Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: It was the middle of the eighties and missus Thatcher
Speaker 2: was the prime minister here and she was very popular
Speaker 2: with the sort of working classes and things, and not
Speaker 2: with the lefty middle classes like me.
Speaker 1: Harry Enfield, one of England's best known comedians. He's talking
Speaker 1: about where he got the inspiration for his most famous character,
Speaker 1: a response to the imperious Margaret Thatcher with her barb
Speaker 1: and pearls, who unleashed American style capitalism on the UK and.
Speaker 2: The student hippies. We used to live on this council
Speaker 2: state in Hackney and we used to go to the
Speaker 2: local pub and all the local tradesmen and things always
Speaker 2: had huge wards of money and they'd take it out
Speaker 2: because they thought we were squatters. We weren't actually squatters,
Speaker 2: but we looked like squatters because we worked in television,
Speaker 2: so they get their big wards of money outs instead
Speaker 2: of you know, flash it at the bar and everything.
Speaker 1: Enfield hated Thatcher, hated what she represented, but the power
Speaker 1: I took was the power to reduce the power of government.
Speaker 1: Enfield and his partner Paul Whitehouse dreamt up a character
Speaker 1: to embody Thatcher's England.
Speaker 2: And it sort of just became this sort of thing
Speaker 2: really where we just go loads of money about everything.
Speaker 2: You know, well, that's loads of money, loads of money that,
Speaker 2: loads of money that, and then it became a sort
Speaker 2: of phenomenon.
Speaker 1: His name was loads of money. He was a construction worker,
Speaker 1: catapulted to sudden delirious wealth by the eighties building boom.
Speaker 3: I've got piles.
Speaker 4: Palls and.
Speaker 1: He chews gum with his mouth open, wears acid washed jeans,
Speaker 1: white trainers, a yellow and green nylon jacket with white sleeves,
Speaker 1: keys on his belt, drives a white convertible the countryside.
Speaker 1: All performed with a kind of cheerful, unstoppable tastelessness.
Speaker 2: I'm in a politics right. All you need to know
Speaker 2: about politics. Missus Batch had done a lot good for
Speaker 2: the country, but you wouldn't want to shag it. I mean,
Speaker 2: at the time everything was, you know, everyone was going
Speaker 2: missus statch to this, missus statcha that, and you know,
Speaker 2: sort of very obviously preaching to the converted. So we
Speaker 2: sort of did it the other way, which is just
Speaker 2: to go look at me, aren't I gray? Isn't money gray?
Speaker 2: Everything else is rubbish. Only money is good.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: where every week I revisit the forgotten and the misunderstood.
Speaker 1: In this week's episode, the final episode of our first season,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about satire, political satire. We live
Speaker 1: in the golden age of satire. It's almost to the
Speaker 1: point where we seem to conduct as much of our
Speaker 1: political conversation through humor as through the normal media. Remember
Speaker 1: Stephen Colbert at the two thousand and six White House
Speaker 1: Correspondent Stinner, in character as the conservative talk show host
Speaker 1: he was then playing on television. He stands up and
Speaker 1: gives a satirical toast to his quote unquote hero, President
Speaker 1: George W. Bush.
Speaker 5: I stand by this man. I stand by this man
Speaker 5: because he stands four things, not only four things. He
Speaker 5: stands on things things like aircraft carriers and rubble and
Speaker 5: recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message
Speaker 5: that no matter what happens to America, she will always
Speaker 5: rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.
Speaker 1: All the while President Bush sits unhappily on the dais
Speaker 1: a few feet from Colbert, squirming and grimacing and looking
Speaker 1: like it'd rather be one hundred feet underground. It was
Speaker 1: a moment of comic genius. Then there was Tina Fey's
Speaker 1: devastating impression of Sarah Palin during the two thousand and
Speaker 1: eight campaign, when the Alaskan governor ran on the Republican
Speaker 1: presidential ticket with John McCain.
Speaker 6: Well, Alaska and Russia are only separated by a narrow
Speaker 6: maritime border. You've got Alaska here and this right, here's water,
Speaker 6: and then mess up, there's Russia. So we keep an
Speaker 6: eye on them.
Speaker 1: Who do you remember now, Sarah Palin herself or Tina
Speaker 1: Fey's Palin. I've written opinion pieces for newspapers or magazines,
Speaker 1: and there you have to write in somber, reasonable tones.
Speaker 1: You're limited. Satire allows you to say almost anything. That's
Speaker 1: where truth is spoken to power in our society. When
Speaker 1: you sugarcoat a bitter truth with humor, it makes medicine
Speaker 1: go down, your audience lets its guard down. Just look
Speaker 1: at the way Saturday Night Live has covered Hillary Clinton.
