by Andrew Pipe

In my experience, comedians are only ever capable of paying their colleagues backhanded compliments.

My own personal favourite was when the Aussie comic Brendon Burns was talking to an audience member after a show we'd both performed at.

He told them: ‘I don't follow the news. If I ever want to know what's going on in the world, I just go and see Pipey.’ My heart melted. I'd never heard him gush like that before. I realised in that moment that I could be an alternative news source as well as an alternative comedian.

When I was a kid, television delivered a shared source of news. We all watched the same programmes, lived through the same news cycle and inhabited our own perceived version of reality based on that shared information. 

Today, algorithmic content has turned the news into something more sinister. It has effectively become a diagnostic tool for the individual viewer's own particular pathology.

The Renee Good shooting in Minneapolis back in January is about as striking and tragic an example as there could be. One version saw footage of a woman weaponising her vehicle against law enforcement and the other a completely innocent 37-year-old mother being shot to death by an untrained ICE thug in broad daylight. 

The remarkable thing was that both sides could point to the same footage; TikTok, X, YouTube, Facebook and, increasingly, the legacy media itself are competing for our attention. So once your personalised algorithm discovers which version of reality fits your existing narrative – especially if it makes you angry or morally indignant – that's the reality it keeps feeding you.

The nightly news has effectively become a Rorschach test. Some people look at a standard pattern inkblot and see a vase, others see a butterfly. Someone with a completely different pathology will look at the same inkblot and see their paternal grandmother giving Napoleon a blowjob...for instance.

Algorithms don't need to tell you what happened so much as work out what you're prepared to believe. 

And that's where I think live comedy has acquired an unexpected importance. In a comedy club, people sit in the same room listening to the same person talking about the same world. The alternative news source becomes a shared experience once again. 

The American satirist Bill Hicks famously described himself as ‘Chomsky with dick jokes’. He was referring, of course, to the linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky, whose work has spent a lifetime encouraging us to question power, interrogate institutions and distrust official narratives — which makes the recent revelations that he maintained close social ties with Jeffrey Epstein uncomfortable for anybody who regarded Chomsky as either a moral or intellectual authority.

When I was growing up in the mid-70s, the now notorious ITV show The Comedians was in its full pomp. Casual racism, like a similarly misguided and toxic misogyny, was tolerated by producers and audiences alike. The British alternative comedy revolution that inspired youngsters like me in the late 1970s grew out of that particular political moment, and comedians like Alexei Sayle and Arnold Brown began making stand-up comedy out of something else entirely.

By the time I became a professional comedian during the mid-1990s post-alternative boom, the lines between mainstream and alternative were beginning to blur again. The alternative comedy I grew up with had become an orthodoxy of its own and once an alternative becomes an orthodoxy, somebody has to start taking the piss out of the orthodoxy.

One of the reasons the first two seasons of Saturday Night Live in the United States were so powerful wasn’t so much that the satire was funny. There was a tangible fury following the Watergate scandal that had brought down Richard Nixon. Chevy Chase's savage depiction of the hapless Gerald Ford was hilarious partly because the righteous indignation behind the joke was real. Ford's pardon of Nixon had created genuine anger across America. 

Satire took that anger and reflected it back to the public through the distorting lens of comedy. That's why I've always regarded Lewis Carroll's Looking Glass as an essential comedy-writing metaphor. Politics goes through the filter and comes back looking like the comedy grotesque it only ever was.

Nixon understood the dangers of satire, which is why his enemies list contained not just politicians, journalists and activists, but people from the entertainment world as well. The great Dick Gregory was on it, while Hunter S. Thompson was at the same time bitterly disappointed that he wasn't. More recently, we've witnessed something with an uncomfortable familiarity.

Stephen Colbert's Late Show was cancelled by CBS/Paramount. Jimmy Kimmel's programme was suspended amid political pressure. Neither was literally banned by Trump, but the distinction may ultimately be less important than the atmosphere in which political pressure is brought to bear on comedians.

The fact of the matter is that you don't necessarily have to arrest a comedian in order to silence them. The environment in which the comedian operates can be made sufficiently uncomfortable until somebody decides the comedian isn't worth the trouble and that should greatly concern anybody who thinks satire matters.

Today I religiously watch the late-night satirists: Seth Meyers on Late Night, Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, and Colin Jost and Michael Che on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, among others, as real-time news sources. Because as far back as Ben Elton on Friday Night Live in the 1980s, I've regarded satire as the news from an angle you hadn't yet considered.

Tom Lehrer famously joked that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize with a prescient anticipation of Trump's own rabid pursuit of the same bauble. Lehrer later made clear that the remark wasn't actually the reason he stopped performing. His more serious explanation was Vietnam. ‘Everybody got earnest.’

When I left comedy in 2002, I hadn't yet considered how politics could become identity. While I was away we'd had Brexit, the culture wars, Israel / Palestine and, latterly, the extraordinary resurgence of antisemitism and Islamophobia on the comedy circuit, as it has in wider society.

 If you'd told me in 2002 that those kinds of racial and religious hatreds would become so prevalent and obvious again, I simply wouldn't have believed you.

Satire is certainly one of the few things still capable of puncturing certainty.

I left comedy in August 2002 and by March 2003, you'd all invaded Iraq.

Honestly, I feel as though I turn my back for five minutes and all hell breaks loose and here we are again today with another generation of leaders every bit as vain, reckless and convinced of their own righteousness as those who blundered into the First World War.

Are you sure you can afford to take that kind of risk again?

Published: 9 Sep 2026