August 17, 2016 • 36 mins
In the political turmoil of mid-1990s Britain, a brilliant young comic named Harry Enfield set out to satirize the ideology and politics of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His parodies became famous. He wrote and performed a vicious sendup of the typical Thatcherite nouveau riche buffoon. People loved it. And what happened? Exactly the opposite of what Enfield hoped would happen. In an age dominated by political comedy, “The Satire Paradox” asks whether laughter and social protest are friends or foes.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
It was the middle of the eighties and missus Thatcher
was the prime minister here and she was very popular
with the sort of working classes and things, and not
with the lefty middle classes like me.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Harry Enfield, one of England's best known comedians. He's talking
about where he got the inspiration for his most famous character,
a response to the imperious Margaret Thatcher with her barb
and pearls, who unleashed American style capitalism on the UK and.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
The student hippies. We used to live on this council
state in Hackney and we used to go to the
local pub and all the local tradesmen and things always
had huge wards of money and they'd take it out
because they thought we were squatters. We weren't actually squatters,
but we looked like squatters because we worked in television,
so they get their big wards of money outs instead
(01:10):
of you know, flash it at the bar and everything.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Enfield hated Thatcher, hated what she represented, but the power
I took was the power to reduce the power of government.
Enfield and his partner Paul Whitehouse dreamt up a character
to embody Thatcher's England.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
And it sort of just became this sort of thing
really where we just go loads of money about everything.
You know, well, that's loads of money, loads of money that,
loads of money that, and then it became a sort
of phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
His name was loads of money. He was a construction worker,
catapulted to sudden delirious wealth by the eighties building boom.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I've got piles.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
Palls and.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
He chews gum with his mouth open, wears acid washed jeans,
white trainers, a yellow and green nylon jacket with white sleeves,
keys on his belt, drives a white convertible the countryside.
All performed with a kind of cheerful, unstoppable tastelessness.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
I'm in a politics right. All you need to know
about politics. Missus Batch had done a lot good for
the country, but you wouldn't want to shag it. I mean,
at the time everything was, you know, everyone was going
missus statch to this, missus statcha that, and you know,
sort of very obviously preaching to the converted. So we
(02:35):
sort of did it the other way, which is just
to go look at me, aren't I gray? Isn't money gray?
Everything else is rubbish. Only money is good.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
My name is Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to Revisionist History,
where every week I revisit the forgotten and the misunderstood.
In this week's episode, the final episode of our first season,
I want to talk about satire, political satire. We live
(03:13):
in the golden age of satire. It's almost to the
point where we seem to conduct as much of our
political conversation through humor as through the normal media. Remember
Stephen Colbert at the two thousand and six White House
Correspondent Stinner, in character as the conservative talk show host
(03:35):
he was then playing on television. He stands up and
gives a satirical toast to his quote unquote hero, President
George W. Bush.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
I stand by this man. I stand by this man
because he stands four things, not only four things. He
stands on things things like aircraft carriers and rubble and
recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message
that no matter what happens to America, she will always
(04:03):
rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
All the while President Bush sits unhappily on the dais
a few feet from Colbert, squirming and grimacing and looking
like it'd rather be one hundred feet underground. It was
a moment of comic genius. Then there was Tina Fey's
devastating impression of Sarah Palin during the two thousand and
eight campaign, when the Alaskan governor ran on the Republican
presidential ticket with John McCain.
Speaker 6 (04:31):
Well, Alaska and Russia are only separated by a narrow
maritime border. You've got Alaska here and this right, here's water,
and then mess up, there's Russia. So we keep an
eye on them.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Who do you remember now, Sarah Palin herself or Tina
Fey's Palin. I've written opinion pieces for newspapers or magazines,
and there you have to write in somber, reasonable tones.
You're limited. Satire allows you to say almost anything. That's
where truth is spoken to power in our society. When
you sugarcoat a bitter truth with humor, it makes medicine
(05:09):
go down, your audience lets its guard down. Just look
at the way Saturday Night Live has covered Hillary Clinton.
They've ruthlessly zeroed in on her ambition, her humorlessness, her severity,
her opportunism, all the things that have always given people
pause about her.
Speaker 6 (05:27):
You're finally going to announce that you're running for president.
My gosh, I don't know if I have it in me.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
I'm scared. I'm kidding. Let's do this.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Comedians had become our truth tellers. That's what loads of
Money was trying to do. Enfield wanted to tell the
truth about what was happening in England. After Margaret Thatcher
came to power in nineteen seventy nine, she was the
British Ronald Reagan. During her eleven year reign, she took
(06:01):
on British socialism with a vengeance, called it a nanny state.
Her aggression angered and scared a lot of people who
felt that something fundamental about the country's character was being upended,
that something dark and crude had been unearthed, something like
loads of money.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
All he did was have money, shag birds, drink, go
to the opera. That was it kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
I didn't realize that he went to the opera.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Well, he didn't really like the opera, but he liked
it because it was expensive, so he'd liked to be
seen there, you know. So he go up to the
bar and flashes wood, you know, order champagne top, which
is basically like lagertop is a very big drink over here,
which is lago with a bit of lime in the top.
It's something you might get your girlfriend in the pub.
(06:52):
So he'd go to the opera and order a pint
of champagne top.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Loads of Money around in the mid nineteen eighties on
a popular Friday night sketch Carmedy show on British television.
It struck a nerve the first couple of times you
do this sketch, is there is the reaction immediate or
is it kind of bills?
Speaker 2 (07:10):
No, it's absolutely immediate. I mean it was a sort
of live show and so it needed to the big, brash,
loud characters and this was one and people absolutely got
it straight away.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
It's really hard to find someone over the age of
thirty in England who doesn't remember the Loads of Money
theme song. Enfield released it as a lark in nineteen
eighty eight and it was huge, rose to number two
in the British pop charts. The video is a series
(07:41):
of shots of loads of Money marching around with scantily
dressed women, driving fancy cars and sneering at the rest
of the world, all the while waving huge piles of
pound notes. It has three point three million views on YouTube.
(08:07):
There is no op ed, no letter to the editor,
no impassioned essay that gets three point three million views
on YouTube. That's the power of satire. It can go
places that serious discourse cannot. But here's the strange thing.
If you ask Harry Enfield about Loads of Money's legacy,
(08:28):
about what he thinks he accomplished by speaking truth so boldly,
the power. You know what he says, he says it
made no difference. That's what I want to talk about.
Let's call it the loads of money problem.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
You know, I mean, it's great fun to do, but generally,
you know, it's just about questioning what's there. Because we're
allowed to question what's there, so we do. But it
doesn't ever change anyone's mind.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
When Harry Enfield told me he didn't think loads of
Money made any difference, the first person I thought of
Stephen Colbert, not the straight Stephen Colbert of The Current
Late Show, his breakout character, the parody of a right
wing journalist that Colbert played on Comedy Central, first on
the Daily Show and then from two thousand and five
to twenty fourteen on The Colbert Report. Colbert was trying
(09:21):
to do a version of what loads of money was
doing shine a light on something crude in American popular culture.
But you know, I was a guest on The Colbert
Report a few times when I was promoting my books,
and I have to say that there was always something
a bit maybe ambiguous, is the right word, about Colbert's satire.