Speaker 1: They've ruthlessly zeroed in on her ambition, her humorlessness, her severity,
Speaker 1: her opportunism, all the things that have always given people
Speaker 1: pause about her.
Speaker 6: You're finally going to announce that you're running for president.
Speaker 6: My gosh, I don't know if I have it in me.
Speaker 3: I'm scared. I'm kidding. Let's do this.
Speaker 1: Comedians had become our truth tellers. That's what loads of
Speaker 1: Money was trying to do. Enfield wanted to tell the
Speaker 1: truth about what was happening in England. After Margaret Thatcher
Speaker 1: came to power in nineteen seventy nine, she was the
Speaker 1: British Ronald Reagan. During her eleven year reign, she took
Speaker 1: on British socialism with a vengeance, called it a nanny state.
Speaker 1: Her aggression angered and scared a lot of people who
Speaker 1: felt that something fundamental about the country's character was being upended,
Speaker 1: that something dark and crude had been unearthed, something like
Speaker 1: loads of money.
Speaker 2: All he did was have money, shag birds, drink, go
Speaker 2: to the opera. That was it kind of thing.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that he went to the opera.
Speaker 2: Well, he didn't really like the opera, but he liked
Speaker 2: it because it was expensive, so he'd liked to be
Speaker 2: seen there, you know. So he go up to the
Speaker 2: bar and flashes wood, you know, order champagne top, which
Speaker 2: is basically like lagertop is a very big drink over here,
Speaker 2: which is lago with a bit of lime in the top.
Speaker 2: It's something you might get your girlfriend in the pub.
Speaker 2: So he'd go to the opera and order a pint
Speaker 2: of champagne top.
Speaker 1: Loads of Money around in the mid nineteen eighties on
Speaker 1: a popular Friday night sketch Carmedy show on British television.
Speaker 1: It struck a nerve the first couple of times you
Speaker 1: do this sketch, is there is the reaction immediate or
Speaker 1: is it kind of bills?
Speaker 2: No, it's absolutely immediate. I mean it was a sort
Speaker 2: of live show and so it needed to the big, brash,
Speaker 2: loud characters and this was one and people absolutely got
Speaker 2: it straight away.
Speaker 1: It's really hard to find someone over the age of
Speaker 1: thirty in England who doesn't remember the Loads of Money
Speaker 1: theme song. Enfield released it as a lark in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight and it was huge, rose to number two
Speaker 1: in the British pop charts. The video is a series
Speaker 1: of shots of loads of Money marching around with scantily
Speaker 1: dressed women, driving fancy cars and sneering at the rest
Speaker 1: of the world, all the while waving huge piles of
Speaker 1: pound notes. It has three point three million views on YouTube.
Speaker 1: There is no op ed, no letter to the editor,
Speaker 1: no impassioned essay that gets three point three million views
Speaker 1: on YouTube. That's the power of satire. It can go
Speaker 1: places that serious discourse cannot. But here's the strange thing.
Speaker 1: If you ask Harry Enfield about Loads of Money's legacy,
Speaker 1: about what he thinks he accomplished by speaking truth so boldly,
Speaker 1: the power. You know what he says, he says it
Speaker 1: made no difference. That's what I want to talk about.
Speaker 1: Let's call it the loads of money problem.
Speaker 2: You know, I mean, it's great fun to do, but generally,
Speaker 2: you know, it's just about questioning what's there. Because we're
Speaker 2: allowed to question what's there, so we do. But it
Speaker 2: doesn't ever change anyone's mind.
Speaker 1: When Harry Enfield told me he didn't think loads of
Speaker 1: Money made any difference, the first person I thought of
Speaker 1: Stephen Colbert, not the straight Stephen Colbert of The Current
Speaker 1: Late Show, his breakout character, the parody of a right
Speaker 1: wing journalist that Colbert played on Comedy Central, first on
Speaker 1: the Daily Show and then from two thousand and five
Speaker 1: to twenty fourteen on The Colbert Report. Colbert was trying
Speaker 1: to do a version of what loads of money was
Speaker 1: doing shine a light on something crude in American popular culture.
Speaker 1: But you know, I was a guest on The Colbert
Speaker 1: Report a few times when I was promoting my books,
Speaker 1: and I have to say that there was always something
Speaker 1: a bit maybe ambiguous, is the right word, about Colbert's satire.
Speaker 1: You go to the studios. They're in Hell's Kitchen in
Speaker 1: Manhattan far West Side. You sit in the green room beforehand,
Speaker 1: and Colbert comes in to say hello. He's not in character.
