The Satire Paradox

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: It was the middle of the eighties and missus Thatcher was the prime minister here and she was very popular with the sort of working classes and things, and not with the lefty middle classes like me.

00:00:33
Speaker 1: Harry Enfield, one of England's best known comedians. He's talking about where he got the inspiration for his most famous character, a response to the imperious Margaret Thatcher with her barb and pearls, who unleashed American style capitalism on the UK and.

00:00:49
Speaker 2: The student hippies. We used to live on this council state in Hackney and we used to go to the local pub and all the local tradesmen and things always had huge wards of money and they'd take it out because they thought we were squatters. We weren't actually squatters, but we looked like squatters because we worked in television, so they get their big wards of money outs instead of you know, flash it at the bar and everything.

00:01:13
Speaker 1: Enfield hated Thatcher, hated what she represented, but the power I took was the power to reduce the power of government. Enfield and his partner Paul Whitehouse dreamt up a character to embody Thatcher's England.

00:01:29
Speaker 2: And it sort of just became this sort of thing really where we just go loads of money about everything. You know, well, that's loads of money, loads of money that, loads of money that, and then it became a sort of phenomenon.

00:01:42
Speaker 1: His name was loads of money. He was a construction worker, catapulted to sudden delirious wealth by the eighties building boom.

00:01:50
Speaker 3: I've got piles.

00:01:54
Speaker 4: Palls and.

00:01:58
Speaker 1: He chews gum with his mouth open, wears acid washed jeans, white trainers, a yellow and green nylon jacket with white sleeves, keys on his belt, drives a white convertible the countryside. All performed with a kind of cheerful, unstoppable tastelessness.

00:02:15
Speaker 2: I'm in a politics right. All you need to know about politics. Missus Batch had done a lot good for the country, but you wouldn't want to shag it. I mean, at the time everything was, you know, everyone was going missus statch to this, missus statcha that, and you know, sort of very obviously preaching to the converted. So we sort of did it the other way, which is just to go look at me, aren't I gray? Isn't money gray? Everything else is rubbish. Only money is good.

00:02:46
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to Revisionist History, where every week I revisit the forgotten and the misunderstood. In this week's episode, the final episode of our first season, I want to talk about satire, political satire. We live in the golden age of satire. It's almost to the point where we seem to conduct as much of our political conversation through humor as through the normal media. Remember Stephen Colbert at the two thousand and six White House Correspondent Stinner, in character as the conservative talk show host he was then playing on television. He stands up and gives a satirical toast to his quote unquote hero, President George W. Bush.

00:03:43
Speaker 5: I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands four things, not only four things. He stands on things things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

00:04:10
Speaker 1: All the while President Bush sits unhappily on the dais a few feet from Colbert, squirming and grimacing and looking like it'd rather be one hundred feet underground. It was a moment of comic genius. Then there was Tina Fey's devastating impression of Sarah Palin during the two thousand and eight campaign, when the Alaskan governor ran on the Republican presidential ticket with John McCain.

00:04:31
Speaker 6: Well, Alaska and Russia are only separated by a narrow maritime border. You've got Alaska here and this right, here's water, and then mess up, there's Russia. So we keep an eye on them.

00:04:46
Speaker 1: Who do you remember now, Sarah Palin herself or Tina Fey's Palin. I've written opinion pieces for newspapers or magazines, and there you have to write in somber, reasonable tones. You're limited. Satire allows you to say almost anything. That's where truth is spoken to power in our society. When you sugarcoat a bitter truth with humor, it makes medicine go down, your audience lets its guard down. Just look at the way Saturday Night Live has covered Hillary Clinton. They've ruthlessly zeroed in on her ambition, her humorlessness, her severity, her opportunism, all the things that have always given people pause about her.

00:05:27
Speaker 6: You're finally going to announce that you're running for president. My gosh, I don't know if I have it in me.

00:05:33
Speaker 3: I'm scared. I'm kidding. Let's do this.

00:05:39
Speaker 1: Comedians had become our truth tellers. That's what loads of Money was trying to do. Enfield wanted to tell the truth about what was happening in England. After Margaret Thatcher came to power in nineteen seventy nine, she was the British Ronald Reagan. During her eleven year reign, she took on British socialism with a vengeance, called it a nanny state. Her aggression angered and scared a lot of people who felt that something fundamental about the country's character was being upended, that something dark and crude had been unearthed, something like loads of money.

