The pillar defines satire's five techniques. This page watches all five work inside a single piece — Jonathan Swift's 1729 "A Modest Proposal" — so you see how they interlock instead of reading them as a list.
Swift's premise: solve Irish poverty by selling the poor's infants as food for the rich. The machinery under it:
Irony is the engine — Swift believes none of it. Advocating cannibalism in the measured voice of a policy wonk forces the reader to feel that England's real treatment of Ireland was already this monstrous; he just added a recipe. The irony isn't one line, it's the essay's entire relationship to its author.
Parody is the costume. The piece copies the form of an earnest economic pamphlet — tables, cost projections, projected yields — the exact genre Swift's contemporaries used to propose real policy. The respectable format is what makes the content land as obscene.
Exaggeration is the amplifier. Swift takes a real attitude — the Irish poor treated as livestock to be managed — and pushes it to its literal endpoint. He didn't invent the dehumanization; he extrapolated it a few degrees, which is exactly why it stings.
Incongruity is the friction: the warm, reasonable tone set against the atrocity proposed. Nothing in the prose's manner matches its content, and the discomfort in that gap does the arguing.
Reversal is the quiet move. He puts the cold logic of the comfortable classes into a narrator who reasons exactly as they reasoned, and by inhabiting that voice perfectly, convicts it. The "expert" is the villain; the proposal's competence is the crime.
Take any one element away and the piece collapses. Strip the parody and it's a sick idea; strip the irony and it's a real proposal; strip the exaggeration and it's an essay. That interlock — not the individual techniques — is what "using the elements well" actually means.