Speaker 1: He's this warm, charming, nice guy. And I can't stress
Speaker 1: the nice part enough. Everyone who meets Stephen Colbert thinks
Speaker 1: he's nice. He chats with you, and he warns you
Speaker 1: that when you go out on set, he's going to
Speaker 1: be someone else. But you don't quite believe him because
Speaker 1: you you see this really nice guy in front of you.
Speaker 1: Then you get on stage and he really is someone else.
Speaker 1: He's now this aggressive right wing talk show host.
Speaker 5: Okay, I'll get straight to my problem with this. Okay,
Speaker 5: you know I've got a problem with this, right sure,
Speaker 5: I can't come as a surprise to you. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 5: the New Yorker. Okay, you think pieces that's you're right,
Speaker 5: you write think pieces. Why do you want to make
Speaker 5: me think about my dog? I feel about my dog,
Speaker 5: and my dog loves me back onconditionally? Why ruin that
Speaker 5: with thinking about it?
Speaker 1: Now? You know intellectually that it's satire. He's doing a
Speaker 1: parody of a brain dead talk show host. But it
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like a parody when you're sitting there. He's
Speaker 1: jabbing his finger and raising his one acrobatic eyebrow, and
Speaker 1: there I am like a deer in the headlights of satire, blinking.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying. I think I went on three times, and
Speaker 1: every time I swore I'd never go on again.
Speaker 5: Our dogs?
Speaker 2: Do you have a dog?
Speaker 1: I don't have a dog.
Speaker 5: I don't have a dog.
Speaker 1: My building doesn't allow dogs. I'm an aspirational dog owner, but.
Speaker 5: I really day, had you the ability you would own
Speaker 5: a dog.
Speaker 1: I would someday I hoped to own a dog.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I grew up with dogs, and.
Speaker 5: I've you're raised by wolves.
Speaker 6: Grew up with dogs.
Speaker 1: That's what I mean by ambiguous. Am I in on
Speaker 1: the joke or the butt of it? I don't know.
Speaker 1: The Colbert Report has actually been studied by a communications
Speaker 1: scholar named Heather Lamar an assistant professor at Temple University
Speaker 1: in Philadelphia. She's part of a group of social scientists
Speaker 1: who've made a specialty out of studying how humor operates
Speaker 1: in popular culture, and she was drawn to the Colbert
Speaker 1: Report for the very reason that I'm talking about that
Speaker 1: gap between what you as the audience know intellectually that
Speaker 1: he's trying to do and the way his performance feels.
Speaker 7: I have a lot of liberal friends, especially in you know, academia,
Speaker 7: but I also have a lot of friends and family
Speaker 7: members that are conservative, and I started noticing that they
Speaker 7: would talk about the show as if it was equally funny,
Speaker 7: but in completely opposite ways.
Speaker 1: It struck her as something worth examining in more detail.
Speaker 7: Why are my Republican friends and family members watching him
Speaker 7: every single night and finding him hilarious, but they see
Speaker 7: him making fun of liberals and my liberal friends love
Speaker 7: him to death. I'm just biggest fans ever and think
Speaker 7: it's hilarious that he's making fun of people like Rush
Speaker 7: Limbaugh and Bellow Riley.
Speaker 1: As an example, Lamar picks a clip of an interview
Speaker 1: Colbert did with a left wing journalist, Amy Goodman. This
Speaker 1: is from two thousand and nine.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for coming of the show.
Speaker 3: It's good to be read you, Steve.
Speaker 1: And now.
Speaker 5: You're a communist right, you're super liberal lefty. They don't
Speaker 5: get any more liberal lefty like outside agitator than you
Speaker 5: do they.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 6: I think that conservative liberal lines are breaking down.
Speaker 5: Right, yeah, to right and wrong.
Speaker 6: Let me talk about the reddest state.
Speaker 5: Let you do anything you have to earn every inch
Speaker 5: of this interview, young lady. Yes, you don't come in
Speaker 5: my house and get me to let you do anything.
Speaker 1: During that outburst, Goodman nervously swivels back and forth in
Speaker 1: her chair. She starts to smile, but only gets halfway,
Speaker 1: so there's a kind of grimace left on her face.
Speaker 1: She raises her arm and points it at Colbert, but
Speaker 1: then just as quickly takes it down. I know exactly
Speaker 1: how she feels.
Speaker 5: I heard you were a fire brand. Will bring it, baby.
Speaker 1: What does Lamar find when she studies audience reactions to
Speaker 1: a clip like this? She finds it the more liberal
Speaker 1: you are, the more you see Stephen Colbert as a
Speaker 1: liberal skewing conservatives. But the more conservative you are, the
Speaker 1: more you see Stephen Colbert as a conservative skewing.
Speaker 7: Liberals, so essentially they saw what they wanted to see.
Speaker 7: So the big takeaway here of this study was that
Speaker 7: this is what we would call motivated cognition or biased perception.