00:06:21
Speaker 2: All he did was have money, shag birds, drink, go to the opera. That was it kind of thing.

00:06:29
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that he went to the opera.

00:06:31
Speaker 2: Well, he didn't really like the opera, but he liked it because it was expensive, so he'd liked to be seen there, you know. So he go up to the bar and flashes wood, you know, order champagne top, which is basically like lagertop is a very big drink over here, which is lago with a bit of lime in the top. It's something you might get your girlfriend in the pub. So he'd go to the opera and order a pint of champagne top.

00:06:56
Speaker 1: Loads of Money around in the mid nineteen eighties on a popular Friday night sketch Carmedy show on British television. It struck a nerve the first couple of times you do this sketch, is there is the reaction immediate or is it kind of bills?

00:07:10
Speaker 2: No, it's absolutely immediate. I mean it was a sort of live show and so it needed to the big, brash, loud characters and this was one and people absolutely got it straight away.

00:07:21
Speaker 1: It's really hard to find someone over the age of thirty in England who doesn't remember the Loads of Money theme song. Enfield released it as a lark in nineteen eighty eight and it was huge, rose to number two in the British pop charts. The video is a series of shots of loads of Money marching around with scantily dressed women, driving fancy cars and sneering at the rest of the world, all the while waving huge piles of pound notes. It has three point three million views on YouTube. There is no op ed, no letter to the editor, no impassioned essay that gets three point three million views on YouTube. That's the power of satire. It can go places that serious discourse cannot. But here's the strange thing. If you ask Harry Enfield about Loads of Money's legacy, about what he thinks he accomplished by speaking truth so boldly, the power. You know what he says, he says it made no difference. That's what I want to talk about. Let's call it the loads of money problem.

00:08:40
Speaker 2: You know, I mean, it's great fun to do, but generally, you know, it's just about questioning what's there. Because we're allowed to question what's there, so we do. But it doesn't ever change anyone's mind.

00:08:58
Speaker 1: When Harry Enfield told me he didn't think loads of Money made any difference, the first person I thought of Stephen Colbert, not the straight Stephen Colbert of The Current Late Show, his breakout character, the parody of a right wing journalist that Colbert played on Comedy Central, first on the Daily Show and then from two thousand and five to twenty fourteen on The Colbert Report. Colbert was trying to do a version of what loads of money was doing shine a light on something crude in American popular culture. But you know, I was a guest on The Colbert Report a few times when I was promoting my books, and I have to say that there was always something a bit maybe ambiguous, is the right word, about Colbert's satire. You go to the studios. They're in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan far West Side. You sit in the green room beforehand, and Colbert comes in to say hello. He's not in character. He's this warm, charming, nice guy. And I can't stress the nice part enough. Everyone who meets Stephen Colbert thinks he's nice. He chats with you, and he warns you that when you go out on set, he's going to be someone else. But you don't quite believe him because you you see this really nice guy in front of you. Then you get on stage and he really is someone else. He's now this aggressive right wing talk show host.

00:10:19
Speaker 5: Okay, I'll get straight to my problem with this. Okay, you know I've got a problem with this, right sure, I can't come as a surprise to you. Yeah, okay, the New Yorker. Okay, you think pieces that's you're right, you write think pieces. Why do you want to make me think about my dog? I feel about my dog, and my dog loves me back onconditionally? Why ruin that with thinking about it?

00:10:44
Speaker 1: Now? You know intellectually that it's satire. He's doing a parody of a brain dead talk show host. But it doesn't feel like a parody when you're sitting there. He's jabbing his finger and raising his one acrobatic eyebrow, and there I am like a deer in the headlights of satire, blinking. It's terrifying. I think I went on three times, and every time I swore I'd never go on again.

00:11:09
Speaker 5: Our dogs?

00:11:09
Speaker 2: Do you have a dog?

00:11:10
Speaker 1: I don't have a dog.

00:11:11
Speaker 5: I don't have a dog.

00:11:14
Speaker 1: My building doesn't allow dogs. I'm an aspirational dog owner, but.

00:11:17
Speaker 5: I really day, had you the ability you would own a dog.

