Andrew Pipe on when comedy meets tyranny

Modern political theatre makes for a dark satirical script in today's fevered, hair-trigger culture wars. Take, just as a for instance, the leader of the free world being offered a $400million aircraft by a Middle Eastern monarchy with a questionable human-rights record.

On his debut album, The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce, the great man displayed a real-time talent for finding the absurdity buried under the respectable surface of American public life. In Ike, Sherm And Nick, he took the 1958 scandal involving Eisenhower's chief of staff Sherman Adams, who had accepted a vicuña overcoat and an expensive oriental rug from businessman Bernard Goldfine and turned it into a game of political misdirection. ‘Well, Sherm – ya goofed, baby.’

Bruce eventually found himself fighting the state over language itself when his obscenity prosecutions turned the words in his act into evidence. There is a famous exchange associated with his trial when the prosecutor asks: ‘Do you think the word "cocksucker" is funny?’ and the defence replies: 'Not when you say it.’ The word itself isn't the interesting thing so much as who gets to decide which words are permissible

A comedian isn't, as some seem to think, a teacher at the front of a class explaining the world to their pupils so much as an unruly kid who has somehow wrestled control of the class off of them and telling anyone who'll listen that the Emperors' New Clothes don't exist. Everybody sees what they can see but only realise that everyone else is seeing the same thing when they're told it by an errant child.

Gore Vidal, the American playwright, essayist, novelist, sometime actor, raconteur and all round good egg quoted the historian Steven Runciman in Byzantium's Fall describing Hitler as ‘a better than average politician who nearly won a war’. Calling someone evil tells us what we think but doesn't explain the political weakness, economic crisis, nationalism, antisemitism, propaganda and failure of his opponents that put him in charge.

The Great Dictator was released by Charlie Chaplin in 1940, when Hitler was still alive, still in power and still winning wars – which matters because it's far too easy to laugh at history once we know how it turns out. 

In today's world, reducing Hitler to a ridiculous little man feels as though it has always had a distinct whiff of inevitability about it but Chaplin's film wasn't universally applauded upon its release. What looked decidedly reckless while the dictator was still standing can also look decidedly obvious after he has fallen.

In his review of the film, George Orwell praised its extraordinary combination of slapstick and political seriousness. He regarded the final speech as a powerful argument for democracy, tolerance and common decency but the uncomfortable truth has only ever been that comedy does not automatically belong to the good guys.

In Nazi Germany and the territories it controlled, Jews were repeatedly depicted through caricature, stereotype and ridicule. In the Netherlands, the Nazi-aligned Volk En Vaderland published a comic strip called Rare, Maar Ware Commentaren (Odd, But True, Comments), which portrayed Jews and other supposed enemies of National Socialism through crude antisemitic stereotypes.

Under Stalin, the political joke became a peculiar form of underground communication. The Russian word ‘anekdot’ came to encompass the political joke, often passed from one person to another in circumstances where the teller had no idea who might be listening.

In communist Poland, Jan Pietrzak's Kabaret Pod Egidą found a way around censorship by developing a style of saying important things indirectly. Pietrzak described it as using ‘ezopowy’, or Aesopian language. The censors would read the text and sometimes fail to understand what the audience would understand immediately in the room. The gap between the written word and the word when spoken became a crack in the wall.

In Myanmar, the Moustache Brothers took that principle into a very dangerous territory. U Pa Pa Lay and U Lu Zaw were comedians who performed political material critical of the military regime. In 1996 they were arrested after performing at Aung San Suu Kyi's home in Yangon and were sentenced to seven years in prison. Amnesty International considered them prisoners of conscience, detained for the peaceful expression of their views which begs the question, if the joke is meaningless, why imprison the comedian?

After the 1993 siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Bill Hicks repeatedly returned to the official justification for the federal response then asked why, if the authorities' motivating concern was child abuse, we never saw tanks smashing into Catholic churches.

The majority of comedians only ever want to make the audience they're standing in front of on any given evening laugh as much as they can then get paid for doing so. This is, of course, a perfectly noble pursuit. There are, however, those who step out from behind the mask and get inside the political machinery. Tina Fey's 2008 Saturday Night Live impersonation of Sarah Palin became one of the defining comic impressions of that election cycle. Fey's invented line, ‘I can see Russia from my house!’, became so widely repeated that it was subsequently mistaken for something Palin herself had actually said.

A comedian can create a piece of political folklore when a joke enters its bloodstream. Whether Fey altered the course of political history for good or ill will remain a matter of conjecture for as long as human beings continue to argue about politics but the fact that a comedian managed to become part of that history is, without doubt, achievement enough.

Shaparak Khorsandi once joked that a fatwa was the closest thing an Iranian writer gets to a literary prize. Omid Djalili has spoken about the importance of Iranians being together, laughing and discussing what is happening around them; his point being that this collective joy and conversation is precisely the sort of thing a regime does not want people doing.

Jimmy Carr’s 2021 Netflix special His Dark Material contained a joke about the murder of Roma and Sinti people during the Holocaust. The joke provoked condemnation from organisations including the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Auschwitz Memorial. Whatever one thinks of the joke itself is almost beside the point; what matters is the changing relationship between comedy, offence, outrage and publicity.

For older generations of comedians, minorities were often regarded as fair game. The modern comedian operates in a world where the comedian knows that the joke may be clipped, posted, denounced, defended, recycled and watched by millions of people who were not in the room when it was originally told.

We can now construct our own version of history and everyone wants to be seen to be on the right side of it in an age where virtue signalling has oftentimes taken the place of any discernible virtue.

Fidel Castro famously ended his 1953 defence at the trial following the attack on the Moncada barracks with the words: ‘Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.’ He subsequently spent the rest of his political life controlling the machinery by which history could be recorded and dissent could be heard.

Given that comedy doesn't have any inherent moral direction and when history itself has become so contested, fragmented and algorithmically personalised, can there ever again be a single unanimous verdict that we can all universally agree upon?

Published: 28 Sep 2026