Speaker 1: Colbert says to Goodman, you're a communist. That's funny if
Speaker 1: you think the joke is on Colbert. It's also funny
Speaker 1: if you think Goodman actually is a kind of communist
Speaker 1: and someone is finally calling her out on it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and he's sticking it to a communist. And we
Speaker 7: ask those kinds of questions in several different ways, and
Speaker 7: every single time, the conservatives and especially the strong conservatives
Speaker 7: would say, yeah, it's a joke, but he really kind
Speaker 7: of means it, So he really does sort of think
Speaker 7: she's a communist, and he really does sort of think
Speaker 7: there is a right and a wrong. And I agree
Speaker 7: with that, whereas the liberal would be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 7: he's clearly making fun of Bill O'Reilly.
Speaker 1: There's no difference in how funny conservatives and liberals find Colbert.
Speaker 7: And that's part of the magic, right. So that's why
Speaker 7: I would say he was a comedic genius.
Speaker 1: Lamar loves Colbert, and she thinks that what he accomplished
Speaker 1: with the Colbert Report was extraordinary. He created a character
Speaker 1: who managed to appeal to all sides of the political
Speaker 1: spectrum simultaneously. Do you know how hard that is? Really?
Speaker 1: Really hard? But if you think he's somehow winning an
Speaker 1: ideological battle, you're wrong.
Speaker 3: By Millow playing.
Speaker 2: Songs my neighbourhood parade, guys like gosh, we hadn't made.
Speaker 1: This isn't the first time as this happened with politically
Speaker 1: motivated comedy. By the way, almost fifty years ago, when
Speaker 1: Norman Lear's All in the Family was the most popular
Speaker 1: show in American television, there was a huge debate over
Speaker 1: the show's star character, the bigoted, reactionary Archie Bunker.
Speaker 2: Isn't anybody else interested in up Poland's standards?
Speaker 3: Oh wild?
Speaker 1: Just coming crumbling down?
Speaker 3: The coons are coming.
Speaker 1: Bunker was created to satirize conservative attitudes on race and sexuality,
Speaker 1: but in the end, the consensus among social scientists seem
Speaker 1: to be that he didn't do that at all. Here's
Speaker 1: the conclusion of the best known study on the show.
Speaker 1: We found that many persons did not see the program
Speaker 1: as a satire on bigotry. All such findings seem to
Speaker 1: suggest that the program is more likely reinforcing prejudice and
Speaker 1: racism than combating it. It didn't change any minds, and
Speaker 1: the same thing happens with loads of money. At one point,
Speaker 1: Enfield does a benefit for British nurses who are all
Speaker 1: on strike. Nurses in the UK are public sector employees
Speaker 1: and they want a modest race, and Thatcher, whose intent
Speaker 1: on shrinking the size of the public sector, won't give
Speaker 1: it to them. Sweat this benefit. Enfield comes out on
Speaker 1: stage as loads of money in his white trainers and
Speaker 1: acid washed genes and nylon shell and screams at them
Speaker 1: all get back to work, you scum that He burns
Speaker 1: a ten pound note on stage and the room of
Speaker 1: nurses goes wild. They love it. He's perfectly captured what
Speaker 1: they're up against. But the other side, the side they're
Speaker 1: up against, they love it too.
Speaker 2: And it got sort of taken on by the Sun,
Speaker 2: which was a very right wing paper and the kind
Speaker 2: of left wing papers. Basically everyone took it on. Everyone
Speaker 2: decided it was theirs, you know, they made him their property.
Speaker 1: So the Sun looked on loads of money quite affectionately.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they thought it was great and it was
Speaker 2: a sign of Thatchers Britain that all working class people
Speaker 2: were getting richer. That's what they That was the propaganda.
Speaker 2: That was how they interpreted it. I guess yeah, which
Speaker 2: obviously wasn't really the case. But it was quite funny.
Speaker 1: Were you taken by surprise by the reception that loads
Speaker 1: of Money got.
Speaker 2: I was, why, well, just because you know, I've done
Speaker 2: other characters and they've been all right, but this seemed
Speaker 2: to go very big, and it got sort of in
Speaker 2: Parliament and then missus Satcha suddenly said we've got loads
Speaker 2: of money economy or something, and then the leader of
Speaker 2: the opposition said, you know, you've created the loads of money.
Speaker 2: And they were both using it. One of them was
Speaker 2: using it with pride and the other one with you know, contempt,
Speaker 2: and it was odd, very odd. I didn't expect it
Speaker 2: at all, Malcolm.
Speaker 1: It really is odd. There are cultural histories written of
Speaker 1: the Thatcher years, and invariably they talk about loads of
Speaker 1: money and how the character was this great symbol of
Speaker 1: the era, and it's clear that enthusiasm for this grotesque
Speaker 1: mockery was even greater on the right than it was
Speaker 1: on the left. Finally, Enfield just kind of gives up,
Speaker 1: Tell me how you killed him off.
Speaker 2: Oh, I think he got well. I think I just
Speaker 2: stopped doing him. And then we were doing comic relief
Speaker 2: over here, and I think we did a sketch where
Speaker 2: he got run over. He was run over by a
Speaker 2: van on Live Telly for charity.
Speaker 1: The loads of money problem happens because satire is complicated.
Speaker 1: It's not like straightforward speech that's easy to decode. It
Speaker 1: requires interpretation. That's what draws you in, that's where the
Speaker 1: humor lies. But that active interpretation has a cost. How
Speaker 1: the Lamar calls this the paradox of satire.
Speaker 7: So the trade off with satire becomes all of the thinking,
Speaker 7: or a lot of the thinking becomes devoted to what
Speaker 7: the comic means, who the target of the joke is,
Speaker 7: and as they interpret that, then they spend less time
Speaker 7: thinking about whether that warrants any kind of real consideration
Speaker 7: or counter arguing sort of the merits of that message.
Speaker 1: This doesn't happen when you listen to a straightforward discussion
Speaker 1: of politics, you just think about the arguments.
Speaker 7: But with satire here you're spending all of your time
Speaker 7: thinking about the nature of the comedy, which leaves very
Speaker 7: little mental resources available to think about whether the comedy
Speaker 7: has truth.
Speaker 1: There's a brilliant essay written on its very subject in
Speaker 1: the July twenty thirteen London Review of Books. It's called
Speaker 1: Sinking Giggling into the Sea, and it's by the writer
Speaker 1: Jonathan Coe. You should read it. Co takes the argument
Speaker 1: against satire one step further. He says the effectiveness of
Speaker 1: satire is not just undermined by its complicated nature, by
Speaker 1: its ambiguity. Co says it's undermined by something else, the
Speaker 1: laughter it creates.
Speaker 4: Laughter, in a way, is a kind of last resort.
Speaker 4: If you're up against the problem which is completely intractable,
Speaker 4: if you're up against the situation for which there is
Speaker 4: no human solution and never will be, then okay, let's
Speaker 4: laugh about it.
Speaker 1: In say, the Humor of Laurel On Hardy, Co says
Speaker 1: that kind of laughing is perfectly appropriate.
Speaker 4: Because when you see them taking on some ridiculous sisyphean task,
Speaker 4: like pushing a piano up an endless flight of stairs,
Speaker 4: failing time and time again, then you know what they're
Speaker 4: asking you to laugh at. There is the human condition
Speaker 4: and the intractability of the forces of nature, and the
Speaker 4: forces of physics, which we can do nothing about, so
Speaker 4: of course we have to laugh with political problems. It's
Speaker 4: slightly different. I mean, some political problems are intractable, but
Speaker 4: some political problems can be solved, and perhaps instead of
Speaker 4: laughing about them, we should try and do something about them.
Speaker 6: I just hope that tonight the lamestream media won't twist
Speaker 6: my words by repeating them verbatim.
Speaker 1: Back at the beginning, I mentioned Tina Fey's brilliant impersonation
Speaker 1: of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. I love those sketches.
Speaker 1: I think tinafe is a comic genius, but after listening
Speaker 1: to Heather Lamar and Jonathan Coe, I can't help but
Speaker 1: think that her comic genius is actually a problem. SNL
Speaker 1: brought Tina fe into skewer Palin out of a sense
Speaker 1: of outrage that someone this unqualified was running for higher
Speaker 1: office in two thousand and eight. Lots of people felt
Speaker 1: this way. Palin was the running mate of John McCain,
Speaker 1: an elderly senator of uncertain health. She could easily have
Speaker 1: been president. SNL was trying to hold Sarah Palin to
Speaker 1: some kind of scrutiny to say this is who she is.
Speaker 1: But looking back now, I don't think it worked because
Speaker 1: Tina Fey is too busy being funny.
Speaker 5: Oh please welcome the lovely Tina Faye.
Speaker 1: In October two thousand and eight, just before the election,
Speaker 1: Tina Fey does an interview with the talk show host
Speaker 1: David Letterman. Now, you would think with the vote looming,
Speaker 1: Fay and Letterman would want to talk about the subject
Speaker 1: of her satire, or the intention of her satire, the
Speaker 1: fact that someone this unqualified might be less than a
Speaker 1: month away from the vice presidency. But they don't. They
Speaker 1: talk entirely about the mechanics of Faye's satire.