00:11:21
Speaker 1: I would someday I hoped to own a dog.

00:11:23
Speaker 6: Yeah.

00:11:23
Speaker 1: I grew up with dogs, and.

00:11:25
Speaker 5: I've you're raised by wolves.

00:11:28
Speaker 6: Grew up with dogs.

00:11:29
Speaker 1: That's what I mean by ambiguous. Am I in on the joke or the butt of it? I don't know. The Colbert Report has actually been studied by a communications scholar named Heather Lamar an assistant professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. She's part of a group of social scientists who've made a specialty out of studying how humor operates in popular culture, and she was drawn to the Colbert Report for the very reason that I'm talking about that gap between what you as the audience know intellectually that he's trying to do and the way his performance feels.

00:12:04
Speaker 7: I have a lot of liberal friends, especially in you know, academia, but I also have a lot of friends and family members that are conservative, and I started noticing that they would talk about the show as if it was equally funny, but in completely opposite ways.

00:12:19
Speaker 1: It struck her as something worth examining in more detail.

00:12:22
Speaker 7: Why are my Republican friends and family members watching him every single night and finding him hilarious, but they see him making fun of liberals and my liberal friends love him to death. I'm just biggest fans ever and think it's hilarious that he's making fun of people like Rush Limbaugh and Bellow Riley.

00:12:41
Speaker 1: As an example, Lamar picks a clip of an interview Colbert did with a left wing journalist, Amy Goodman. This is from two thousand and nine.

00:12:49
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for coming of the show.

00:12:51
Speaker 3: It's good to be read you, Steve.

00:12:52
Speaker 1: And now.

00:12:57
Speaker 5: You're a communist right, you're super liberal lefty. They don't get any more liberal lefty like outside agitator than you do they.

00:13:08
Speaker 3: I don't know.

00:13:08
Speaker 6: I think that conservative liberal lines are breaking down.

00:13:12
Speaker 5: Right, yeah, to right and wrong.

00:13:15
Speaker 6: Let me talk about the reddest state.

00:13:17
Speaker 5: Let you do anything you have to earn every inch of this interview, young lady. Yes, you don't come in my house and get me to let you do anything.

00:13:26
Speaker 1: During that outburst, Goodman nervously swivels back and forth in her chair. She starts to smile, but only gets halfway, so there's a kind of grimace left on her face. She raises her arm and points it at Colbert, but then just as quickly takes it down. I know exactly how she feels.

00:13:43
Speaker 5: I heard you were a fire brand. Will bring it, baby.

00:13:49
Speaker 1: What does Lamar find when she studies audience reactions to a clip like this? She finds it the more liberal you are, the more you see Stephen Colbert as a liberal skewing conservatives. But the more conservative you are, the more you see Stephen Colbert as a conservative skewing.

00:14:05
Speaker 7: Liberals, so essentially they saw what they wanted to see. So the big takeaway here of this study was that this is what we would call motivated cognition or biased perception.

00:14:15
Speaker 1: Colbert says to Goodman, you're a communist. That's funny if you think the joke is on Colbert. It's also funny if you think Goodman actually is a kind of communist and someone is finally calling her out on it.

00:14:28
Speaker 7: Yeah, and he's sticking it to a communist. And we ask those kinds of questions in several different ways, and every single time, the conservatives and especially the strong conservatives would say, yeah, it's a joke, but he really kind of means it, So he really does sort of think she's a communist, and he really does sort of think there is a right and a wrong. And I agree with that, whereas the liberal would be like, oh, yeah, he's clearly making fun of Bill O'Reilly.

00:14:50
Speaker 1: There's no difference in how funny conservatives and liberals find Colbert.

00:14:55
Speaker 7: And that's part of the magic, right. So that's why I would say he was a comedic genius.

00:14:59
Speaker 1: Lamar loves Colbert, and she thinks that what he accomplished with the Colbert Report was extraordinary. He created a character who managed to appeal to all sides of the political spectrum simultaneously. Do you know how hard that is? Really? Really hard? But if you think he's somehow winning an ideological battle, you're wrong.

00:15:21
Speaker 3: By Millow playing.

00:15:25
Speaker 2: Songs my neighbourhood parade, guys like gosh, we hadn't made.

00:15:36
Speaker 1: This isn't the first time as this happened with politically motivated comedy. By the way, almost fifty years ago, when Norman Lear's All in the Family was the most popular show in American television, there was a huge debate over the show's star character, the bigoted, reactionary Archie Bunker.

00:15:52
Speaker 2: Isn't anybody else interested in up Poland's standards?

00:15:56
Speaker 3: Oh wild?

00:15:57
Speaker 1: Just coming crumbling down?

00:15:59
Speaker 3: The coons are coming.

00:16:03
Speaker 1: Bunker was created to satirize conservative attitudes on race and sexuality, but in the end, the consensus among social scientists seem to be that he didn't do that at all. Here's the conclusion of the best known study on the show. We found that many persons did not see the program as a satire on bigotry. All such findings seem to suggest that the program is more likely reinforcing prejudice and racism than combating it. It didn't change any minds, and the same thing happens with loads of money. At one point, Enfield does a benefit for British nurses who are all on strike. Nurses in the UK are public sector employees and they want a modest race, and Thatcher, whose intent on shrinking the size of the public sector, won't give it to them. Sweat this benefit. Enfield comes out on stage as loads of money in his white trainers and acid washed genes and nylon shell and screams at them all get back to work, you scum that He burns a ten pound note on stage and the room of nurses goes wild. They love it. He's perfectly captured what they're up against. But the other side, the side they're up against, they love it too.

00:17:18
Speaker 2: And it got sort of taken on by the Sun, which was a very right wing paper and the kind of left wing papers. Basically everyone took it on. Everyone decided it was theirs, you know, they made him their property.

00:17:30
Speaker 1: So the Sun looked on loads of money quite affectionately.

00:17:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they thought it was great and it was a sign of Thatchers Britain that all working class people were getting richer. That's what they That was the propaganda. That was how they interpreted it. I guess yeah, which obviously wasn't really the case. But it was quite funny.

00:17:52
Speaker 1: Were you taken by surprise by the reception that loads of Money got.

00:17:57
Speaker 2: I was, why, well, just because you know, I've done other characters and they've been all right, but this seemed to go very big, and it got sort of in Parliament and then missus Satcha suddenly said we've got loads of money economy or something, and then the leader of the opposition said, you know, you've created the loads of money. And they were both using it. One of them was using it with pride and the other one with you know, contempt, and it was odd, very odd. I didn't expect it at all, Malcolm.

00:18:31
Speaker 1: It really is odd. There are cultural histories written of the Thatcher years, and invariably they talk about loads of money and how the character was this great symbol of the era, and it's clear that enthusiasm for this grotesque mockery was even greater on the right than it was on the left. Finally, Enfield just kind of gives up, Tell me how you killed him off.

00:18:53
Speaker 2: Oh, I think he got well. I think I just stopped doing him. And then we were doing comic relief over here, and I think we did a sketch where he got run over. He was run over by a van on Live Telly for charity.

00:19:10
Speaker 1: The loads of money problem happens because satire is complicated. It's not like straightforward speech that's easy to decode. It requires interpretation. That's what draws you in, that's where the humor lies. But that active interpretation has a cost. How the Lamar calls this the paradox of satire.

00:19:30
Speaker 7: So the trade off with satire becomes all of the thinking, or a lot of the thinking becomes devoted to what the comic means, who the target of the joke is, and as they interpret that, then they spend less time thinking about whether that warrants any kind of real consideration or counter arguing sort of the merits of that message.

00:19:52
Speaker 1: This doesn't happen when you listen to a straightforward discussion of politics, you just think about the arguments.

00:19:59
Speaker 7: But with satire here you're spending all of your time thinking about the nature of the comedy, which leaves very little mental resources available to think about whether the comedy has truth.

00:20:12
Speaker 1: There's a brilliant essay written on its very subject in the July twenty thirteen London Review of Books. It's called Sinking Giggling into the Sea, and it's by the writer Jonathan Coe. You should read it. Co takes the argument against satire one step further. He says the effectiveness of satire is not just undermined by its complicated nature, by its ambiguity. Co says it's undermined by something else, the laughter it creates.

00:20:39
Speaker 4: Laughter, in a way, is a kind of last resort. If you're up against the problem which is completely intractable, if you're up against the situation for which there is no human solution and never will be, then okay, let's laugh about it.

00:20:52
Speaker 1: In say, the Humor of Laurel On Hardy, Co says that kind of laughing is perfectly appropriate.

00:20:59
Speaker 4: Because when you see them taking on some ridiculous sisyphean task, like pushing a piano up an endless flight of stairs, failing time and time again, then you know what they're asking you to laugh at. There is the human condition and the intractability of the forces of nature, and the forces of physics, which we can do nothing about, so of course we have to laugh with political problems. It's slightly different. I mean, some political problems are intractable, but some political problems can be solved, and perhaps instead of laughing about them, we should try and do something about them.

00:21:35
Speaker 6: I just hope that tonight the lamestream media won't twist my words by repeating them verbatim.

00:21:42
Speaker 1: Back at the beginning, I mentioned Tina Fey's brilliant impersonation of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. I love those sketches. I think tinafe is a comic genius, but after listening to Heather Lamar and Jonathan Coe, I can't help but think that her comic genius is actually a problem. SNL brought Tina fe into skewer Palin out of a sense of outrage that someone this unqualified was running for higher office in two thousand and eight. Lots of people felt this way. Palin was the running mate of John McCain, an elderly senator of uncertain health. She could easily have been president. SNL was trying to hold Sarah Palin to some kind of scrutiny to say this is who she is. But looking back now, I don't think it worked because Tina Fey is too busy being funny.

00:22:34
Speaker 5: Oh please welcome the lovely Tina Faye.

00:22:40
Speaker 1: In October two thousand and eight, just before the election, Tina Fey does an interview with the talk show host David Letterman. Now, you would think with the vote looming, Fay and Letterman would want to talk about the subject of her satire, or the intention of her satire, the fact that someone this unqualified might be less than a month away from the vice presidency. But they don't. They talk entirely about the mechanics of Faye's satire.

00:23:06
Speaker 6: She got that crazy accent. It's a little bit far ago, with a little bit Reese Witherspoon an election. And it also I tried to base it on my friend Paula's grandma, because she had her grandma is the sweet, sweet lit old lady from Joliet, Illinois, and she would always say like, oh this and that and stuff like that, and I think that's might be our next president.

00:23:32
Speaker 5: But it's it's It sounded to me a little and I don't know what the connection would be.

00:23:35
Speaker 6: It sounds a little like Upper Midwest kind of Great Lakes region. Yeah, she drop in the Jesus, you know, and her rs or she really loves the you know, like these terrorists and William yerrs and and uh she did for those arts. I think she thinks there's oil in those urs.

00:23:52
Speaker 3: She and J and D.

00:23:55
Speaker 1: They want the laugh, so they make fun of the way Sarah Palin talks. And the way she talks is not the problem.

00:24:03
Speaker 6: There's certainly been a strange reaction to it. And then I've seen people who say, oh, no, you're helping them. You're helping them because people, it's people. It seems makes her seem nice or you know, or it's or some of the Republicans say it's sexist. That's you know, just crazy, because you have to be able to goof on the female politicians just as much. Otherwise you really are treating them like they're like they're weaker or something. And this Sarah Palin is a tough lady. She kills things, big.

00:24:32
Speaker 2: Kills the animals.

00:24:37
Speaker 1: Did you catch that? Because you have to be able to goof on female politicians, goof like the role of the satirist is to sit on the front porch and crack wise, why doesn't Tina Fey just come out and admit that her satire is completely toothless. And then what happens the very next day, The day after Tina fe goes on Letterman, Sarah Palin appears as a guest on Saturday Night Live, right beside Tina Fey.

00:25:06
Speaker 7: No, I'm not going to take any of your questions, but I do want to take this opportunity to say, live from New York, it's Saturday Nights.

00:25:16
Speaker 1: They let Sarah Palin in on the joke, and Pale and Tina Fey dress up in identical red outfits with little things in their hair and put on identical glasses because that's even funnier. And what are you left with? You left with one of the most charming and winning and hilarious comics of her generation, letting her charisma wash over her ostensible target, disarming us, Disarming Sarah Palin, And now.

00:25:43
Speaker 6: I'd like to entertain everybody with some fancy pageant walking.

00:25:49
Speaker 1: Sure we laughed, but it's kind of heartbreaking, isn't it. At least Harry Unphil was trying to take a bite out of the establishment with loads of money, Saturday Night Live has taken out its dentures and is sipping the political situation through a straw. Lord help us if some other, even less qualified and more frightening political figure comes along.

00:26:11
Speaker 4: I think the pleasure that laughter generates can be deceptive.

00:26:15
Speaker 1: That's writer Jonathan Coe again.

00:26:17
Speaker 4: To make an audience laugh is very it's a very solid, very tangible thing. I think it's it's only after the event, maybe years after the event, that you pull back and ask yourself, well, was that the effect that I wanted?

00:26:27
Speaker 1: Jonathan Coe brings up Peter Cook, the legendary English comedian of the nineteen sixties. Cook was the driving force behind Beyond the Fringe, the British satirical review. That's really the spiritual ancestor of shows like Saturday Night Live.

00:26:41
Speaker 4: What I mean is they're not English, They're not the English stock.

00:26:43
Speaker 5: I mean you only had a look at the names Lift of Its ribble Bits, Vessily, and those are English names they used.

00:26:50
Speaker 1: To Cook later started a comedy club in Soho in London called The Establishment.

00:26:56
Speaker 4: Peter Cook kind of his genius and also his curse, was that he he saw all these contradictions as soon as he started, really, and he was under no illusions that he was going to change the world through satire, and yes, the else he used with the establishment was that he was modeling it all on all those wonderful Berlin cabarees from the nineteen twenties, which had done so much to prevent the rise of Hitler and the beginnings of Nazism.

00:27:24
Speaker 1: There's a television show in Israel called A Wonderful Country Eretz Nderit. It's been on the air since two thousand and three. It's satire, very political. The show's writers belong to the beleaguered Israeli political left. They won a separate state for Palestinians. They want an end of the Endless Wars. They worry about the increasing conservative religious influence on the country's politics. They're ideologically motivated in their humor in the same way that Harry Enfield and Tina Fey were. But there's a difference.

00:27:55
Speaker 3: It's more political, and it's a little more rugged and hardcore, because life in Israel is much more rugged than hardcore.

00:28:05
Speaker 1: That's Mouley Segev, the show's executive producer. A Wonderful Country airs Friday night at nine after the news. Practically the whole country watches it.

00:28:15
Speaker 3: The stomach of reality viewers is much more adjustable. You know, they can adjust too much tougher material. Firstly, because the news broadcast that is on the air before US shows so many gruesome stuff and horrible things that naturally the comedy after that will be the same.

00:28:35
Speaker 1: A wonderful country goes further than the kind of TV satire that we have in the US or the UK. Maybe because the stakes are so much higher in Israel. Maybe in a country with a tortured history, suffering under constant threat, the boundaries that satire needs to push up against are more real.

00:28:52
Speaker 3: And we have very very bad reactions sometimes.

00:28:56
Speaker 1: Can you give me an example of a sketch that brought a bad reaction.

00:29:00
Speaker 3: Let's say, like a couple of years ago, we made a sketch that was a parody on a game show called a One Versus one hundred.

00:29:08
Speaker 1: You know that show One versus one hundred was a quiz show where one supposedly brilliant contestant known as the One, squares off against one hundred people sitting in little cubicles in the audience. The One and the audience are asked a question and whenever someone in the audience gets it wrong, they're eliminated. The light in their cubicle goes off and we can't see them anymore. In A Wonderful Country's version, the one was the Prime Minister at the time, and the audience was made up of one hundred and nineteen people. One hundred and nineteen was a number of Israeli soldiers who died in the two thousand and six Lebanon War.

00:29:45
Speaker 3: He was asked, why did you go to that war? Why did you do that? Why did you do that? And all the hands that he gave was were wrong.

00:29:52
Speaker 1: Naturally, it was the one versus the one nineteen, And with every wrong answer from the Prime Minister, the light went off underneath one of the soldiers in the audience. They vanished from sight.

00:30:04
Speaker 3: And that was very graphic and very hard to watch, but it was but it was imp ot for us to say so that this war was unnecessary at the time.