(09:42):
You go to the studios. They're in Hell's Kitchen in
Manhattan far West Side. You sit in the green room beforehand,
and Colbert comes in to say hello. He's not in character.
He's this warm, charming, nice guy. And I can't stress
the nice part enough. Everyone who meets Stephen Colbert thinks
he's nice. He chats with you, and he warns you
(10:03):
that when you go out on set, he's going to
be someone else. But you don't quite believe him because
you you see this really nice guy in front of you.
Then you get on stage and he really is someone else.
He's now this aggressive right wing talk show host.
Speaker 5 (10:19):
Okay, I'll get straight to my problem with this. Okay,
you know I've got a problem with this, right sure,
I can't come as a surprise to you. Yeah, okay,
the New Yorker. Okay, you think pieces that's you're right,
you write think pieces. Why do you want to make
me think about my dog? I feel about my dog,
and my dog loves me back onconditionally? Why ruin that
(10:42):
with thinking about it?
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Now? You know intellectually that it's satire. He's doing a
parody of a brain dead talk show host. But it
doesn't feel like a parody when you're sitting there. He's
jabbing his finger and raising his one acrobatic eyebrow, and
there I am like a deer in the headlights of satire, blinking.
It's terrifying. I think I went on three times, and
(11:05):
every time I swore I'd never go on again.
Speaker 5 (11:09):
Our dogs?
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Do you have a dog?
Speaker 1 (11:10):
I don't have a dog.
Speaker 5 (11:11):
I don't have a dog.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
My building doesn't allow dogs. I'm an aspirational dog owner, but.
Speaker 5 (11:17):
I really day, had you the ability you would own
a dog.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
I would someday I hoped to own a dog.
Speaker 6 (11:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
I grew up with dogs, and.
Speaker 5 (11:25):
I've you're raised by wolves.
Speaker 6 (11:28):
Grew up with dogs.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
That's what I mean by ambiguous. Am I in on
the joke or the butt of it? I don't know.
The Colbert Report has actually been studied by a communications
scholar named Heather Lamar an assistant professor at Temple University
in Philadelphia. She's part of a group of social scientists
who've made a specialty out of studying how humor operates
(11:50):
in popular culture, and she was drawn to the Colbert
Report for the very reason that I'm talking about that
gap between what you as the audience know intellectually that
he's trying to do and the way his performance feels.
Speaker 7 (12:04):
I have a lot of liberal friends, especially in you know, academia,
but I also have a lot of friends and family
members that are conservative, and I started noticing that they
would talk about the show as if it was equally funny,
but in completely opposite ways.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
It struck her as something worth examining in more detail.
Speaker 7 (12:22):
Why are my Republican friends and family members watching him
every single night and finding him hilarious, but they see
him making fun of liberals and my liberal friends love
him to death. I'm just biggest fans ever and think
it's hilarious that he's making fun of people like Rush
Limbaugh and Bellow Riley.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
As an example, Lamar picks a clip of an interview
Colbert did with a left wing journalist, Amy Goodman. This
is from two thousand and nine.
Speaker 5 (12:49):
Thank you so much for coming of the show.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
It's good to be read you, Steve.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
And now.
Speaker 5 (12:57):
You're a communist right, you're super liberal lefty. They don't
get any more liberal lefty like outside agitator than you
do they.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (13:08):
I think that conservative liberal lines are breaking down.
Speaker 5 (13:12):
Right, yeah, to right and wrong.
Speaker 6 (13:15):
Let me talk about the reddest state.
Speaker 5 (13:17):
Let you do anything you have to earn every inch
of this interview, young lady. Yes, you don't come in
my house and get me to let you do anything.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
During that outburst, Goodman nervously swivels back and forth in
her chair. She starts to smile, but only gets halfway,
so there's a kind of grimace left on her face.
She raises her arm and points it at Colbert, but
then just as quickly takes it down. I know exactly
how she feels.
Speaker 5 (13:43):
I heard you were a fire brand. Will bring it, baby.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
What does Lamar find when she studies audience reactions to
a clip like this? She finds it the more liberal
you are, the more you see Stephen Colbert as a
liberal skewing conservatives. But the more conservative you are, the
more you see Stephen Colbert as a conservative skewing.
Speaker 7 (14:05):
Liberals, so essentially they saw what they wanted to see.
So the big takeaway here of this study was that
this is what we would call motivated cognition or biased perception.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Colbert says to Goodman, you're a communist. That's funny if
you think the joke is on Colbert. It's also funny
if you think Goodman actually is a kind of communist
and someone is finally calling her out on it.
Speaker 7 (14:28):
Yeah, and he's sticking it to a communist. And we
ask those kinds of questions in several different ways, and
every single time, the conservatives and especially the strong conservatives
would say, yeah, it's a joke, but he really kind
of means it, So he really does sort of think
she's a communist, and he really does sort of think
there is a right and a wrong. And I agree
with that, whereas the liberal would be like, oh, yeah,
he's clearly making fun of Bill O'Reilly.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
There's no difference in how funny conservatives and liberals find Colbert.
Speaker 7 (14:55):
And that's part of the magic, right. So that's why
I would say he was a comedic genius.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Lamar loves Colbert, and she thinks that what he accomplished
with the Colbert Report was extraordinary. He created a character
who managed to appeal to all sides of the political
spectrum simultaneously. Do you know how hard that is? Really?
Really hard? But if you think he's somehow winning an
ideological battle, you're wrong.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
By Millow playing.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Songs my neighbourhood parade, guys like gosh, we hadn't made.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
This isn't the first time as this happened with politically
motivated comedy. By the way, almost fifty years ago, when
Norman Lear's All in the Family was the most popular
show in American television, there was a huge debate over
the show's star character, the bigoted, reactionary Archie Bunker.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Isn't anybody else interested in up Poland's standards?
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Oh wild?
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Just coming crumbling down?
Speaker 3 (15:59):
The coons are coming.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Bunker was created to satirize conservative attitudes on race and sexuality,
but in the end, the consensus among social scientists seem
to be that he didn't do that at all. Here's
the conclusion of the best known study on the show.
We found that many persons did not see the program
as a satire on bigotry. All such findings seem to
(16:24):
suggest that the program is more likely reinforcing prejudice and
racism than combating it. It didn't change any minds, and
the same thing happens with loads of money. At one point,
Enfield does a benefit for British nurses who are all
on strike. Nurses in the UK are public sector employees
(16:46):
and they want a modest race, and Thatcher, whose intent
on shrinking the size of the public sector, won't give
it to them. Sweat this benefit. Enfield comes out on
stage as loads of money in his white trainers and
acid washed genes and nylon shell and screams at them
all get back to work, you scum that He burns
a ten pound note on stage and the room of
(17:08):
nurses goes wild. They love it. He's perfectly captured what
they're up against. But the other side, the side they're
up against, they love it too.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
And it got sort of taken on by the Sun,
which was a very right wing paper and the kind
of left wing papers. Basically everyone took it on. Everyone
decided it was theirs, you know, they made him their property.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
So the Sun looked on loads of money quite affectionately.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah, yeah, they thought it was great and it was
a sign of Thatchers Britain that all working class people
were getting richer. That's what they That was the propaganda.
