Scatology has a long literary association with satire,    as it is a classical mode of the grotesque , the grotesque body and the satiric grotesque.   Shit plays a fundamental role in satire because it symbolizes death , the turd being "the ultimate dead object".   The satirical comparison of individuals or institutions with human excrement , exposes their "inherent inertness, corruption and dead-likeness".    The ritual clowns of clown societies , like among the Pueblo Indians , have ceremonies with filth-eating .   In other cultures, sin-eating is an apotropaic rite in which the sin-eater (also called filth-eater),   by ingesting the food provided, takes "upon himself the sins of the departed".  Satire about death overlaps with black humor and gallows humor .
If Wilde’s play takes aim at the society that persuades itself that it is virtuous and right-thinking while in reality being cold, harsh, and self-serving, it also celebrates the human ingenuity that allows people to make of themselves what they will and to enter imaginatively into another frame of reference or reality, a world in which wit and artifice are paramount. These, after all, are the qualities of which an audience is most aware, having been alternately amused, provoked, and delighted, when it leaves the theater at the end of the evening.