00:30:13
Speaker 1: Can you imagine Saturday Night Live doing that sketch during the I Rock War? Of course not. I think we've forgotten what real satire is in the West. That's real satire. It uses a comic pretense to land a massive blow. The first A Wonderful Country sketch I ever Saw was from five years ago. It was done right at the time when liberal Israelis began to despair about the direction of their government under Benjamin Nett and Yahoo. The sketch I saw is styled in the manner of a government funded documentary, a kind of promotional video for a new educational initiative in the schools. It's set in a classroom full of adorable kindergarten students, seriously adorable a warm and very compelling teachers at the front of the room Ayom Mirad. The teacher says, today, kids, we will talk about peace. Who can tell me what we need to have peace? Then the kids start to mouth every cliche that the Israeli right wing uses to justify not negotiating with the Palestinians, opposing a two state solution, or ignoring world opinion and continuing to build settlements in the occupied territories. A truly cute girl with curly hair says, what peace? Who will we make peace with? There's not even anyone to talk to on the other side. The teacher replies, that's right, lolly, there's no one to talk to. Another adorable girl says, I used to be a lefty, but then I got disillusioned. The teacher asks, so why is the world angry at us? A little boy says, our problem is pr and then he repeats it. The teacher turns to the camera. We don't want them to grow up ignorant. We teach them geography from a young age. She points to Israel on a globe. Here is our tiny little Israel in the middle least, who knows what we call the rest of the world, And the children chant in unison, antisemitic sh It's hard to explain a comedy sketch if I can't show it to you, though, you can always pause and go see the whole thing at revisionishistory dot com. And it's doubly difficult to explain comedy from another country. But believe me when I say the kindergarten bit is hilarious. I laughed out loud.

00:32:40
Speaker 3: We tried to put it in this situation where kids in kindergarten on learning it, and you see how bleak it is, how sad it is to raise a generation with no hope. And that's exactly the ideology of N'tagnielle. Things are only going to get worse. All the world is against us, we're alone in the world. We have to build a fortress around us and pray for God to save us. It's not in our hands. There's nothing we can do. And that's it for the rest of your life.

00:33:13
Speaker 1: Kids, I said, I laughed out loud the first time I saw that sketch, but the second time I saw it, I didn't laugh at all.

00:33:20
Speaker 3: That's what we're aiming for. In a lot of our sketches. It appears to be funny, and then it sinks in and you think about it once more, and then maybe something will touch you and you feel the pain that you know driven us to write that the fundamental truth when you think about it, is kind of sad.

00:33:41
Speaker 1: Can someone read this sketch the wrong way like Stephen Colbert got read the wrong way? Could some viewers think this sketch satirizes left wing is really thinking? Maybe? But I think the intentions are pretty plain. They're not hard to decode. We have children mouthing the absurd, dead end arguments of adults, and if laughter is normally the great distractor, the laughter dissipates awfully quickly.

00:34:05
Speaker 6: Here.

00:34:06
Speaker 1: Satire works best when the satirist has the courage not just to go for the joke. The teacher says, do you want to play? Nobody gets to preach to us about morality. The kids shout out yes, yes. The teacher pulls out a tambourine and starts chanting the Italians. One little girl, chance back, they collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust. The teacher chance the French. A child replies, Vishi regime teacher. The Turks massacred the Armenians, teacher, Norwegians. And the kids say, killed all the Salmon teachers. So what do we tell the world? Kids in Unison don't preach to us about morals?

00:34:58
Speaker 6: H Sam Lord La made no bonos.

00:35:04
Speaker 1: The kids are waving their fists in the air at this point, shouting in Unison. There is courage in that sketch, unlike Saturday Night Live on Sarah Palin, which is comedy done without any courage at all. If there's a lesson to the ten episodes of this first season of Revisionist History, it's this that nothing of consequence gets accomplished without courage. You can't educate the poor without making difficult choices, without giving up some portion of your own privilege. You can't be a great basketball player without being willing to look stupid. You can't heal your church without sacrificing your own career. You can't even drive a car properly unless you're willing to acknowledge that you sometimes make mistakes, stupid, involuntary, dumb mistakes. The path to a better world is hard. Is that depressing? I don't think so. I think what's depressing is when we ignore every we think history is trying to tell us. You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. You can get more information about this and other episodes at Revisionististory dot com or on your favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle, Roxanne Scott, and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Laon Williams is our engineer. Our fact checker is Michelle Siaka. Thanks to the Penalty Management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and my old and dear friend el Hafe. Jacob Weisberg