Beppe Grillo, Italy's most famous comedian, appeared suddenly in the midst of the audience. He moved about the people, as he likes to do, but even so, the size of the crowd meant that most of his fans, who had come out on a sharp, late-January night to fill the covered stadium of the Nelson Mandela Forum in Florence, followed him on one of three huge screens.
Grillo has been 40 years in show business and has become rich on it. Thick grey hair about his face, white beard waggling, he strode around the audience, his energy that of a man of 30 (he will be 61 next month). He is funny, but he's not really a comedian any more. He is a political activist with a show – and a campaign.
EDITOR'S CHOICE
More from Reportage - Nov-24In this, he joins a vein of contemporary humour now powerful enough – at least in democracies – to dictate terms of engagement to public figures. Political satire – mocking politicians and other public figures – is centuries old, and takes many forms: it's generally reckoned good for democracy and civic life. Now, though, it has become a huge part of comedy, of cinema, TV and theatre, novels and cartoon strips. It has even entered opera: recent productions of Leonard Bernstein's Candide in Paris and London featured parodies of Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin. It has acquired the power to frame the image of politicians – sometimes, even, to destroy them. Among mainline cinema releases this spring was the satire of New Labour spin culture, In the Loop, a full-length version of Armando Iannucci's TV comedy The Thick of It – a third series of which is scheduled for later this year. It came out at the same time as a darker satire – the US-made State of Play, about the corruption of politics – also based on a British series, of the same name.
Grillo is perhaps the purest example today of comedy crossing from political satire to political activism, and he does it in many different registers. His hugely popular blog, Beppegrillo.it, specialises in scabrous denunciations of Italian public figures – frequently prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, whom Grillo calls “the psycho dwarf” (“psycho nano”). In a blog of February 10, Grillo characterised the psycho dwarf's political strategy in a way that blatantly alluded to the gossip about affairs that surrounds the prime minister (and which rose to a peak last month, when his wife said she wanted a divorce after he attended the birthday party of an 18-year-old would-be model).
Grillo's larger and more audacious project has been the mounting of “Va Fancullo!” events, usually translated as “Fuck Off Days”. These “V days” draw vast crowds who listen to his long, emphatic speeches and sign up, in large numbers, to the referenda he runs on various issues – he is pressing, for example, for a change in the electoral law to reflect more directly the will of the people. This has made Grillo a significant political figure: a couple of days after his show in Florence, he gave a press conference in Naples at which he worked himself up into frequent fluent furies over the stupidity or criminality of this or that politician.
In the Florence stadium, the same to-the-verge-of-speechless rage convulsed him every few minutes – and when it did, he would either break it with a joke, or hug close to his chest the head of some random audience member, gently stroking their hair as if to protect them from a cruel world. His jokes were bitter, aimed at showing the rottenness of the Italian state and society – and that there is no salvation, anywhere.
“The churches are empty, signori, empty! No one is listening! No one!,” he cried out. “Our bishops go around with four bodyguards! If Jesus Christ had had four bodyguards, they would never have put him on the cross!” Certainly there is no salvation in the left: the Democratic party, the main party of the left, is “dead before it lives!” As for Walter Veltroni (at the time its leader, but since resigned), he is “a nothing! An idiot!” And nor does Grillo see any independent institution coming to the aid of democracy: “The media are all corrupt, and they are all against me.”
This last statement is not true, for Grillo often gets a respectful, even an admiring, press. But the statement does betray his large estimation of himself, for he believes – and many seem to agree – that he is Italy's foremost opponent of the government. He feeds into a strong strain in Italian culture: a sense, even a complex, that the country has been degraded to a position below other advanced and wealthy states, and that it is uniquely badly governed: “We are alone in the world – alone with garbage choking our streets! Alone with the psycho dwarf!”
Grillo has helped to set a style of outspoken, bawdy comic satire, which often amounts to accusation. At a huge rally in Rome last summer another comedian, Sabina Guzzanti, referred to a new Berlusconi minister, Mara Carfagna, who had been a hostess on a Berlusconi TV channel before being elected to parliament for his party, Forza Italia, and becoming the minister for equal opportunity. “You can't make someone minister of equal opportunity just because she's sucked your cock,” she exclaimed. Carfagna fiercely denied the allegation, and issued a suit for defamation against Guzzanti.
Both Guzzanti and Grillo have at times been denied TV appearances, but they play to big houses and cannot be quietened. It is true that Italy's political system often serves their jibes well, but it remains a democracy. The shows must go on.
. . .
The show has not gone on in Russia which, for a little over a decade, from the last years of Mikhail Gorbachev to those of Boris Yeltsin, produced an outpouring of political satire. Now, political satire in Russia hangs on by the skin of its teeth: it isn't banned entirely, as in other authoritarian states, but the authorities pay it the compliment of taking it seriously, and suppress it.
Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a new show came on the NTV channel, called Kukly (“Puppets”), modelled on Britain's Spitting Image. It loved to pull the tail of the government, and pulled hard – hard enough to shock, and delight, many Russians. The puppet representing the then president, Yeltsin, had the drunkard's purple nose and slurred speech; that representing Vladimir Putin had the KGB agent's grim watchfulness. Corruption in government, brutality in the (first) Chechen war, chaos in public services – all were grist to the Kukly mills.
The leader of the Kukly team was Victor Shenderovich, an intense and ironic writer and journalist with a dark comic sense – a Gogol with contemporary bite. I met him in Moscow at the actors' club near the foreign ministry. He was jovial but tense: armed police had raided the St Petersburg offices of Memorial, a human rights group founded in the late 1980s to exhume the memory of the victims of the Gulag. “Even in the days of the USSR,” he said sourly, “they had to do things by the law. Now it's by the will of the state or whoever acts in its name.”
I asked him about Kukly, which came off the air in 2001. “In 2001, it was the end of independent NTV. It was taken over by the state. It's so with all such systems – the Bolsheviks and the Nazis: they close down the independent media. Putin was the kind of person who couldn't bear that kind of satire. He came from the Soviet era and from the KGB, where that kind of thing was not tolerated, where even a tiny hole in the cover could spell the end of the regime.
“They offered us a deal. Kukly could continue, but it couldn't (a) say anything about Chechnya; (b) say anything about corruption and (c) say anything derogatory about Putin.” Shenderovich looked at me, and laughed. “Well, I said, that's just about all the show! What's left? We refused.”
Since then, Shenderovich said, political satire has not been possible in the mass media. “I am not banned, but all producers understand that it endangers them to have me on. Kultura [an arts and culture channel] asked me to appear recently; I said, fine, but it will be forbidden. The producer said, let's try. So he did try and it was forbidden: I didn't get on.
“We must recognise that they do this very cleverly. The intelligentsia – one to two million people at most – have their papers and Ekho Moskvy [a critical Moscow radio station]; they have books and the internet. The administration isn't worried by that.”
Shenderovich has a blog – shender.ru – which, like Grillo's, is higher on political comment than jokes. In a recent post, Shenderovich invoked Gulliver's Travels as a sign of how bad the Russian situation is. Even, he wrote, “in corrupt, class-ridden 18th-century England… no one thought of taking a writer to court for the use of a metaphor.” He was referring to his own court battle with a far-right parliamentarian who has alleged defamation for a metaphorical reference to him Shenderovich made on Ekho Moskvy.
But Shenderovich believes that Russian satire's time will come again. “It will get harder for them with the economic crisis. Their rule has depended on strong growth and on success. When that stops the opposition voices will become more attractive. The paradox is that when satire becomes popular again, it will get dangerous again: and then we might lose what freedom we have.”
Political satire in the US has a history as long as the republic, being a hallmark of the post-independence newspapers. After the second world war, stand-up comics such as Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce dived vigorously into the political scene: Sahl, though a friend of John Kennedy, had a line in anti-Kennedy jokes that got him banned from television for a while, until the power of the counterculture in the 1960s got too great for the gatekeepers. In the 1960s, too, the play MacBird, written by Barbara Garson, became a sensation: based on Macbeth, it showed Lyndon Johnson, then president, plotting to kill Ken O'Dunc (Kennedy). Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK rehearsed the same conspiracy theory, less humorously: by the time it came out, the power of the counterculture was huge – satire reigned, and reigns still. The long-running late-night chat shows with David Letterman (CBS) and Jay Leno (NBC) went on to poke fun at politicians routinely, even inviting them on to the shows in a kind of joust to test how much good humour they can muster in the face of the host's jabs.
Jon Stewart's satirical Daily Show, among others, feasted richly on liberal detestation of George Bush's presidency. It then veritably gorged on a campaign which – with primaries as well as the election proper – lasted around a year. Satire scored notable “successes” – most of all, perhaps, in the comedian Tina Fey's wickedly close parody of Sarah Palin, complete with winks to the camera and helpless floundering when asked a question on the financial crisis.
The largest event was Saturday Night Live's capture of John McCain to appear with Fey (as Palin). At one point, Fey/Palin turned away from her running mate and, with the wink going full tilt, flourished a “Palin for 2012” sweatshirt, revealing that she thought there was no hope of winning with McCain in 2008, and saying, “I'm not goin' anywhere and I'm sure as hell not goin' back to Alaska.” McCain, not a natural comic or TV performer, took the decision to go on to the show precisely because of the strength of satire: it now demands obeisance from politicians who must show themselves able to be good sports, to laugh at themselves and be laughed at.
. . .
Curiously, the apogee of this trend occurred in a country in conflict – Israel. It was on a programme called Eretz Nehederet (“A Wonderful Country”), a weekly satire in which actors mimic politicians. Shortly before a programme was due to be taped (and before the Israeli intervention in Gaza), the producers got a call from the office of Ehud Barak, the defence minister and leader of the Labour party. The aide asked if the programme was intending to feature Barak any time soon. Yes, of course, came the answer. The aide said, in that case, would you consider Mr Barak coming on the show and playing himself? The show's producers agreed, as long as the politician said their lines. No problem, said the aide.