That was how they interpreted it. I guess yeah, which
obviously wasn't really the case. But it was quite funny.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Were you taken by surprise by the reception that loads
of Money got.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
I was, why, well, just because you know, I've done
other characters and they've been all right, but this seemed
to go very big, and it got sort of in
Parliament and then missus Satcha suddenly said we've got loads
of money economy or something, and then the leader of
the opposition said, you know, you've created the loads of money.
(18:21):
And they were both using it. One of them was
using it with pride and the other one with you know, contempt,
and it was odd, very odd. I didn't expect it
at all, Malcolm.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
It really is odd. There are cultural histories written of
the Thatcher years, and invariably they talk about loads of
money and how the character was this great symbol of
the era, and it's clear that enthusiasm for this grotesque
mockery was even greater on the right than it was
on the left. Finally, Enfield just kind of gives up,
(18:52):
Tell me how you killed him off.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Oh, I think he got well. I think I just
stopped doing him. And then we were doing comic relief
over here, and I think we did a sketch where
he got run over. He was run over by a
van on Live Telly for charity.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
The loads of money problem happens because satire is complicated.
It's not like straightforward speech that's easy to decode. It
requires interpretation. That's what draws you in, that's where the
humor lies. But that active interpretation has a cost. How
the Lamar calls this the paradox of satire.
Speaker 7 (19:30):
So the trade off with satire becomes all of the thinking,
or a lot of the thinking becomes devoted to what
the comic means, who the target of the joke is,
and as they interpret that, then they spend less time
thinking about whether that warrants any kind of real consideration
or counter arguing sort of the merits of that message.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
This doesn't happen when you listen to a straightforward discussion
of politics, you just think about the arguments.
Speaker 7 (19:59):
But with satire here you're spending all of your time
thinking about the nature of the comedy, which leaves very
little mental resources available to think about whether the comedy
has truth.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
There's a brilliant essay written on its very subject in
the July twenty thirteen London Review of Books. It's called
Sinking Giggling into the Sea, and it's by the writer
Jonathan Coe. You should read it. Co takes the argument
against satire one step further. He says the effectiveness of
satire is not just undermined by its complicated nature, by
(20:32):
its ambiguity. Co says it's undermined by something else, the
laughter it creates.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
Laughter, in a way, is a kind of last resort.
If you're up against the problem which is completely intractable,
if you're up against the situation for which there is
no human solution and never will be, then okay, let's
laugh about it.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
In say, the Humor of Laurel On Hardy, Co says
that kind of laughing is perfectly appropriate.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
Because when you see them taking on some ridiculous sisyphean task,
like pushing a piano up an endless flight of stairs,
failing time and time again, then you know what they're
asking you to laugh at. There is the human condition
and the intractability of the forces of nature, and the
forces of physics, which we can do nothing about, so
(21:20):
of course we have to laugh with political problems. It's
slightly different. I mean, some political problems are intractable, but
some political problems can be solved, and perhaps instead of
laughing about them, we should try and do something about them.
Speaker 6 (21:35):
I just hope that tonight the lamestream media won't twist
my words by repeating them verbatim.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Back at the beginning, I mentioned Tina Fey's brilliant impersonation
of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. I love those sketches.
I think tinafe is a comic genius, but after listening
to Heather Lamar and Jonathan Coe, I can't help but
think that her comic genius is actually a problem. SNL
brought Tina fe into skewer Palin out of a sense
(22:05):
of outrage that someone this unqualified was running for higher
office in two thousand and eight. Lots of people felt
this way. Palin was the running mate of John McCain,
an elderly senator of uncertain health. She could easily have
been president. SNL was trying to hold Sarah Palin to
some kind of scrutiny to say this is who she is.
(22:28):
But looking back now, I don't think it worked because
Tina Fey is too busy being funny.
Speaker 5 (22:34):
Oh please welcome the lovely Tina Faye.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
In October two thousand and eight, just before the election,
Tina Fey does an interview with the talk show host
David Letterman. Now, you would think with the vote looming,
Fay and Letterman would want to talk about the subject
of her satire, or the intention of her satire, the
fact that someone this unqualified might be less than a
month away from the vice presidency. But they don't. They
(23:02):
talk entirely about the mechanics of Faye's satire.
Speaker 6 (23:06):
She got that crazy accent. It's a little bit far ago,
with a little bit Reese Witherspoon an election. And it
also I tried to base it on my friend Paula's grandma,
because she had her grandma is the sweet, sweet lit
old lady from Joliet, Illinois, and she would always say like,
oh this and that and stuff like that, and I
(23:27):
think that's might be our next president.
Speaker 5 (23:32):
But it's it's It sounded to me a little and
I don't know what the connection would be.
Speaker 6 (23:35):
It sounds a little like Upper Midwest kind of Great
Lakes region. Yeah, she drop in the Jesus, you know,
and her rs or she really loves the you know,
like these terrorists and William yerrs and and uh she
did for those arts. I think she thinks there's oil
in those urs.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
She and J and D.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
They want the laugh, so they make fun of the
way Sarah Palin talks. And the way she talks is
not the problem.
Speaker 6 (24:03):
There's certainly been a strange reaction to it. And then
I've seen people who say, oh, no, you're helping them.
You're helping them because people, it's people. It seems makes
her seem nice or you know, or it's or some
of the Republicans say it's sexist. That's you know, just crazy,
because you have to be able to goof on the
female politicians just as much. Otherwise you really are treating
them like they're like they're weaker or something. And this
(24:25):
Sarah Palin is a tough lady. She kills things, big.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Kills the animals.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Did you catch that? Because you have to be able
to goof on female politicians, goof like the role of
the satirist is to sit on the front porch and
crack wise, why doesn't Tina Fey just come out and
admit that her satire is completely toothless. And then what
happens the very next day, The day after Tina fe
(24:59):
goes on Letterman, Sarah Palin appears as a guest on
Saturday Night Live, right beside Tina Fey.
Speaker 7 (25:06):
No, I'm not going to take any of your questions,
but I do want to take this opportunity to say,
live from New York, it's Saturday Nights.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
They let Sarah Palin in on the joke, and Pale
and Tina Fey dress up in identical red outfits with
little things in their hair and put on identical glasses
because that's even funnier. And what are you left with?
You left with one of the most charming and winning
and hilarious comics of her generation, letting her charisma wash
(25:37):
over her ostensible target, disarming us, Disarming Sarah Palin, And now.
Speaker 6 (25:43):
I'd like to entertain everybody with some fancy pageant walking.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Sure we laughed, but it's kind of heartbreaking, isn't it.
At least Harry Unphil was trying to take a bite
out of the establishment with loads of money, Saturday Night
Live has taken out its dentures and is sipping the
political situation through a straw. Lord help us if some other,
even less qualified and more frightening political figure comes along.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
I think the pleasure that laughter generates can be deceptive.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
That's writer Jonathan Coe again.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
To make an audience laugh is very it's a very solid,
very tangible thing. I think it's it's only after the event,
maybe years after the event, that you pull back and
ask yourself, well, was that the effect that I wanted?
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Jonathan Coe brings up Peter Cook, the legendary English comedian
of the nineteen sixties. Cook was the driving force behind
Beyond the Fringe, the British satirical review. That's really the
spiritual ancestor of shows like Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
What I mean is they're not English, They're not the
English stock.
Speaker 5 (26:43):
I mean you only had a look at the names
Lift of Its ribble Bits, Vessily, and those are English
names they used.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
To Cook later started a comedy club in Soho in
London called The Establishment.
Speaker 4 (26:56):
Peter Cook kind of his genius and also his curse,
was that he he saw all these contradictions as soon
as he started, really, and he was under no illusions
that he was going to change the world through satire,
and yes, the else he used with the establishment was
that he was modeling it all on all those wonderful
Berlin cabarees from the nineteen twenties, which had done so
(27:16):
much to prevent the rise of Hitler and the beginnings
of Nazism.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
There's a television show in Israel called A Wonderful Country
Eretz Nderit. It's been on the air since two thousand
and three. It's satire, very political. The show's writers belong
to the beleaguered Israeli political left. They won a separate
state for Palestinians. They want an end of the Endless Wars.
They worry about the increasing conservative religious influence on the
(27:46):
country's politics. They're ideologically motivated in their humor in the
same way that Harry Enfield and Tina Fey were. But
there's a difference.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
It's more political, and it's a little more rugged and hardcore,
because life in Israel is much more rugged than hardcore.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
That's Mouley Segev, the show's executive producer. A Wonderful Country
airs Friday night at nine after the news. Practically the
whole country watches it.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
The stomach of reality viewers is much more adjustable. You know,
they can adjust too much tougher material. Firstly, because the
news broadcast that is on the air before US shows
so many gruesome stuff and horrible things that naturally the
comedy after that will be the same.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
A wonderful country goes further than the kind of TV
satire that we have in the US or the UK.
Maybe because the stakes are so much higher in Israel.
Maybe in a country with a tortured history, suffering under
constant threat, the boundaries that satire needs to push up
against are more real.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
And we have very very bad reactions sometimes.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Can you give me an example of a sketch that
brought a bad reaction.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Let's say, like a couple of years ago, we made
a sketch that was a parody on a game show
called a One Versus one hundred.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
You know that show One versus one hundred was a
quiz show where one supposedly brilliant contestant known as the One,
squares off against one hundred people sitting in little cubicles
in the audience. The One and the audience are asked
a question and whenever someone in the audience gets it wrong,
they're eliminated. The light in their cubicle goes off and
(29:29):
we can't see them anymore. In A Wonderful Country's version,
the one was the Prime Minister at the time, and
the audience was made up of one hundred and nineteen people.
One hundred and nineteen was a number of Israeli soldiers
who died in the two thousand and six Lebanon War.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
He was asked, why did you go to that war?
Why did you do that? Why did you do that?
And all the hands that he gave was were wrong.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Naturally, it was the one versus the one nineteen, And
with every wrong answer from the Prime Minister, the light
went off underneath one of the soldiers in the audience.
They vanished from sight.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
And that was very graphic and very hard to watch,
but it was but it was imp ot for us
to say so that this war was unnecessary at the time.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Can you imagine Saturday Night Live doing that sketch during
the I Rock War? Of course not. I think we've
forgotten what real satire is in the West. That's real satire.
It uses a comic pretense to land a massive blow.
The first A Wonderful Country sketch I ever Saw was
from five years ago. It was done right at the
(30:34):
time when liberal Israelis began to despair about the direction
of their government under Benjamin Nett and Yahoo. The sketch
I saw is styled in the manner of a government
funded documentary, a kind of promotional video for a new
educational initiative in the schools. It's set in a classroom
full of adorable kindergarten students, seriously adorable a warm and
(30:56):
very compelling teachers at the front of the room Ayom Mirad.
The teacher says, today, kids, we will talk about peace.
Who can tell me what we need to have peace?
Then the kids start to mouth every cliche that the
(31:18):
Israeli right wing uses to justify not negotiating with the Palestinians,
opposing a two state solution, or ignoring world opinion and
continuing to build settlements in the occupied territories. A truly
cute girl with curly hair says, what peace? Who will
we make peace with? There's not even anyone to talk
to on the other side. The teacher replies, that's right, lolly,
(31:41):
there's no one to talk to. Another adorable girl says,
I used to be a lefty, but then I got disillusioned.
The teacher asks, so why is the world angry at us?
A little boy says, our problem is pr and then
he repeats it. The teacher turns to the camera. We
don't want them to grow up ignorant. We teach them
(32:02):
geography from a young age. She points to Israel on
a globe. Here is our tiny little Israel in the
middle least, who knows what we call the rest of
the world, And the children chant in unison, antisemitic sh
(32:23):
It's hard to explain a comedy sketch if I can't
show it to you, though, you can always pause and
go see the whole thing at revisionishistory dot com. And
it's doubly difficult to explain comedy from another country. But
believe me when I say the kindergarten bit is hilarious.
I laughed out loud.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
We tried to put it in this situation where kids
in kindergarten on learning it, and you see how bleak
it is, how sad it is to raise a generation
with no hope. And that's exactly the ideology of N'tagnielle.
Things are only going to get worse. All the world
is against us, we're alone in the world. We have
(33:02):
to build a fortress around us and pray for God
to save us. It's not in our hands. There's nothing
we can do. And that's it for the rest of
your life.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Kids, I said, I laughed out loud the first time
I saw that sketch, but the second time I saw it,
I didn't laugh at all.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
That's what we're aiming for. In a lot of our sketches.
It appears to be funny, and then it sinks in
and you think about it once more, and then maybe
something will touch you and you feel the pain that
you know driven us to write that the fundamental truth
when you think about it, is kind of sad.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Can someone read this sketch the wrong way like Stephen
Colbert got read the wrong way? Could some viewers think
this sketch satirizes left wing is really thinking? Maybe? But
I think the intentions are pretty plain. They're not hard
to decode. We have children mouthing the absurd, dead end
arguments of adults, and if laughter is normally the great distractor,
(34:03):
the laughter dissipates awfully quickly.
Speaker 6 (34:05):
Here.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Satire works best when the satirist has the courage not
just to go for the joke. The teacher says, do
you want to play? Nobody gets to preach to us
about morality. The kids shout out yes, yes. The teacher
(34:28):
pulls out a tambourine and starts chanting the Italians. One
little girl, chance back, they collaborated with the Nazis in
the Holocaust. The teacher chance the French. A child replies,
Vishi regime teacher. The Turks massacred the Armenians, teacher, Norwegians.
(34:48):
And the kids say, killed all the Salmon teachers. So
what do we tell the world? Kids in Unison don't
preach to us about morals?
Speaker 6 (34:58):
H Sam Lord La made no bonos.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
The kids are waving their fists in the air at
this point, shouting in Unison. There is courage in that sketch,
unlike Saturday Night Live on Sarah Palin, which is comedy
done without any courage at all. If there's a lesson
(35:25):
to the ten episodes of this first season of Revisionist History,
it's this that nothing of consequence gets accomplished without courage.
You can't educate the poor without making difficult choices, without
giving up some portion of your own privilege. You can't
be a great basketball player without being willing to look stupid.
(35:46):
You can't heal your church without sacrificing your own career.
You can't even drive a car properly unless you're willing
to acknowledge that you sometimes make mistakes, stupid, involuntary, dumb mistakes.
The path to a better world is hard. Is that depressing?
I don't think so. I think what's depressing is when
(36:08):
we ignore every we think history is trying to tell us.
