The President has little tolerance for mockery. Photo by Martin Pope/Getty Images
How long before mockery and derision become a crime in the United States? Not that they are much in evidence now. Last month, the US comedian Stephen Colbert had his Late Show cancelled after nearly 10 years. It is widely suspected that the cancellation was motivated partly by executives’ desire to appease Donald Trump, whom Colbert frequently satirised. As Trump said at the time, “Colbert has no talent, Fallon has no talent, Kimmel has no talent, they’re next, I hear they’re going to be going.”
Admittedly, there lacks a vigorous tradition of satire in the nation: their impulse is always to affirm rather than deflate. Satire is thus at odds with the idealising tendency of American culture. It’s the opposite of that most depressing type of humour, good clean fun. The days of the great Tom Lehrer, who sang of chopping up babies and poisoning pigeons in the park, are long gone. For all his admirable readiness to speak up against power, Stephen Colbert is no Frankie Boyle and David Letterman is no Stewart Lee.
England, by contrast with the States, boasts of a rich lineage of satirists — from Chaucer, Ben Jonson and Dryden to Pope, Swift, Byron, Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis. (Waugh hasn’t always received the recognition he deserves: a few years ago, on a radio quiz show, the contestants were asked who he was, to which one of them replied “Hitler’s girlfriend”.) And over the centuries, a good many English politicians have feared the lampoons of Grub Street hacks, many of whom wrote anonymously or pseudonymously to avoid the wrath of the state. The satirist is a scourge of vice, but he punishes you by making you look pathetic rather than wicked. Stephen Colbert belongs in this distinguished company.
It’s common enough in political circles to hear people complain that “words just aren’t enough, we need to do something”. But authoritarian regimes have never underestimated the power of words, which can be as much a form of action as tearing down a fence. If all the supporters of Palestine Action were to hold placards reading “Plasticine Action”, as one protesting satirist did recently, the police might be forced to hire literary critics to determine whether this constituted a criminal offence. And what — as happened with another wag — if the words “Palestine” and “Action” appeared at different places on a sign? Perhaps the police would suggest there were nefarious intentions here; but appeals of this kind can always be taken too far, as with the police officer some years ago who arrested an anti-Royalist carrying a blank placard on the grounds that they may have intended to write something on it just before the royal limousine sailed past. It’s what one might call a subjunctive theory of crime — crimes that might be committed, thus allowing you to arrest anyone with saliva on the grounds that they might spit in someone’s face.
Satire mauls its object rather than elevates it, and is often too negative to be enjoyable. Swift’s suggestion that the starving Irish should cook and eat their own children stretches the permissible almost to breaking-point, fuelled as it is by a furious sadistic energy. But Waugh and Amis can be extremely funny, and in any case all humour has a utopian dimension, however scurrilous and abrasive it might be. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, not the most rib-tickling of English authors, describes laughter as “sudden glory”. One might see it as the language of the body, as language proper disintegrates into a set of meaningless grunts or chortles and the body dissolves to the uncoordinated state of an infant. Comedy is, quite literally, a bodily disorder. The symmetry of everyday life encounters a sudden contradiction or incongruity, which means that for a precious moment we can stop investing our unconscious energy in the business of keeping things shipshape and release the energy we’ve saved in the form of laughter.
This melting away of meaning and coherence is part of humour’s subversive effect, since disorderly bodies of one kind or another have always been a target for authority. Laughter signalling a loss of self-discipline, is potentially dangerous. The body must be smoothly coordinated, as well as appropriately clothed. In the days when men regularly wore ties, the rebels and dissenters among them took to wearing roll-neck sweaters. This meant that you weren’t wearing a tie, thus preserving your nonconformity, but nobody could see that you weren’t, thus satisfying convention. There was anxiety as well as insolence in the question of the American reporter who asked President Zelensky why he wasn’t wearing a suit.
But humour can do more than question the status quo. It can also outline an alternative to it, one in which the sharing of pleasure and friendship becomes an end in itself, and is thus akin to art. Jokes might impress or cajole or disarm, but, like play in general, most don’t get you anywhere. But they can as a critique of a civilisation in which getting somewhere is considered a sacred obligation. To mention Dante’s great poem is to recall that the word “comedy” can have a deeper meaning than anything that can be found in Derry Girls. The Divine Comedy doesn’t yield the reader many laughs, unless seeing people tortured in hell makes you chuckle, but that’s not what the poem’s title means. It refers to a condition in which all things are fundamentally well, whatever appearances to the contrary may suggest. It’s from this sense of serenity that true humour springs, so that the two meanings of “comic” converge.
If Donald Trump really wants to be a king, he should stop bullying satirists and find himself that most indispensable member of any royal entourage, a Fool. Though arguably the American President already has one: himself. Like Boris Johnson, he’s both monarch and clown, switching in a second from regal petulance to baby talk. He’s retained the cap of the traditional Fool but not the bells. Jesters, though, do more than make their masters laugh. His job is also to cut him savagely down to size, as with the Fool in King Lear. He holds up a mirror to the monarch’s feebleness and finitude, which most autocrats hardly find gratifying. When the distraught Lear cries: “Who is it who can tell me who I am?” The Fool replies “Lear’s shadow”, meaning that the king is a shadow of his former self but also that he, the Fool, who shadows his master wherever he goes, is the only one who can resolve the problem of his identity. When power goes mad, only the riddling, enigmatic talk of the jester is able to penetrate it. When it threatens to expand almost beyond limit, the satirist must step in to debunk and deflate it.
The Fool punctures the grandiose delusions of power by reminding it that it has a body and is therefore vulnerable. Just as we can never truly see our bodies in the round, so we can never entirely integrate them into our consciousness. The body hovers between being subject and object, and part of the jester’s task is to remind the rulers of this crippling incongruity. It’s this that Lear discovers in his wanderings on the heath. He thought he was everything, he mutters, but he is not “ague-proof”. Power is mortal, potentially diseased and desperately fragile, even though it behaves as though it will live forever.
Trump, having survived an assassination attempt, behaves like he is invincible. But you have to find some way of anticipating your death if you’re to live fully. To acknowledge a limit is to begin to transcend it. But Trump isn’t a man for limits or defects. Everything in his manically hyperbolic universe is fine, beautiful, fantastic, best ever, gonna be great. That’s why he needs the Colberts of this world, and also why he can’t abide them.