Speaker 6: She got that crazy accent. It's a little bit far ago,
Speaker 6: with a little bit Reese Witherspoon an election. And it
Speaker 6: also I tried to base it on my friend Paula's grandma,
Speaker 6: because she had her grandma is the sweet, sweet lit
Speaker 6: old lady from Joliet, Illinois, and she would always say like,
Speaker 6: oh this and that and stuff like that, and I
Speaker 6: think that's might be our next president.
Speaker 5: But it's it's It sounded to me a little and
Speaker 5: I don't know what the connection would be.
Speaker 6: It sounds a little like Upper Midwest kind of Great
Speaker 6: Lakes region. Yeah, she drop in the Jesus, you know,
Speaker 6: and her rs or she really loves the you know,
Speaker 6: like these terrorists and William yerrs and and uh she
Speaker 6: did for those arts. I think she thinks there's oil
Speaker 6: in those urs.
Speaker 3: She and J and D.
Speaker 1: They want the laugh, so they make fun of the
Speaker 1: way Sarah Palin talks. And the way she talks is
Speaker 1: not the problem.
Speaker 6: There's certainly been a strange reaction to it. And then
Speaker 6: I've seen people who say, oh, no, you're helping them.
Speaker 6: You're helping them because people, it's people. It seems makes
Speaker 6: her seem nice or you know, or it's or some
Speaker 6: of the Republicans say it's sexist. That's you know, just crazy,
Speaker 6: because you have to be able to goof on the
Speaker 6: female politicians just as much. Otherwise you really are treating
Speaker 6: them like they're like they're weaker or something. And this
Speaker 6: Sarah Palin is a tough lady. She kills things, big.
Speaker 2: Kills the animals.
Speaker 1: Did you catch that? Because you have to be able
Speaker 1: to goof on female politicians, goof like the role of
Speaker 1: the satirist is to sit on the front porch and
Speaker 1: crack wise, why doesn't Tina Fey just come out and
Speaker 1: admit that her satire is completely toothless. And then what
Speaker 1: happens the very next day, The day after Tina fe
Speaker 1: goes on Letterman, Sarah Palin appears as a guest on
Speaker 1: Saturday Night Live, right beside Tina Fey.
Speaker 7: No, I'm not going to take any of your questions,
Speaker 7: but I do want to take this opportunity to say,
Speaker 7: live from New York, it's Saturday Nights.
Speaker 1: They let Sarah Palin in on the joke, and Pale
Speaker 1: and Tina Fey dress up in identical red outfits with
Speaker 1: little things in their hair and put on identical glasses
Speaker 1: because that's even funnier. And what are you left with?
Speaker 1: You left with one of the most charming and winning
Speaker 1: and hilarious comics of her generation, letting her charisma wash
Speaker 1: over her ostensible target, disarming us, Disarming Sarah Palin, And now.
Speaker 6: I'd like to entertain everybody with some fancy pageant walking.
Speaker 1: Sure we laughed, but it's kind of heartbreaking, isn't it.
Speaker 1: At least Harry Unphil was trying to take a bite
Speaker 1: out of the establishment with loads of money, Saturday Night
Speaker 1: Live has taken out its dentures and is sipping the
Speaker 1: political situation through a straw. Lord help us if some other,
Speaker 1: even less qualified and more frightening political figure comes along.
Speaker 4: I think the pleasure that laughter generates can be deceptive.
Speaker 1: That's writer Jonathan Coe again.
Speaker 4: To make an audience laugh is very it's a very solid,
Speaker 4: very tangible thing. I think it's it's only after the event,
Speaker 4: maybe years after the event, that you pull back and
Speaker 4: ask yourself, well, was that the effect that I wanted?
Speaker 1: Jonathan Coe brings up Peter Cook, the legendary English comedian
Speaker 1: of the nineteen sixties. Cook was the driving force behind
Speaker 1: Beyond the Fringe, the British satirical review. That's really the
Speaker 1: spiritual ancestor of shows like Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 4: What I mean is they're not English, They're not the
Speaker 4: English stock.
Speaker 5: I mean you only had a look at the names
Speaker 5: Lift of Its ribble Bits, Vessily, and those are English
Speaker 5: names they used.
Speaker 1: To Cook later started a comedy club in Soho in
Speaker 1: London called The Establishment.
Speaker 4: Peter Cook kind of his genius and also his curse,
Speaker 4: was that he he saw all these contradictions as soon
Speaker 4: as he started, really, and he was under no illusions
Speaker 4: that he was going to change the world through satire,
Speaker 4: and yes, the else he used with the establishment was
Speaker 4: that he was modeling it all on all those wonderful
Speaker 4: Berlin cabarees from the nineteen twenties, which had done so
Speaker 4: much to prevent the rise of Hitler and the beginnings
Speaker 4: of Nazism.