You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us
on iTunes. You can get more information about this and
(36:29):
other episodes at Revisionististory dot com or on your favorite
podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle, Roxanne Scott,
and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is
composed by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Laon Williams is
our engineer. Our fact checker is Michelle Siaka. Thanks to
(36:50):
the Penalty Management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and my
old and dear friend el Hafe. Jacob Weisberg
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
It was the middle of the eighties and missus Thatcher
was the prime minister here and she was very popular
with the sort of working classes and things, and not
with the lefty middle classes like me.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Harry Enfield, one of England's best known comedians. He's talking
about where he got the inspiration for his most famous character,
a response to the imperious Margaret Thatcher with her barb
and pearls, who unleashed American style capitalism on the UK and.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
The student hippies. We used to live on this council
state in Hackney and we used to go to the
local pub and all the local tradesmen and things always
had huge wards of money and they'd take it out
because they thought we were squatters. We weren't actually squatters,
but we looked like squatters because we worked in television,
so they get their big wards of money outs instead
(01:10):
of you know, flash it at the bar and everything.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Enfield hated Thatcher, hated what she represented, but the power
I took was the power to reduce the power of government.
Enfield and his partner Paul Whitehouse dreamt up a character
to embody Thatcher's England.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
And it sort of just became this sort of thing
really where we just go loads of money about everything.
You know, well, that's loads of money, loads of money that,
loads of money that, and then it became a sort
of phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
His name was loads of money. He was a construction worker,
catapulted to sudden delirious wealth by the eighties building boom.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I've got piles.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
Palls and.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
He chews gum with his mouth open, wears acid washed jeans,
white trainers, a yellow and green nylon jacket with white sleeves,
keys on his belt, drives a white convertible the countryside.
All performed with a kind of cheerful, unstoppable tastelessness.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
I'm in a politics right. All you need to know
about politics. Missus Batch had done a lot good for
the country, but you wouldn't want to shag it. I mean,
at the time everything was, you know, everyone was going
missus statch to this, missus statcha that, and you know,
sort of very obviously preaching to the converted. So we
(02:35):
sort of did it the other way, which is just
to go look at me, aren't I gray? Isn't money gray?
Everything else is rubbish. Only money is good.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
My name is Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to Revisionist History,
where every week I revisit the forgotten and the misunderstood.
In this week's episode, the final episode of our first season,
I want to talk about satire, political satire. We live
(03:13):
in the golden age of satire. It's almost to the
point where we seem to conduct as much of our
political conversation through humor as through the normal media. Remember
Stephen Colbert at the two thousand and six White House
Correspondent Stinner, in character as the conservative talk show host
(03:35):
he was then playing on television. He stands up and
gives a satirical toast to his quote unquote hero, President
George W. Bush.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
I stand by this man. I stand by this man
because he stands four things, not only four things. He
stands on things things like aircraft carriers and rubble and
recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message
that no matter what happens to America, she will always
(04:03):
rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
All the while President Bush sits unhappily on the dais
a few feet from Colbert, squirming and grimacing and looking
like it'd rather be one hundred feet underground. It was
a moment of comic genius. Then there was Tina Fey's
devastating impression of Sarah Palin during the two thousand and
eight campaign, when the Alaskan governor ran on the Republican
presidential ticket with John McCain.
Speaker 6 (04:31):
Well, Alaska and Russia are only separated by a narrow
maritime border. You've got Alaska here and this right, here's water,
and then mess up, there's Russia. So we keep an
eye on them.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
Who do you remember now, Sarah Palin herself or Tina
Fey's Palin. I've written opinion pieces for newspapers or magazines,
and there you have to write in somber, reasonable tones.
You're limited. Satire allows you to say almost anything. That's
where truth is spoken to power in our society. When
you sugarcoat a bitter truth with humor, it makes medicine
(05:09):
go down, your audience lets its guard down. Just look
at the way Saturday Night Live has covered Hillary Clinton.
They've ruthlessly zeroed in on her ambition, her humorlessness, her severity,
her opportunism, all the things that have always given people
pause about her.
Speaker 6 (05:27):
You're finally going to announce that you're running for president.
My gosh, I don't know if I have it in me.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
I'm scared. I'm kidding. Let's do this.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Comedians had become our truth tellers. That's what loads of
Money was trying to do. Enfield wanted to tell the
truth about what was happening in England. After Margaret Thatcher
came to power in nineteen seventy nine, she was the
British Ronald Reagan. During her eleven year reign, she took
(06:01):
on British socialism with a vengeance, called it a nanny state.
Her aggression angered and scared a lot of people who
felt that something fundamental about the country's character was being upended,
that something dark and crude had been unearthed, something like
loads of money.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
All he did was have money, shag birds, drink, go
to the opera. That was it kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
I didn't realize that he went to the opera.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Well, he didn't really like the opera, but he liked
it because it was expensive, so he'd liked to be
seen there, you know. So he go up to the
bar and flashes wood, you know, order champagne top, which
is basically like lagertop is a very big drink over here,
which is lago with a bit of lime in the top.
It's something you might get your girlfriend in the pub.
(06:52):
So he'd go to the opera and order a pint
of champagne top.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Loads of Money around in the mid nineteen eighties on
a popular Friday night sketch Carmedy show on British television.
It struck a nerve the first couple of times you
do this sketch, is there is the reaction immediate or
is it kind of bills?
Speaker 2 (07:10):
No, it's absolutely immediate. I mean it was a sort
of live show and so it needed to the big, brash,
loud characters and this was one and people absolutely got
it straight away.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
It's really hard to find someone over the age of
thirty in England who doesn't remember the Loads of Money
theme song. Enfield released it as a lark in nineteen
eighty eight and it was huge, rose to number two
in the British pop charts. The video is a series
(07:41):
of shots of loads of Money marching around with scantily
dressed women, driving fancy cars and sneering at the rest
of the world, all the while waving huge piles of
pound notes. It has three point three million views on YouTube.
(08:07):
There is no op ed, no letter to the editor,
no impassioned essay that gets three point three million views
on YouTube. That's the power of satire. It can go
places that serious discourse cannot. But here's the strange thing.
If you ask Harry Enfield about Loads of Money's legacy,
(08:28):
about what he thinks he accomplished by speaking truth so boldly,
the power. You know what he says, he says it
made no difference. That's what I want to talk about.
Let's call it the loads of money problem.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
You know, I mean, it's great fun to do, but generally,
you know, it's just about questioning what's there. Because we're
allowed to question what's there, so we do. But it
doesn't ever change anyone's mind.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
When Harry Enfield told me he didn't think loads of
Money made any difference, the first person I thought of
Stephen Colbert, not the straight Stephen Colbert of The Current
Late Show, his breakout character, the parody of a right
wing journalist that Colbert played on Comedy Central, first on
the Daily Show and then from two thousand and five
to twenty fourteen on The Colbert Report. Colbert was trying
(09:21):
to do a version of what loads of money was
doing shine a light on something crude in American popular culture.
But you know, I was a guest on The Colbert
Report a few times when I was promoting my books,
and I have to say that there was always something
a bit maybe ambiguous, is the right word, about Colbert's satire.
(09:42):
You go to the studios. They're in Hell's Kitchen in
Manhattan far West Side. You sit in the green room beforehand,
and Colbert comes in to say hello. He's not in character.
He's this warm, charming, nice guy. And I can't stress
the nice part enough. Everyone who meets Stephen Colbert thinks
he's nice. He chats with you, and he warns you
(10:03):
that when you go out on set, he's going to
be someone else. But you don't quite believe him because
you you see this really nice guy in front of you.
Then you get on stage and he really is someone else.
He's now this aggressive right wing talk show host.
Speaker 5 (10:19):
Okay, I'll get straight to my problem with this. Okay,
you know I've got a problem with this, right sure,
I can't come as a surprise to you. Yeah, okay,
the New Yorker. Okay, you think pieces that's you're right,
you write think pieces. Why do you want to make
me think about my dog? I feel about my dog,
and my dog loves me back onconditionally? Why ruin that
(10:42):
with thinking about it?
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Now? You know intellectually that it's satire. He's doing a
parody of a brain dead talk show host. But it
doesn't feel like a parody when you're sitting there. He's
jabbing his finger and raising his one acrobatic eyebrow, and
there I am like a deer in the headlights of satire, blinking.
It's terrifying. I think I went on three times, and
(11:05):
every time I swore I'd never go on again.
Speaker 5 (11:09):
Our dogs?
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Do you have a dog?
Speaker 1 (11:10):
I don't have a dog.
Speaker 5 (11:11):
I don't have a dog.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
My building doesn't allow dogs. I'm an aspirational dog owner, but.
Speaker 5 (11:17):
I really day, had you the ability you would own
a dog.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
I would someday I hoped to own a dog.
Speaker 6 (11:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
I grew up with dogs, and.
Speaker 5 (11:25):
I've you're raised by wolves.
Speaker 6 (11:28):
Grew up with dogs.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
That's what I mean by ambiguous. Am I in on
the joke or the butt of it? I don't know.
The Colbert Report has actually been studied by a communications
scholar named Heather Lamar an assistant professor at Temple University
in Philadelphia. She's part of a group of social scientists
who've made a specialty out of studying how humor operates
(11:50):
in popular culture, and she was drawn to the Colbert
Report for the very reason that I'm talking about that
gap between what you as the audience know intellectually that
he's trying to do and the way his performance feels.
Speaker 7 (12:04):
I have a lot of liberal friends, especially in you know, academia,
but I also have a lot of friends and family
members that are conservative, and I started noticing that they
would talk about the show as if it was equally funny,
but in completely opposite ways.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
It struck her as something worth examining in more detail.
Speaker 7 (12:22):
Why are my Republican friends and family members watching him
every single night and finding him hilarious, but they see
him making fun of liberals and my liberal friends love
him to death. I'm just biggest fans ever and think
it's hilarious that he's making fun of people like Rush
Limbaugh and Bellow Riley.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
As an example, Lamar picks a clip of an interview
Colbert did with a left wing journalist, Amy Goodman. This
is from two thousand and nine.
Speaker 5 (12:49):
Thank you so much for coming of the show.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
It's good to be read you, Steve.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
And now.
Speaker 5 (12:57):
You're a communist right, you're super liberal lefty. They don't
get any more liberal lefty like outside agitator than you
do they.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (13:08):
I think that conservative liberal lines are breaking down.
Speaker 5 (13:12):
Right, yeah, to right and wrong.
Speaker 6 (13:15):
Let me talk about the reddest state.
Speaker 5 (13:17):
Let you do anything you have to earn every inch
of this interview, young lady. Yes, you don't come in
my house and get me to let you do anything.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
During that outburst, Goodman nervously swivels back and forth in
her chair. She starts to smile, but only gets halfway,
so there's a kind of grimace left on her face.
She raises her arm and points it at Colbert, but
then just as quickly takes it down. I know exactly
how she feels.
Speaker 5 (13:43):
I heard you were a fire brand. Will bring it, baby.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
What does Lamar find when she studies audience reactions to
a clip like this? She finds it the more liberal
you are, the more you see Stephen Colbert as a
liberal skewing conservatives. But the more conservative you are, the
more you see Stephen Colbert as a conservative skewing.
Speaker 7 (14:05):
Liberals, so essentially they saw what they wanted to see.
So the big takeaway here of this study was that
this is what we would call motivated cognition or biased perception.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Colbert says to Goodman, you're a communist. That's funny if
you think the joke is on Colbert. It's also funny
if you think Goodman actually is a kind of communist
and someone is finally calling her out on it.
Speaker 7 (14:28):
Yeah, and he's sticking it to a communist. And we
ask those kinds of questions in several different ways, and
every single time, the conservatives and especially the strong conservatives
would say, yeah, it's a joke, but he really kind
of means it, So he really does sort of think
she's a communist, and he really does sort of think
there is a right and a wrong. And I agree
with that, whereas the liberal would be like, oh, yeah,
he's clearly making fun of Bill O'Reilly.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
There's no difference in how funny conservatives and liberals find Colbert.
Speaker 7 (14:55):
And that's part of the magic, right. So that's why
I would say he was a comedic genius.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Lamar loves Colbert, and she thinks that what he accomplished
with the Colbert Report was extraordinary. He created a character
who managed to appeal to all sides of the political
spectrum simultaneously. Do you know how hard that is? Really?
Really hard? But if you think he's somehow winning an
ideological battle, you're wrong.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
By Millow playing.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Songs my neighbourhood parade, guys like gosh, we hadn't made.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
This isn't the first time as this happened with politically
motivated comedy. By the way, almost fifty years ago, when
Norman Lear's All in the Family was the most popular
show in American television, there was a huge debate over
the show's star character, the bigoted, reactionary Archie Bunker.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Isn't anybody else interested in up Poland's standards?
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Oh wild?
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Just coming crumbling down?
Speaker 3 (15:59):
The coons are coming.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Bunker was created to satirize conservative attitudes on race and sexuality,
but in the end, the consensus among social scientists seem
to be that he didn't do that at all. Here's
the conclusion of the best known study on the show.
We found that many persons did not see the program
as a satire on bigotry. All such findings seem to
(16:24):
suggest that the program is more likely reinforcing prejudice and
racism than combating it. It didn't change any minds, and
the same thing happens with loads of money. At one point,
Enfield does a benefit for British nurses who are all
on strike. Nurses in the UK are public sector employees
(16:46):
and they want a modest race, and Thatcher, whose intent
on shrinking the size of the public sector, won't give
it to them. Sweat this benefit. Enfield comes out on
stage as loads of money in his white trainers and
acid washed genes and nylon shell and screams at them
all get back to work, you scum that He burns
a ten pound note on stage and the room of
(17:08):
nurses goes wild. They love it. He's perfectly captured what
they're up against. But the other side, the side they're
up against, they love it too.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
And it got sort of taken on by the Sun,
which was a very right wing paper and the kind
of left wing papers. Basically everyone took it on. Everyone
decided it was theirs, you know, they made him their property.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
So the Sun looked on loads of money quite affectionately.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah, yeah, they thought it was great and it was
a sign of Thatchers Britain that all working class people
were getting richer. That's what they That was the propaganda.
That was how they interpreted it. I guess yeah, which
obviously wasn't really the case. But it was quite funny.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Were you taken by surprise by the reception that loads
of Money got.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
I was, why, well, just because you know, I've done
other characters and they've been all right, but this seemed
to go very big, and it got sort of in
Parliament and then missus Satcha suddenly said we've got loads
of money economy or something, and then the leader of
the opposition said, you know, you've created the loads of money.
