A while back I wrote about satire and whether we were living through its death knells, but even as I wrote it I thought ‘satire’s not dead, it just smells funny’. Now, the day after the President Elect Donald Trump fulfilled a prophecy made by The Simpsons… I just don’t know.
Satirical shows such as the BBC’s Have I Got News For You and The Now Show will plough on it seems but when the punchlines are getting elected it’s hard to know what there is to add. A sense of melancholy overwhelmed the final show of the last News Quiz series as Susan Calman predicted Trump’s win.
There was a lot of comedy to be mined early on in Trump’s bid for the presidency, but ultimately it didn’t matter that Donald Trump is a bit fat, most of us are a bit fat. It didn’t matter that he possibly had a small penis – hey, full disclosure, I don’t have a penis at all! It didn’t matter he openly lost his temper, it’s clear that he was echoing many people shouting at their TV screens during the debates.
And why did it not matter that as well as the ‘faults’ listed above, Donald Trump has been accused of stirring up racial hatred, abusing women and making wild architectural plans? Because he ‘tells it like it is’? Because he’s a white man who’s rich as Croesus? Because he’s providing people to blame that seem easily held to account? It may not be a part of many people’s thinking process but it’s worth noting poor migrants tend not to have access to a great lawyer. Rich politicians and tax avoiding corporations though…
When you feel disenfranchised, you believe you have very little to lose. When comics are joking about the people you think could save you it is as though they are trivialising your difficulties and you’re not going to listen to their smart and quirky observations. In my article about satire said we’d embraced the cult of personality, I think it’s arguable to say that within this cult we have made gods of world leaders. We think they can save us, destroy us and that they control us.
This is not true, they serve us not the other way round, so why have we forgotten this? Because it’s helpful to those in power to promote the idea that satire is smug, cruel and unpatriotic, rather than one of the few comic styles that rarely punches down. To question is to become the villain of the piece. Imagine if Sue Townsend’s novel The Queen & I, in which the Republican Party were voted in and the Royal Family is sent to live on a council estate (if you haven’t read this I urge you to do so, or better yet listen to Miriam Margolyes’s recording of it) were published today? I’m not convinced the reaction would be fond.
Brexit, Trump they’re both signs that we want to revolutionise the establishment that has chipped away at the tools or knowledge to do so. Yet still people of colour, women, Millenials, LGBTQ+ and other minorities are finding a new way of politics, this is not no-platforming, this is giving them long owed space.
I want to end on a hopeful note. It might not seem like it, but the first woman President of the USA is out there, the first LGBTQ and/or person of colour Prime Minister is going to come to power. We just need to clear the path. And in order for that to happen, we need satirists who can puncture racist dialogue, dismiss sexism, mock homophobia and say to the establishment: that’s ridiculous.
