The BBC ran an interesting article about political satire in Russia today. Apparently, there has been more of it as elections approach:
TV political satire has been virtually extinct in Russia since the puppet show Kukly (along the lines of the now-defunct UK satirical programme Spitting Image) disappeared from the screens shortly after Mr Putin came to power. Now, though, this kind of satire is making a comeback on the internet. Not all the satire is anti-government, but it is generally irreverent towards authority.
Many questions are regularly raised about the main purpose of political satire. Is it supposed to change the world? Is it used by politicians and activists to topple regimes? To smear politicians to make them unelectable and so change the world? ’Not really’, would be my best answer to all of the above.
Satire is simply mockery at its core. Even so, there are many things that have to fall into place to produce successful satire. The choice of target is perhaps the crucial second step, the first being the choice of an audience. These Russian satirists seem to have chosen the Kremlin as their target and as their productions are on the internet they can reach a lot of people. One must speak Russian and have an interest in Russian politics, which rules out quite a few people, including me, but the potential audience is still at least 60 million Russians.
At the risk of making eighteenth-century English satire sound relevant to what is going on around the Kremlin, the critical function for satire Jonathan Swift and his contemporaries had in mind applies here as well. What one has to do in order to engage in criticism of a given target is not to engage with it at its own level. To put it simply, one shouldn’t try to beat them at their own game. Instead, one should make fun of the game and all the players. That is the only way not to get involved in an exercise in question begging. In order to soar above, one has to stoop lower.
This can be complicated and there are dangers. Daniel Defoe became famous for his Shortest Way With the Dissenters not because the satire was successful, but because he parodied the rhetoric of his targets, High Church Tories, rather too well. As punishment for engaging in real political talk, he ended up in the pillory. Zizek’s comments about Berlusconi and, indeed, Soviet Russia point out another problem: What if the political system or the politicians already make a mockery of themselves? What is left for the satirist to do when the country is ruled by mockery?
Shaftesbury wrote: ’Wit is its own remedy’. This means that excesses in wit have a tendency to be corrected by ridicule. Making fun of mockery is not a divide-by-zero situation, nor a postmodern self-reflexive paradox. When satire goes overboard, it can be fixed with more satire. Who does the fixing, against whom and how skilfully is what matters. The best argument wins and this, if one is to believe a number of moral philosophers, will lead to virtue in the end. I’m not sure if this is true, but something like it must occur even in political debate.
The point is that making fun of things and people is very important. It has a use in society and it’s one of the reasons the West values freedom of speech so highly. Even the ancients used to think that the tyrant who is left without critics is in real trouble. His people might be in trouble as well, but what not being made fun of does to the ruler is much worse. Sometimes lack of real critics will lead to something as innocuous as wearing a Cthulhu hat to a royal wedding. But in politics, the criticless tyrant becomes weak and prone to manipulation, the slave of his flatterers.
Tommi Kakko