(18:21):
And they were both using it. One of them was
using it with pride and the other one with you know, contempt,
and it was odd, very odd. I didn't expect it
at all, Malcolm.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
It really is odd. There are cultural histories written of
the Thatcher years, and invariably they talk about loads of
money and how the character was this great symbol of
the era, and it's clear that enthusiasm for this grotesque
mockery was even greater on the right than it was
on the left. Finally, Enfield just kind of gives up,
(18:52):
Tell me how you killed him off.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Oh, I think he got well. I think I just
stopped doing him. And then we were doing comic relief
over here, and I think we did a sketch where
he got run over. He was run over by a
van on Live Telly for charity.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
The loads of money problem happens because satire is complicated.
It's not like straightforward speech that's easy to decode. It
requires interpretation. That's what draws you in, that's where the
humor lies. But that active interpretation has a cost. How
the Lamar calls this the paradox of satire.
Speaker 7 (19:30):
So the trade off with satire becomes all of the thinking,
or a lot of the thinking becomes devoted to what
the comic means, who the target of the joke is,
and as they interpret that, then they spend less time
thinking about whether that warrants any kind of real consideration
or counter arguing sort of the merits of that message.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
This doesn't happen when you listen to a straightforward discussion
of politics, you just think about the arguments.
Speaker 7 (19:59):
But with satire here you're spending all of your time
thinking about the nature of the comedy, which leaves very
little mental resources available to think about whether the comedy
has truth.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
There's a brilliant essay written on its very subject in
the July twenty thirteen London Review of Books. It's called
Sinking Giggling into the Sea, and it's by the writer
Jonathan Coe. You should read it. Co takes the argument
against satire one step further. He says the effectiveness of
satire is not just undermined by its complicated nature, by
(20:32):
its ambiguity. Co says it's undermined by something else, the
laughter it creates.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
Laughter, in a way, is a kind of last resort.
If you're up against the problem which is completely intractable,
if you're up against the situation for which there is
no human solution and never will be, then okay, let's
laugh about it.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
In say, the Humor of Laurel On Hardy, Co says
that kind of laughing is perfectly appropriate.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
Because when you see them taking on some ridiculous sisyphean task,
like pushing a piano up an endless flight of stairs,
failing time and time again, then you know what they're
asking you to laugh at. There is the human condition
and the intractability of the forces of nature, and the
forces of physics, which we can do nothing about, so
(21:20):
of course we have to laugh with political problems. It's
slightly different. I mean, some political problems are intractable, but
some political problems can be solved, and perhaps instead of
laughing about them, we should try and do something about them.
Speaker 6 (21:35):
I just hope that tonight the lamestream media won't twist
my words by repeating them verbatim.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Back at the beginning, I mentioned Tina Fey's brilliant impersonation
of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. I love those sketches.
I think tinafe is a comic genius, but after listening
to Heather Lamar and Jonathan Coe, I can't help but
think that her comic genius is actually a problem. SNL
brought Tina fe into skewer Palin out of a sense
(22:05):
of outrage that someone this unqualified was running for higher
office in two thousand and eight. Lots of people felt
this way. Palin was the running mate of John McCain,
an elderly senator of uncertain health. She could easily have
been president. SNL was trying to hold Sarah Palin to
some kind of scrutiny to say this is who she is.
(22:28):
But looking back now, I don't think it worked because
Tina Fey is too busy being funny.
Speaker 5 (22:34):
Oh please welcome the lovely Tina Faye.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
In October two thousand and eight, just before the election,
Tina Fey does an interview with the talk show host
David Letterman. Now, you would think with the vote looming,
Fay and Letterman would want to talk about the subject
of her satire, or the intention of her satire, the
fact that someone this unqualified might be less than a
month away from the vice presidency. But they don't. They
(23:02):
talk entirely about the mechanics of Faye's satire.
Speaker 6 (23:06):
She got that crazy accent. It's a little bit far ago,
with a little bit Reese Witherspoon an election. And it
also I tried to base it on my friend Paula's grandma,
because she had her grandma is the sweet, sweet lit
old lady from Joliet, Illinois, and she would always say like,
oh this and that and stuff like that, and I
(23:27):
think that's might be our next president.
Speaker 5 (23:32):
But it's it's It sounded to me a little and
I don't know what the connection would be.
Speaker 6 (23:35):
It sounds a little like Upper Midwest kind of Great
Lakes region. Yeah, she drop in the Jesus, you know,
and her rs or she really loves the you know,
like these terrorists and William yerrs and and uh she
did for those arts. I think she thinks there's oil
in those urs.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
She and J and D.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
They want the laugh, so they make fun of the
way Sarah Palin talks. And the way she talks is
not the problem.
Speaker 6 (24:03):
There's certainly been a strange reaction to it. And then
I've seen people who say, oh, no, you're helping them.
You're helping them because people, it's people. It seems makes
her seem nice or you know, or it's or some
of the Republicans say it's sexist. That's you know, just crazy,
because you have to be able to goof on the
female politicians just as much. Otherwise you really are treating
them like they're like they're weaker or something. And this
(24:25):
Sarah Palin is a tough lady. She kills things, big.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Kills the animals.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Did you catch that? Because you have to be able
to goof on female politicians, goof like the role of
the satirist is to sit on the front porch and
crack wise, why doesn't Tina Fey just come out and
admit that her satire is completely toothless. And then what
happens the very next day, The day after Tina fe
(24:59):
goes on Letterman, Sarah Palin appears as a guest on
Saturday Night Live, right beside Tina Fey.
Speaker 7 (25:06):
No, I'm not going to take any of your questions,
but I do want to take this opportunity to say,
live from New York, it's Saturday Nights.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
They let Sarah Palin in on the joke, and Pale
and Tina Fey dress up in identical red outfits with
little things in their hair and put on identical glasses
because that's even funnier. And what are you left with?
You left with one of the most charming and winning
and hilarious comics of her generation, letting her charisma wash
(25:37):
over her ostensible target, disarming us, Disarming Sarah Palin, And now.
Speaker 6 (25:43):
I'd like to entertain everybody with some fancy pageant walking.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Sure we laughed, but it's kind of heartbreaking, isn't it.
At least Harry Unphil was trying to take a bite
out of the establishment with loads of money, Saturday Night
Live has taken out its dentures and is sipping the
political situation through a straw. Lord help us if some other,
even less qualified and more frightening political figure comes along.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
I think the pleasure that laughter generates can be deceptive.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
That's writer Jonathan Coe again.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
To make an audience laugh is very it's a very solid,
very tangible thing. I think it's it's only after the event,
maybe years after the event, that you pull back and
ask yourself, well, was that the effect that I wanted?
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Jonathan Coe brings up Peter Cook, the legendary English comedian
of the nineteen sixties. Cook was the driving force behind
Beyond the Fringe, the British satirical review. That's really the
spiritual ancestor of shows like Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
What I mean is they're not English, They're not the
English stock.
Speaker 5 (26:43):
I mean you only had a look at the names
Lift of Its ribble Bits, Vessily, and those are English
names they used.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
To Cook later started a comedy club in Soho in
London called The Establishment.
