For Father’s Day, a photo celebration of fathers getting the job done.

Satire is maledy in my formulation: Regardless of the jokes, the action of the story will move from better to worse. To make this fly with audiences, satirists will affect to inject a creamy filling into the bitter pill, but the objective of the work is not to illuminate pain’s relief but, instead, to make the agony even more excruciating.

Another way of saying the same thing: Satire is a public Loki joke. A joke has a seller and a buyer, a comic and his audience. But a Loki joke comes with a third party, the target. The buyer will laugh, but the target will not, and the target’s pain makes the joke that much funnier to the buyer. In private, a Loki joke can be affectionate, play-fighting in the form of teasing. In public, a Loki joke is almost always aggressive. Satire is always aggressive, and the risk of retaliation to the satirist becomes part of the joke, too.

I punished you with brutal satire this week, and I haven’t punished you nearly enough with the guitar lately, so for my Father’s Day Church of Splendor service, I elected to do something different: A Father’s Day card.

Here’s to the man with a plan: