Satire - then and now

Been exercising my satirical muscle this week (oo er... oh no, that's the innuendo muscle (oo er)) with a coupla days writing for The News Quiz, and shall be again next week. If you're particularly keen to hear it, it's on the Radio 4 website's Listen Again till next Friday. My job was to write about 12 jokes each based around a racist Tory candidate, a Labour peer who's leaving the government to be a racing driver, research that sunbathing makes you live longer, and the decline of hot puddings. Mmm, taste the satire. I'm sticking it to the pudding industry.

They say satire is dead. Well look at what we're given. There's not much to rebel against. Labour are nicking ideas from the Tories, so everyone's in agreement. The modern hey-day of satire was back when Spitting Image was rife, Have I Got News For You was a baby, and the king of impressionists was Rory Bremner and not a voiceover artist most happy doing Tom Baker. Back then comedians would rant at Thatcherism or boring Major. Love or hate Thatcher, she changed the country a great deal, benefitting a lot of people but also pissing off a lot of people. Lots for satirists to get their teeth into.

Then there was a slight revival with the invention of New Labour. Spin. Yeah. Exposed. Telling it like it is. Comedy writers sticking it to the government. Eat my jokes, Tony. And then The War That No One Wanted. Ooh. They shouldn't have done that. No WMDs? Hanx Blix, etc etc. George Bush is invading countries on a whim, and you know what else, he's stupid. No, really stupid. So much so that for years comedians just had to repeat things he'd said or done ("the French have no word for entrepreneur", etc... For the best part of a year you'd get a laugh at a comedy night just by saying, "He choked on a pretzel"). So now Blair's gone and Bush is going, the war jokes are tired (although I think they were probably born tired). So what now?

Well none of us quite know what Brown is yet. I haven't seen anyone nail him yet with a killer joke or impression or angle. Too early days. And yes the War on Terror carries on (does it? the problem with a war on a tangible thing is that you can't tell if/when it has/might ever end - there'll be no "On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, terror has surrended."), but it's all got a bit embarrassing with no real sign of much progress in the Middle East. We can't really have a go at Brown for Blair's mistake (although I'm sure many have anyway). So only the true satirists - Mark Thomas, Rob Newman, John Oliver, etc - are managing to carry on their trade, and that's only because they are walking wikipediae of knowledge on politics and political history. I have to go on Wikipedia to remind myself who's Chancellor of the Exchequer.

So instead, for now, comedians stick to jokes about ex-girlfriends and drugs and insulting nicknames they were called in school (and that was just the teachers!! The teachers!!! Get it?!? Not the kids! The teachers!!!!). Some pretend to be satirists by occasionally doing a joke about a Muslim with a rucksack on a tube train, but normally it's somewhere between racist and lazy. That's not to say I haven't done it myself. Desperate times call for desperate jokes. Otherwise the casual satirist is left with changing the world by mocking the decline of hot puddings (which as I say, you can catch on Radio 4's Listen Again).