Satire props up what it should destroy. Chris Morris, a satirist himself, understands this as well as anyone. “Satire placates the court,” he told Jon Snow on Channel 4 news recently. “You do a nice dissection of the way things are in the orthodox elite and the orthodox elite slaps you on the back and says, ‘Jolly good. Can we have some more?’”
The return of Have I Got News for You last week, for its 58th series, only confirms Morris’s point. Poetry, wrote WH Auden, changes nothing. Satire is worse than poetry: it has made us a nation of giggling couch potatoes, laughing at what we don’t have the gumption to change.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote, “In the false society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society’s worthless totality.” I thought of the Frankfurt School’s diagnosis of the sickness of laughter when I read the blurb to a new book called The Shitshow. Like HIGNFY, the book’s authors, Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur, have created a successful satirical franchise that leaves what it satirises untouched. It started in 2005 with the book Is it Just Me or is Everything Shit? and continued through sequels and audio books, before now being disinterred in time to capitalise on Christmas 2019’s lucrative stocking-filler market. “So it turns out things can get even shitter. Who knew? Er, we did, sadly. Still have to laugh. You, like, have to. So let’s.”
Let’s not. Satire and laughter are not just displacement activities of supine Britons. Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, in fact, unwittingly helped Boris Johnson become prime minister. In a superb essay in the London Review of Books, the novelist Jonathan Coe recalled a moment 21 years ago when Johnson went on HIGNFY. Hislop had Johnson on the ropes over his notorious phone call with his friend Darius Guppy, when the pair discussed the possibility of beating up an unfriendly journalist. Eventually, Merton interjected with a gag – ending the inquisition and letting Johnson off the hook. Instead of a possible thug plotting something criminal, Johnson became merely laughable. For the rest of the episode, he could revert to the role in which he was most comfortable – posh-boy boob channelling Hugh Grant, Billy Bunter and Toad of Toad Hall.
In subsequent performances as guest and host on the show, Johnson finessed this persona. “Boris Johnson has become his own satirist,” wrote Coe, “safe, above all, in the knowledge that the best way to make sure the satire aimed at you is gentle and unchallenging is to create it yourself.” In our cynical age, all politicians come in for derision, but Johnson managed to turn that to his advantage: he made his buffoonish persona charming – to some demographics, at least.
It worked. Six years after Coe’s article, Johnson is the prime minister we deserve. Today, Johnson is stronger for being laughable, and the laughter he attracts serves as a force field to stop us thinking too hard about the hash he is making of the UK’s gravest crisis since Suez. Better to giggle over Jon Culshaw’s send-up of Johnson on Radio 4’s Dead Ringers than do the hard work of comprehending the self-satirising disaster of Johnson’s plan for multiple checkpoints in post-Brexit Ireland.
This is what author Malcolm Gladwell calls the “satire paradox”: the funnier someone finds it, the less likely they are to be changed by it. And it’s hardly a new problem. During the UK’s “satire boom”, in the early 1960s, Michael Frayn worried that its purported targets were left unscathed. “Certain kinds of satirical writing (political satire is a good example) are not normally intended to convert one’s opponents, but to gratify and fortify one’s friends,” he wrote. That’s why we should have few hopes that the return of Spitting Image will have much effect: after all, it achieved nothing first time around apart from making us laugh. Or consider Yes, Minister, another 1980s satire. Margaret Thatcher liked it because it showed her what she wanted, namely a civil service that needed to be cut down to size.
Satire then, as now, doesn’t so much tell truth to power as give a pretext for power to extend its remit while we aren’t paying proper attention. Jürgen Habermas described this in his book Legitimation Crisis as “civic privatism”: we citizens had abandoned our duty of scrutinising politics in favour of “career, leisure and consumption”. Laughter, as produced by satire, facilitates that civic privatism.
Meanwhile, another satirical TV news quiz is due to return shortly. Mock the Week effectively mocks the weak, namely its demographic of couch potatoes, by inviting its powerless audience to laugh instead of changing what they are laughing at. Satire has become a vice rather than a corrective to vice, and laughter not the best medicine but the UK’s chronic disease.
Can it do better? “These times should bring on something with more clout,” Morris told Snow. Morris’s new film, The Day Shall Come, dramatises the absurd true story of how the FBI became the biggest recruiters of terrorists in the US. It would make up a terrorist plot, find people to try to carry it out and then arrest them. The aim? To make it look like the feds were on top of terrorism. Certainly no one in the Trump administration or the FBI is going to be patting Morris on the back. Yet like all satire in today’s era of fake news, the film risks angrily preaching to the choir and bolstering its cynicism, while the satirised carry on regardless.
“These are the headlines,” Chris Morris’s deadpan newsreader said on The Day Today, his mid-1990s news spoof. “God, I wish they weren’t.” Today the headlines are even worse but satire’s chance of changing them is just as remote.
• Stuart Jeffries is a feature writer
