Viewpoint
Heather Mallick
Satirists, the world's unacknowledged legislators
Last Updated: Friday, March 20, 2009 | 5:36 PM ET
By Heather Mallick, special to CBC News
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Isn't that a great line? Percy Bysshe Shelley said it. But of course it was in his interest to make that point. He was a poet in 1819, when poets were rock stars.
Two hundred years have passed, 200 scarily eventful years. Scarcely anyone reads poetry now. But we do have our unacknowledged legislators. They are comedians. They run our lives and rightly so.
I am referring to our real, actual, interior lives — the way we think. Our superficial lives — tax returns, public behaviour, job losses and newly acquired poverty — are ruled by politicians.
Our hygiene is ruled by spouses; our fashion sense by makers of baggy unflattering black garments that attract pet hair; our daily mission statement by doomed diet-crazed hope-mongers like Oprah; and our self-esteem by drive-by comments on Facebook from people we've never met.
But our authentic inner lives, our core, the thing that keeps us going during what one hopes is the worst decade of this century (but likely isn't), are fuelled by comedians.
Comedian Jon Stewart. (Associated Press) They are the ones providing inspiration and fire in the blood. They are the Romantic poets of the 21st century, telling citizens to find nobility within themselves. Their names are Tina Fey, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Will Ferrell, Mary Walsh, et al.
Moral guidance
These days, I turn to comedians for information, advice and moral guidance, in fact, for an entire stance on life.
Oh, who am I kidding? I have been so reduced in hope by eight years of George W. Bush — and of course the next dozen of Stephen Harper — that if I don't watch my personal video recording of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report each morning, my day is shot.
When I needed a journalist to tell Bush he was a failure and a disgrace, none was available at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner. Except Stephen Colbert, the evening's hired entertainment.
And he said unto them: "The greatest thing about this man is that he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will."
Colbert said this to a silent, aghast room filled with obedient, highly paid "journalists." It was the coolest thing I have ever seen.
Later his Bush-ripping speech played to an awed adoring audience composed mainly of American college students who will run the nation 20 years from now. That's power.
You're welcome, America
Last week I watched Jon Stewart interview and destroy Jim Cramer, one of the shrieking "journalistic" freaks who helped feed the last stock market bubble that made Wall Street rich and then bankrupted normal citizens.
I love what Stewart and Colbert do, mainly because no one else is doing it.
This week HBO gave me You're Welcome, America, the comedian Will Ferrell's one-man Broadway show offering a smirking farewell to the most unpopular president in U.S. history.
I expected guffaws and snorting noises (from myself at least; the rest of my household is much more genteel). But what I felt was more heart-wringing — pity for Dubya and awe at Ferrell's magnificent grotesquerie and guttural genius.
Ferrell's funniest line in the movie Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was "You stay classy, San Diego."
His best moment in You're Welcome, America is a scene he created not so much with words but with gestures, grimaces and a sort of crushed, hunched walk.
In the scene, Ferrell has George W. describing his effort to win his father's esteem by taking him and all the Bush brothers, Jeb, Neil and Marvin, out to a really neat abandoned mineshaft near the Crawford ranch he had bought to pass himself off as a Texan.
They were all trapped inside for three days, running out of oxygen, with Bush Senior screaming at Dubya about his ill-preparedness, his stupidity, his general all-time worthlessness. "Why are you the only one in this family that speaks in a Texas accent?"
Stop Hitler now
In the end, they were saved. "Outside was my mom, all ripped and muscular, throwing boulders away from the opening of the mineshaft.
"She then pulled us out one by one and placed us on a cart, like a powerful draft horse, all the way back home, her deltoids twitching, her loins covered in a milky white froth."
You're Welcome, America is surreal. It resembles the 1930s Berlin cabarets that had the Nazis so riled up, satire that, as Tom Lehrer (the revered songwriter-satirist of the early sixties) put it, "did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War."
I'm not saying that satire and pure lowdown comedy can change world events. But they change minds in some important subterranean way. Perhaps.
Remember Lenny Bruce saying, "If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses."
So times do change and only the most morally bankrupt of the American states execute people now.
Comedians rule
Satire is king in Britain. It runs from loathsome to inspired and everything in-between. What's more, it runs on the BBC and in every newspaper in that newspaper-packed nation.
It is the British attitude. Have a laugh, no matter what. Dunkirk, very funny. Hitler, just the one ball, most amusing.
The comedy of international politics is the staff of life in Britain.
I am sustained by a misanthropic genius, Charlie Brooker, writing in the Guardian, and a political satirist, Mark Steel, in the Independent. Wit is valued in the U.K. Satirists legislate.
Take light things seriously and serious things lightly, it's the only possible attitude, the Brits say. And then we come to Canada.
And then we turn away again. I don't want to talk about the absence of satire in Canada, where the Conservative government just turned away at the border one of the cleverest British politicians of this era, the vigorously anti-war MP "Gorgeous George" Galloway, nominally on security grounds.
But we all know the real reason for keeping Galloway out: he made mincemeat of the Tories' last real set of best friends, the right-wing blowhards of the Bush administration, at Senate hearings on Iraq in 2005.
In particular, Galloway tore apart Republican Senator Norm Coleman, the guy from Minnesota who was just defeated by Democrat Al Franken. Who is a comedian.
That's quite a punchline.
