Speaker 1: Pushkin. It was the middle of the eighties and missus
Speaker 1: Thatcher was the prime minister here and she was very
Speaker 1: popular with the sort of working classes and things, and
Speaker 1: not with the lefty middle classes like me. Harry Enfield,
Speaker 1: one of England's best known comedians. He's talking about where
Speaker 1: he got the inspiration for his most famous character, A
Speaker 1: response to the imperious Margaret Thatcher with her barb and pearls,
Speaker 1: who unleashed American style capitalism in the UK. And we
Speaker 1: the student hippies, we used to live on this council
Speaker 1: state in Hackney, and we used to go to the
Speaker 1: local pub and all the local tradesmen and things always
Speaker 1: had huge wards of money and they'd take it out
Speaker 1: and because they thought we were squatters. We weren't actually squatters,
Speaker 1: but we looked like squatters because we worked in television.
Speaker 1: So they get their big wards of money out and
Speaker 1: sort 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 a power to reduce the power of government.
Speaker 1: Enfield and his partner Paul Whitehouse dreampt up a character
Speaker 1: to embody Thatcher's England and it sort of just became
Speaker 1: this sort of thing really where we just go loads
Speaker 1: of money about everything. You know, well, that's loads of money,
Speaker 1: loads of money that, loads of money that, and then
Speaker 1: it became a sort of phenomenon. His name was loads
Speaker 1: of money. He was a construction worker, catapulted to sudden
Speaker 1: delirious wealth by the eighties building boom oh, got piles falls.
Speaker 1: He choose gum with his mouth open, whereas acid wash 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. A
Speaker 1: politics right all you need, and all about politics. He said,
Speaker 1: miss Batch had done a lot of good for the country,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't want to shaggy. I mean, at the time,
Speaker 1: everything was, you know, everyone was going missus, statue of this,
Speaker 1: missus snatch of that, and you know, sort of very
Speaker 1: obviously preaching to the converted. So we sort of did
Speaker 1: it the other way, which is just to go look
Speaker 1: at me, Auntie. Gray. Isn't money Gray. Everything else is rubbish.
Speaker 1: Only money is good. My name is Malcolm Gladwell, you're
Speaker 1: listening to Revisionist History, where every week I revisit the
Speaker 1: forgotten and the misunderstood. In this week's episode, the final
Speaker 1: episode of our first season, I want to talk about satire,
Speaker 1: political satire. We live in the golden age of satire.
Speaker 1: It's almost to the point where we seem to conduct
Speaker 1: as much of our political conversation through humor as through
Speaker 1: the normal media. Remember Stephen Colbert at the two thousand
Speaker 1: and six White House Correspondence Dinner, in character as the
Speaker 1: conservative talk show host he was then playing on television.
Speaker 1: He stands up and gives a satirical toast to his
Speaker 1: quote unquote hero, President George W. Bush. I stand by
Speaker 1: this man. I stand by this man because he stands
Speaker 1: four things, not only four things. He stands on things
Speaker 1: things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares.
Speaker 1: And that sends a strong message that no matter what
Speaker 1: happens to America, she will always rebound with the most
Speaker 1: powerfully staged photo ops in the world. All the while
Speaker 1: President Bush sits unhappily on the dais a few feet
Speaker 1: from Colbert, squirming and grimacing and looking like you'd rather
Speaker 1: be a hundred feet underground. It was a moment of
Speaker 1: comic genius. Then there was Tina Fey's devastating impression of
Speaker 1: Sarah Palin during the two thousand and eight campaign, when
Speaker 1: the Alaskan governor ran on the Republican presidential ticket with
Speaker 1: John McCain. Well, Alaska and Russia are only separated by
Speaker 1: a narrow maritime boarder. You've got Alaska here and this
Speaker 1: right here's water, and the mets up there's Russia, so
Speaker 1: we keep an eye on them. Who do you remember now,
Speaker 1: Sarah Palin herself or Tina Fey's Palin. I've written opinion
Speaker 1: pieces for newspapers and magazines, and there you have to
Speaker 1: write in somber, reasonable tones. You're limited. Satire allows you
Speaker 1: to say almost anything. That's where truth is spoken to
Speaker 1: power in our society. When you sugarcoat a bitter truth
Speaker 1: with humor, it makes the medicine go down, your audience
Speaker 1: lets its guard down. Just look at the way Saturday
Speaker 1: Night Live has covered Hillary Clinton. They've ruthlessly zeroed in
Speaker 1: on her ambition, her humorlessness, her severity, her opportunism, all
Speaker 1: the things that have always given people pause about her.
Speaker 1: You're finally going to announce that you're running for president.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, I don't know if I have it
Speaker 1: in me. I'm scared. I'm kidding. Let's do best. Comedians
Speaker 1: had become our truth tellers. That's what loads of Money
Speaker 1: was trying to do. Enfield wanted to tell the truth
Speaker 1: about what was happening in England after Margaret Thatcher came
Speaker 1: to power in nineteen seventy nine, she was the British
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan. During her eleven year reign, she took on
Speaker 1: 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. All he did was have money, shag birds, drink,
Speaker 1: go to the opera. That was it kind of thing.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize he went to the opera. Well, he
Speaker 1: didn't really like the opera, but he liked it because
Speaker 1: it was expensive. So he'd liked to be seen there,
Speaker 1: you know. So he'd go up to the bar and
Speaker 1: flashes woods, you know, order champagne top, which is basically
Speaker 1: like lager Top is a very big drink over here,
Speaker 1: which is lager with a bit of lime in the top.
Speaker 1: It's something you might get your girlfriend in the pub,
Speaker 1: so he'd go to the opera and order a pint
Speaker 1: of champagne top. Loads of Money run in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties on a pipe of Friday Night Sketch Carmody
Speaker 1: show on British television. It struck a nerve the first
Speaker 1: couple of times you do this sketch, there is the
Speaker 1: reaction immediate or is it kind of bills No, it's
Speaker 1: absolutely immediate. I mean it was a sort of live
Speaker 1: show and so it needed sort of big brush, loud
Speaker 1: characters and this was one and people absolutely got it
Speaker 1: straight away. It's really hard to find someone over the
Speaker 1: age of thirty in England who doesn't remember the Loads
Speaker 1: of Money theme song. Enfield released it as a lark
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty eight and it was huge, rose to
Speaker 1: number two in the British pop charts. The video is
Speaker 1: a series of shots of Loads of Money marching around
Speaker 1: with scantily dressed women, driving fancy cars and sneering at
Speaker 1: the rest of the world, all the while waiving huge
Speaker 1: piles of pound notes it has three point three million
Speaker 1: views on YouTube. There is no op ed, no letter
Speaker 1: to the editor, no impassioned essay that gets three point
Speaker 1: three million views on YouTube. That's the power of satire.
Speaker 1: It can go places that serious discourse cannot. But here's
Speaker 1: the strange thing. If you ask Harry Enfield about Loads
Speaker 1: of Money's legacy, about what he thinks he accomplished by
Speaker 1: speaking truth so boldly to power. You know what he says,
Speaker 1: he says it made no difference. That's what I want
Speaker 1: to talk about. Let's call it the loads of Money problem.
Speaker 1: You know. I mean, it's great fun to do, but generally,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just about questioning what's there. Because we're
Speaker 1: allowed to question what's there, so we do. But it
Speaker 1: doesn't ever change anyone's mind. When Harry Enfield told me
Speaker 1: he didn't think Loads of Money made any difference, the
Speaker 1: first person I thought of Stephen Colbert, not the straight
Speaker 1: Stephen Colbert of The Current Late Show, his breakout character,
Speaker 1: the parody of a right wing journalist that Colbert played
Speaker 1: on Comedy Central, first on the Daily Show and then
Speaker 1: from two thousand and five to twenty fourteen on The
Speaker 1: Colbert Report. Colbert was trying to do a version of
Speaker 1: what Loads of Money was doing, shine a light on
Speaker 1: something crude in American popular culture. But you know, I
Speaker 1: was a guest on The Colbert Report a few times
Speaker 1: when I was promoting my books, and I have to
Speaker 1: say that there was always something a bit maybe ambiguous
Speaker 1: is the right word, about Colbert's satire. You go to
Speaker 1: the studios there in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan far West Side.
Speaker 1: You sit in the green room beforehand, and Colbert comes
Speaker 1: in to say hello. He's not in character. He's this warm, charming,
Speaker 1: nice guy. And I can't stress the nice part enough.
Speaker 1: Everyone who meets Stephen Colbert thinks he's nice. He chats
Speaker 1: with you, and he warns you that when you go
Speaker 1: out on set, he's going to be someone else. But
Speaker 1: you don't quite believe him because you see this really
Speaker 1: nice guy in front of you. Then you get on
Speaker 1: stage and he really is someone else. He's now this
Speaker 1: aggressive right wing talk show host. Okay, I'll get straight
Speaker 1: to my problem with this. Okay, you know I've got
Speaker 1: a problem with this, right I can't come as a
Speaker 1: surprise to you. Yeah, okay, the New Yorker. Okay, you
Speaker 1: think pieces that's you're right, You're right, think pieces, Why
Speaker 1: do you want to make me think about my dog?
