The Leicester comedy festival, starting in February, has come at a convenient time. One of my third year modules is called Political Communication, so I’ve just spent a fair few weeks studying political satire for an essay. This meant trawling through hours of footage from Mock the Week, Have I Got News for You and America’s own The Daily Show among others, a difficult task to motivate myself for as I’m sure you’d agree! As expected, it turned out to be far more interesting and in depth than I expected, assuming it’d simply be a case of watching these well-known shows and drawing a conclusion. There turned out to be a whole load more background and thought put into satire than I originally guessed.
Don’t worry; this isn’t going to be a recap of my lectures on the history of political satirical writing and the stern but silly subliminal messages that it holds just some observations on why we love political satire so much.
First off, let’s face facts that politics and news are ideal material for comedy. The nature of trying to find amusing holes in the stuff that goes on in the world around us is the very point of it. Out of this, have sprung shows like Mock the Week. This sort of contemporary news satire is all over the place. Radio 4 hosts a number of shows that pull apart and ridicule politics and the news. Comedic shows that are based on sketches or panel shows are massively popular and the reason, I think, is that it includes the audience. The point is that it’s a shared belief and viewpoint between the panellists and the audience. In a sense, we’re all in on it together in joking about the news and system. The nature of politics is that people oppose each other. The nature of comedy is that people join together to share their sense of humour. This creates a perfect tag team for a comedy show to pounce on political news.
The comedy festival is an example of this, the principle of enjoying a shared interest. For however long people are there, they’ve all come out for the express reason to laugh and everyone’s in that same frame of mind. Everyone wants to be entertained and in doing so, they’re part of a group who think in similar ways and have shared interests. Satire allows the discussion and pondering of political news without dividing those taking part. It’s collaborative, it’s a group activity and extremely social.
This is why I think we love political satire so much; Not only do we enjoy joking about politics and current events, but we enjoy doing it together.
The Leicester Comedy Festival is running from February 4th-22nd. For more information on acts, events and tickets, visit the festival’s website at www.comedy-festival.co.uk