Speaker 4 (26:56):
Peter Cook kind of his genius and also his curse,
was that he he saw all these contradictions as soon
as he started, really, and he was under no illusions
that he was going to change the world through satire,
and yes, the else he used with the establishment was
that he was modeling it all on all those wonderful
Berlin cabarees from the nineteen twenties, which had done so
(27:16):
much to prevent the rise of Hitler and the beginnings
of Nazism.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
There's a television show in Israel called A Wonderful Country
Eretz Nderit. It's been on the air since two thousand
and three. It's satire, very political. The show's writers belong
to the beleaguered Israeli political left. They won a separate
state for Palestinians. They want an end of the Endless Wars.
They worry about the increasing conservative religious influence on the
(27:46):
country's politics. They're ideologically motivated in their humor in the
same way that Harry Enfield and Tina Fey were. But
there's a difference.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
It's more political, and it's a little more rugged and hardcore,
because life in Israel is much more rugged than hardcore.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
That's Mouley Segev, the show's executive producer. A Wonderful Country
airs Friday night at nine after the news. Practically the
whole country watches it.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
The stomach of reality viewers is much more adjustable. You know,
they can adjust too much tougher material. Firstly, because the
news broadcast that is on the air before US shows
so many gruesome stuff and horrible things that naturally the
comedy after that will be the same.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
A wonderful country goes further than the kind of TV
satire that we have in the US or the UK.
Maybe because the stakes are so much higher in Israel.
Maybe in a country with a tortured history, suffering under
constant threat, the boundaries that satire needs to push up
against are more real.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
And we have very very bad reactions sometimes.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Can you give me an example of a sketch that
brought a bad reaction.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Let's say, like a couple of years ago, we made
a sketch that was a parody on a game show
called a One Versus one hundred.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
You know that show One versus one hundred was a
quiz show where one supposedly brilliant contestant known as the One,
squares off against one hundred people sitting in little cubicles
in the audience. The One and the audience are asked
a question and whenever someone in the audience gets it wrong,
they're eliminated. The light in their cubicle goes off and
(29:29):
we can't see them anymore. In A Wonderful Country's version,
the one was the Prime Minister at the time, and
the audience was made up of one hundred and nineteen people.
One hundred and nineteen was a number of Israeli soldiers
who died in the two thousand and six Lebanon War.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
He was asked, why did you go to that war?
Why did you do that? Why did you do that?
And all the hands that he gave was were wrong.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Naturally, it was the one versus the one nineteen, And
with every wrong answer from the Prime Minister, the light
went off underneath one of the soldiers in the audience.
They vanished from sight.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
And that was very graphic and very hard to watch,
but it was but it was imp ot for us
to say so that this war was unnecessary at the time.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Can you imagine Saturday Night Live doing that sketch during
the I Rock War? Of course not. I think we've
forgotten what real satire is in the West. That's real satire.
It uses a comic pretense to land a massive blow.
The first A Wonderful Country sketch I ever Saw was
from five years ago. It was done right at the
(30:34):
time when liberal Israelis began to despair about the direction
of their government under Benjamin Nett and Yahoo. The sketch
I saw is styled in the manner of a government
funded documentary, a kind of promotional video for a new
educational initiative in the schools. It's set in a classroom
full of adorable kindergarten students, seriously adorable a warm and
(30:56):
very compelling teachers at the front of the room Ayom Mirad.
The teacher says, today, kids, we will talk about peace.
Who can tell me what we need to have peace?
Then the kids start to mouth every cliche that the
(31:18):
Israeli right wing uses to justify not negotiating with the Palestinians,
opposing a two state solution, or ignoring world opinion and
continuing to build settlements in the occupied territories. A truly
cute girl with curly hair says, what peace? Who will
we make peace with? There's not even anyone to talk
to on the other side. The teacher replies, that's right, lolly,
(31:41):
there's no one to talk to. Another adorable girl says,
I used to be a lefty, but then I got disillusioned.
The teacher asks, so why is the world angry at us?
A little boy says, our problem is pr and then
he repeats it. The teacher turns to the camera. We
don't want them to grow up ignorant. We teach them
(32:02):
geography from a young age. She points to Israel on
a globe. Here is our tiny little Israel in the
middle least, who knows what we call the rest of
the world, And the children chant in unison, antisemitic sh
(32:23):
It's hard to explain a comedy sketch if I can't
show it to you, though, you can always pause and
go see the whole thing at revisionishistory dot com. And
it's doubly difficult to explain comedy from another country. But
believe me when I say the kindergarten bit is hilarious.
I laughed out loud.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
We tried to put it in this situation where kids
in kindergarten on learning it, and you see how bleak
it is, how sad it is to raise a generation
with no hope. And that's exactly the ideology of N'tagnielle.
Things are only going to get worse. All the world
is against us, we're alone in the world. We have
(33:02):
to build a fortress around us and pray for God
to save us. It's not in our hands. There's nothing
we can do. And that's it for the rest of
your life.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Kids, I said, I laughed out loud the first time
I saw that sketch, but the second time I saw it,
I didn't laugh at all.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
That's what we're aiming for. In a lot of our sketches.
It appears to be funny, and then it sinks in
and you think about it once more, and then maybe
something will touch you and you feel the pain that
you know driven us to write that the fundamental truth
when you think about it, is kind of sad.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Can someone read this sketch the wrong way like Stephen
Colbert got read the wrong way? Could some viewers think
this sketch satirizes left wing is really thinking? Maybe? But
I think the intentions are pretty plain. They're not hard
to decode. We have children mouthing the absurd, dead end
arguments of adults, and if laughter is normally the great distractor,
(34:03):
the laughter dissipates awfully quickly.
Speaker 6 (34:05):
Here.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Satire works best when the satirist has the courage not
just to go for the joke. The teacher says, do
you want to play? Nobody gets to preach to us
about morality. The kids shout out yes, yes. The teacher
(34:28):
pulls out a tambourine and starts chanting the Italians. One
little girl, chance back, they collaborated with the Nazis in
the Holocaust. The teacher chance the French. A child replies,
Vishi regime teacher. The Turks massacred the Armenians, teacher, Norwegians.
(34:48):
And the kids say, killed all the Salmon teachers. So
what do we tell the world? Kids in Unison don't
preach to us about morals?
Speaker 6 (34:58):
H Sam Lord La made no bonos.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
The kids are waving their fists in the air at
this point, shouting in Unison. There is courage in that sketch,
unlike Saturday Night Live on Sarah Palin, which is comedy
done without any courage at all. If there's a lesson
(35:25):
to the ten episodes of this first season of Revisionist History,
it's this that nothing of consequence gets accomplished without courage.
You can't educate the poor without making difficult choices, without
giving up some portion of your own privilege. You can't
be a great basketball player without being willing to look stupid.
(35:46):
You can't heal your church without sacrificing your own career.
You can't even drive a car properly unless you're willing
to acknowledge that you sometimes make mistakes, stupid, involuntary, dumb mistakes.
The path to a better world is hard. Is that depressing?
I don't think so. I think what's depressing is when
(36:08):
we ignore every we think history is trying to tell us.
You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us
on iTunes. You can get more information about this and
(36:29):
other episodes at Revisionististory dot com or on your favorite
podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle, Roxanne Scott,
and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is
composed by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Laon Williams is
our engineer. Our fact checker is Michelle Siaka. Thanks to
(36:50):
the Penalty Management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and my
old and dear friend el Hafe. Jacob Weisberg
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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