As Smiley's 1993 article "Fiction in Review" makes clear, MOO is consciously built on a modern satiric tradition that includes writers such as Garrison Keillor, David Lodge, Rupert Everett, Michael Malone, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Walter Kirn. In addition, Smiley mentions such as like Jane Austen and Vladimir Nabokov as comic masters.

Readers will also confirm that MOO is in the tradition of Mark Twain, who frequently turned his satirical attention to American institutions he considered wrongly self-important, like slavery in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) or organized religion in Innocents Abroad (1869). Likewise, readers will also find parallels in Smiley's satire to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), which takes on an American institution, the military, comparable in pervasiveness to the university.