The minister did indeed appear, in a skit that showed him not being recognised by a young couple and then getting the forthcoming election date wrong. His press spokesman Ronen Moshe said that “being ripped to shreds in Eretz Nehederet is much better than being irrelevant. It allows us to convey a new message and through his appearance he shows himself as brave and friendly.”
The Eretz Nehederet director, Muli Segev, told me how satire began on Israeli TV. “It was related to the October war, 1973. Israelis were coming into the first disenchantment with politicians. So they put on satire to capture the spirit of the nation,” he said. “It's very typical for Israelis to ridicule their leaders, but the politicians are getting so ridiculous that it's becoming more difficult to do it. Politicians are much funnier than our comics can imagine. Ben Gurion, Rabin, Sharon, Begin: these were real leaders and so in that way easier to satirise: they had large personalities and you could take them off. But now they are absurd to begin with – so that the news shows already make you laugh, you don't need satire.”
One of the big decisions Eretz Nehederet had to make was when prime minister Ariel Sharon suffered a cerebral haemorrhage that put him in a coma, in January 2006. “We decided to go ahead and do a show about it – to laugh at the hypocrisy of the politicians and the media in the tributes they were paying to him. Israelis have very strong stomachs. There are many difficult moments in the life of an Israeli citizen – so a satire show is needed. Our show is like a relief,” said Segev. “We do [Binyamin] Netanyahu as very slick and smug – with American gestures and habits. We think he regards himself as an American politician. But he's very nervous inside. He's arrogant but insecure. We're in a desperate state – and that's what we're saying in our satire.”
Segev told me, not without a touch of pride, that satire had destroyed the career of the Israeli politician Dan Meridor because he was shown as indecisive and weak. This chimed with a complaint that I once heard from Judy Steel, wife of the former British Liberal party leader David (now Lord) Steel. In the 1980s he had been portrayed on Spitting Image as literally in the pocket of David (now Lord) Owen, his then co-leader of the Liberal Democratic party. While Margaret Thatcher's image as a fascistic tyrant seemed to do her no harm, Steel suffered, establishing a kind of rule, which politicians accept, that to be satirised as a bastard is fine, but as a wimp, fatal.
British satire is not the world's most savage, but it has perhaps penetrated most deeply into political life, with scathing denunciations of politicians' manoeuvres, evasions and worse. A leader of this movement is Alistair Beaton, whose work includes stage plays such as Feelgood, an early (2001) savaging of New Labour and Blair; novels, such as A Planet for the President (2004), which sees a Bush-like figure destroy everyone on the planet to secure US dominance; and a number of TV plays, including the 2005 A Very Social Secretary, about David Blunkett's affair with Kimberly Quinn, and the 2007 The Trial of Tony Blair, in which the former prime minister is arraigned for war crimes. Beaton is often called the greatest political satirist in the country.
With most others in what is now called “the creative community”, Beaton celebrated the election in 1997 of Blair and New Labour – but soon felt, he said, that spin was coming too much to the fore. “In Feelgood, I wanted to show the sense that presentation was taking over from content.” The play, pivoting around an all-powerful press director – Beaton's view of Alastair Campbell, Blair's communications director – shows a crisis resolved by the murder of an investigative reporter who has got hold of an embarrassing story.
The violence in Beaton's work demonstrates a sense of constant outrage, but what prompted it? “Gordon Brown” – for whom Beaton had worked as a speech writer – “has said that we should get a fairer and more decent society. But Blair is in thrall to wealth and was corrupt. If you enjoy mixing with the rich, it doesn't take long before you want to be one of them. There's a detestation in me for the man.
“The important thing about the Blunkett film [A Very Social Secretary] was that he fell in love with a rich, right-wing American socialite. And this becomes a paradigm for New Labour. All of New Labour became smitten by wealth and celebrity.”
The Trial of Tony Blair shows the former prime minister sinking deeper and deeper into a judicial process that will judge what are, for Beaton, unforgivable crimes. But were those crimes really worse than Saddam's? “I was never a defender of Saddam, but I think one's first duty as a satirist is to deal with the hypocrites you live among. Satire is interesting when you're attacking the powerful in your society.
“I'm not interested in fairness – I'm interested in credibility. Look at fairness now [in early January] – the war on Hamas. One of the most sophisticated military machines in the world deployed against guerrillas. And the BBC is balancing all the while. Yet the situation is appalling – the Palestinians are locked inside a prison. How can you balance that?”
He said he is happy when politicians are angered by his satire – and that he, too, had caught some of Judy Steel's ire. “I was at a dinner party at Clement Freud's [the broadcaster and former Liberal MP who died in April]. Judy Steele was there, and went for me. I felt great.”
Why? The mild-mannered Beaton explained: “I felt great because we are surrounded by nice people telling us that nice things are happening and all is OK. And they are not. So you want to give it to people hard.”
John Lloyd is a contributing editor to the Financial Times
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