Satire

Criticism of people, customs, or institutions through ridicule, exaggeration, or irony.

In The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

Every man has the need and the power to contemplate his own nose, in order to see the celestial light, and such contemplation, whose effect is the subordination of the universe to a single nose, constitutes the balance of societies

The sentence turns selfishness into social law and presents it with the air of scientific theory: what would keep the world in order is each person looking at his own nose, and the criticism of customs comes from the grave tone.

Chapters XXXVIII to XLIX: Virgília Lost, the Death of His Father, and the Inheritance, the narrator

this chicken I have just eaten for lunch is the result of a multitude of efforts and struggles, carried out for the sole purpose of quelling my appetite

Chapters CXVII to CXXXVI: Humanitism, Nhã-loló, and the Fifty Years, Quincas Borba