaptist, he cannot because everything that happens is supposedly for the best. By writing of the delusion that philosophers impose on others and how it can be deadly, Voltaire warns readers of the fatal flaws of mindlessly following others’ philosophies.