Speaker 1: There's a television show in Israel called A Wonderful Country
Speaker 1: Eretz Nderit. It's been on the air since two thousand
Speaker 1: and three. It's satire, very political. The show's writers belong
Speaker 1: to the beleaguered Israeli political left. They won a separate
Speaker 1: state for Palestinians. They want an end of the Endless Wars.
Speaker 1: They worry about the increasing conservative religious influence on the
Speaker 1: country's politics. They're ideologically motivated in their humor in the
Speaker 1: same way that Harry Enfield and Tina Fey were. But
Speaker 1: there's a difference.
Speaker 3: It's more political, and it's a little more rugged and hardcore,
Speaker 3: because life in Israel is much more rugged than hardcore.
Speaker 1: That's Mouley Segev, the show's executive producer. A Wonderful Country
Speaker 1: airs Friday night at nine after the news. Practically the
Speaker 1: whole country watches it.
Speaker 3: The stomach of reality viewers is much more adjustable. You know,
Speaker 3: they can adjust too much tougher material. Firstly, because the
Speaker 3: news broadcast that is on the air before US shows
Speaker 3: so many gruesome stuff and horrible things that naturally the
Speaker 3: comedy after that will be the same.
Speaker 1: A wonderful country goes further than the kind of TV
Speaker 1: satire that we have in the US or the UK.
Speaker 1: Maybe because the stakes are so much higher in Israel.
Speaker 1: Maybe in a country with a tortured history, suffering under
Speaker 1: constant threat, the boundaries that satire needs to push up
Speaker 1: against are more real.
Speaker 3: And we have very very bad reactions sometimes.
Speaker 1: Can you give me an example of a sketch that
Speaker 1: brought a bad reaction.
Speaker 3: Let's say, like a couple of years ago, we made
Speaker 3: a sketch that was a parody on a game show
Speaker 3: called a One Versus one hundred.
Speaker 1: You know that show One versus one hundred was a
Speaker 1: quiz show where one supposedly brilliant contestant known as the One,
Speaker 1: squares off against one hundred people sitting in little cubicles
Speaker 1: in the audience. The One and the audience are asked
Speaker 1: a question and whenever someone in the audience gets it wrong,
Speaker 1: they're eliminated. The light in their cubicle goes off and
Speaker 1: we can't see them anymore. In A Wonderful Country's version,
Speaker 1: the one was the Prime Minister at the time, and
Speaker 1: the audience was made up of one hundred and nineteen people.
Speaker 1: One hundred and nineteen was a number of Israeli soldiers
Speaker 1: who died in the two thousand and six Lebanon War.
Speaker 3: He was asked, why did you go to that war?
Speaker 3: Why did you do that? Why did you do that?
Speaker 3: And all the hands that he gave was were wrong.
Speaker 1: Naturally, it was the one versus the one nineteen, And
Speaker 1: with every wrong answer from the Prime Minister, the light
Speaker 1: went off underneath one of the soldiers in the audience.
Speaker 1: They vanished from sight.
Speaker 3: And that was very graphic and very hard to watch,
Speaker 3: but it was but it was imp ot for us
Speaker 3: to say so that this war was unnecessary at the time.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine Saturday Night Live doing that sketch during
Speaker 1: the I Rock War? Of course not. I think we've
Speaker 1: forgotten what real satire is in the West. That's real satire.
Speaker 1: It uses a comic pretense to land a massive blow.
Speaker 1: The first A Wonderful Country sketch I ever Saw was
Speaker 1: from five years ago. It was done right at the
Speaker 1: time when liberal Israelis began to despair about the direction
Speaker 1: of their government under Benjamin Nett and Yahoo. The sketch
Speaker 1: I saw is styled in the manner of a government
Speaker 1: funded documentary, a kind of promotional video for a new
Speaker 1: educational initiative in the schools. It's set in a classroom
Speaker 1: full of adorable kindergarten students, seriously adorable a warm and
Speaker 1: very compelling teachers at the front of the room Ayom Mirad.
Speaker 1: The teacher says, today, kids, we will talk about peace.
Speaker 1: Who can tell me what we need to have peace?
Speaker 1: Then the kids start to mouth every cliche that the
Speaker 1: Israeli right wing uses to justify not negotiating with the Palestinians,
Speaker 1: opposing a two state solution, or ignoring world opinion and
Speaker 1: continuing to build settlements in the occupied territories. A truly
Speaker 1: cute girl with curly hair says, what peace? Who will
Speaker 1: we make peace with? There's not even anyone to talk
Speaker 1: to on the other side. The teacher replies, that's right, lolly,
Speaker 1: there's no one to talk to. Another adorable girl says,
Speaker 1: I used to be a lefty, but then I got disillusioned.
