Viv Groskop

Brexit Britain needs a large dose of proper political satire

After Brexit, satire is well and truly dead. Now we have Boris Johnson answering questions at press conferences about how he’ll explain to Hillary’s face that he once said she looks like a nurse in a mental institution. We have an unelected prime minister who got the job largely because another woman baited her about not having children. We have Andrea Leadsom: a non-entity who is swiftly revealed to be exceedingly stupid and tactless and is then rewarded with a serious cabinet role. And we have no opposition, except Jeremy Corbyn with a leadership style entirely lacking in leadership or style. This stuff just writes itself. How can you be funny about an entire political set-up that is already a joke?

And it’s a joke of epic proportions. As Amy Davidson put it in the New Yorker, our current news narrative is ‘one of tragi-farcical, politico-comic self-destruction.’ (Not sure the Americans can really talk. But more of that in November.) Frankie Boyle, usually our most acid satirist, wrote despairingly pre-Theresa May that ‘commentating on the Johnson administration would have been like writing a cutting review of a dancing dog’. And yet here Johnson is anyway as Foreign Secretary. We are already a long way into autoparody.

Frankie Boyle is usually one of our only hopes in skewering the idiocy de nos jours (soon to be a banned phrase). And yet he quit BBC2‘s Mock the Week seven years ago, saying ‘I don’t think it’s even PC as such…It’s just dull people who want dull TV.’ For a long time now a lot of what passes for political satire on television and in the mainstream media is not doing what Boyle specialises in: annihilating his targets – and with malice. Instead it’s cosy, weary and cynical: ‘Aren’t they all silly? Isn’t politics a farce?’ We’ve had at least a decade of this feeling and this is what it has resulted in: an actual joke.

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