Speaker 1: The teacher asks, so why is the world angry at us?
Speaker 1: A little boy says, our problem is pr and then
Speaker 1: he repeats it. The teacher turns to the camera. We
Speaker 1: don't want them to grow up ignorant. We teach them
Speaker 1: geography from a young age. She points to Israel on
Speaker 1: a globe. Here is our tiny little Israel in the
Speaker 1: middle least, who knows what we call the rest of
Speaker 1: the world, And the children chant in unison, antisemitic sh
Speaker 1: It's hard to explain a comedy sketch if I can't
Speaker 1: show it to you, though, you can always pause and
Speaker 1: go see the whole thing at revisionishistory dot com. And
Speaker 1: it's doubly difficult to explain comedy from another country. But
Speaker 1: believe me when I say the kindergarten bit is hilarious.
Speaker 1: I laughed out loud.
Speaker 3: We tried to put it in this situation where kids
Speaker 3: in kindergarten on learning it, and you see how bleak
Speaker 3: it is, how sad it is to raise a generation
Speaker 3: with no hope. And that's exactly the ideology of N'tagnielle.
Speaker 3: Things are only going to get worse. All the world
Speaker 3: is against us, we're alone in the world. We have
Speaker 3: to build a fortress around us and pray for God
Speaker 3: to save us. It's not in our hands. There's nothing
Speaker 3: we can do. And that's it for the rest of
Speaker 3: your life.
Speaker 1: Kids, I said, I laughed out loud the first time
Speaker 1: I saw that sketch, but the second time I saw it,
Speaker 1: I didn't laugh at all.
Speaker 3: That's what we're aiming for. In a lot of our sketches.
Speaker 3: It appears to be funny, and then it sinks in
Speaker 3: and you think about it once more, and then maybe
Speaker 3: something will touch you and you feel the pain that
Speaker 3: you know driven us to write that the fundamental truth
Speaker 3: when you think about it, is kind of sad.
Speaker 1: Can someone read this sketch the wrong way like Stephen
Speaker 1: Colbert got read the wrong way? Could some viewers think
Speaker 1: this sketch satirizes left wing is really thinking? Maybe? But
Speaker 1: I think the intentions are pretty plain. They're not hard
Speaker 1: to decode. We have children mouthing the absurd, dead end
Speaker 1: arguments of adults, and if laughter is normally the great distractor,
Speaker 1: the laughter dissipates awfully quickly.
Speaker 6: Here.
Speaker 1: Satire works best when the satirist has the courage not
Speaker 1: just to go for the joke. The teacher says, do
Speaker 1: you want to play? Nobody gets to preach to us
Speaker 1: about morality. The kids shout out yes, yes. The teacher
Speaker 1: pulls out a tambourine and starts chanting the Italians. One
Speaker 1: little girl, chance back, they collaborated with the Nazis in
Speaker 1: the Holocaust. The teacher chance the French. A child replies,
Speaker 1: Vishi regime teacher. The Turks massacred the Armenians, teacher, Norwegians.
Speaker 1: And the kids say, killed all the Salmon teachers. So
Speaker 1: what do we tell the world? Kids in Unison don't
Speaker 1: preach to us about morals?
Speaker 6: H Sam Lord La made no bonos.
Speaker 1: The kids are waving their fists in the air at
Speaker 1: this point, shouting in Unison. There is courage in that sketch,
Speaker 1: unlike Saturday Night Live on Sarah Palin, which is comedy
Speaker 1: done without any courage at all. If there's a lesson
Speaker 1: to the ten episodes of this first season of Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: it's this that nothing of consequence gets accomplished without courage.
Speaker 1: You can't educate the poor without making difficult choices, without
Speaker 1: giving up some portion of your own privilege. You can't
Speaker 1: be a great basketball player without being willing to look stupid.
Speaker 1: You can't heal your church without sacrificing your own career.
Speaker 1: You can't even drive a car properly unless you're willing
Speaker 1: to acknowledge that you sometimes make mistakes, stupid, involuntary, dumb mistakes.
Speaker 1: The path to a better world is hard. Is that depressing?
Speaker 1: I don't think so. I think what's depressing is when
Speaker 1: we ignore every we think history is trying to tell us.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
Speaker 1: you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us
Speaker 1: on iTunes. You can get more information about this and
Speaker 1: other episodes at Revisionististory dot com or on your favorite
Speaker 1: podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle, Roxanne Scott,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is
Speaker 1: composed by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Laon Williams is
Speaker 1: our engineer. Our fact checker is Michelle Siaka. Thanks to
Speaker 1: the Penalty Management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and my
Speaker 1: old and dear friend el Hafe. Jacob Weisberg