Speaker 1: I feel about my dog, and my dog loves me
Speaker 1: back on conditionally? Why ruin that with thinking about it? Now?
Speaker 1: You know intellectually that it's satire. He's doing a parody
Speaker 1: of a brain dead talk show host. But it doesn't
Speaker 1: feel like a parody when you're sitting there. He's jabbing
Speaker 1: his finger and raising his one acrobatic eyebrow, and there
Speaker 1: 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. You
Speaker 1: say our dogs. Do you have a dog? I don't
Speaker 1: have a dog. I don't have a dog. Okay, my
Speaker 1: building doesn't allow dogs. I'm an aspirational dog owner, but
Speaker 1: I really, yeah, I had you the ability, you would
Speaker 1: own a dog. I would someday I hoped to own
Speaker 1: a dog. Yeah. I grew up with dogs, and i've
Speaker 1: you're raised by wolves dogs. That's what I mean by ambiguous.
Speaker 1: Am I in on the joke or the butt of it?
Speaker 1: I don't know. The Colbert Report has actually been studied
Speaker 1: by a communication scholar named Heather Lamar, an assistant professor
Speaker 1: at Temple University in Philadelphia. She's part of a group
Speaker 1: of social scientists who have made a specialty out of
Speaker 1: studying how humor operates in popular culture, and she was
Speaker 1: drawn to the Colbert Report for the very reason that
Speaker 1: I'm talking about, that gap between what you as the
Speaker 1: audience know intellectually that he's trying to do and the
Speaker 1: way his performance feels. I have a lot of liberal friends,
Speaker 1: especially in academia, but I also have a lot of
Speaker 1: friends and family members that are conservative, and I started
Speaker 1: noticing that they would talk about the show as if
Speaker 1: it was equally funny, but in completely opposite ways. It
Speaker 1: struck her as something worth examining in more detail. Why
Speaker 1: are my Republican friends and family members watching him every
Speaker 1: single night and finding him hilarious, but they see him
Speaker 1: making fun of liberals and my liberal friends love him
Speaker 1: to death. I'm just biggest fans ever and think it's
Speaker 1: hilarious that he's making fun of people like Rush Limbaugh
Speaker 1: and Bellow'reiley. As an example, Lamar picks a clip of
Speaker 1: an interview Colbert did with a left wing journalist, Amy Goodman.
Speaker 1: This is from two thousand and nine. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for coming to the show. It's good to be
Speaker 1: stew You're a communist, right, you're super liberal lefty. They
Speaker 1: don't get any more liberal lefty like outside agitator than
Speaker 1: you do. They. I don't know. I think that conservative
Speaker 1: liberal lines are breaking down right, yeah, to right and wrong.
Speaker 1: Let me talk about the right estate. Let you do anything.
Speaker 1: You have to earn every inch of this interview, young lady. Yes,
Speaker 1: you don't come in my house and get me to
Speaker 1: let you do anything. During that outburst, Goodman nervously swivels
Speaker 1: back and forth in her chair. She starts to smile,
Speaker 1: but only gets halfway, so there's a kind of grimace
Speaker 1: left on her face. She raises her arm and points
Speaker 1: it at Colbert, but then just as quickly takes it down.
Speaker 1: I know exactly how she feels. I heard you or
Speaker 1: a firebrand will bring it baby. What does Lamar find
Speaker 1: when she studies audience reactions to a clip like this?
Speaker 1: She finds that the more liberal you are, the more
Speaker 1: you see Stephen Colbert as a liberal skewering conservatives. But
Speaker 1: the more conservative you are, the more you see Stephen
Speaker 1: Colbert as a conservative. Skewering liberals, so essentially they saw
Speaker 1: what they wanted to see. So the big takeaway here
Speaker 1: of this study was that this is what we would
Speaker 1: call motivated cognition or biased perception. Colbert says to Goodman,
Speaker 1: you're a communist. That's funny if you think the joke
Speaker 1: is on Colbert. It's also funny if you think Goodman
Speaker 1: actually is a kind of communist and someone is finally
Speaker 1: calling her out on it. Yeah, and he's sticking it
Speaker 1: to a communist. And we ask those kinds of questions
Speaker 1: in several different ways, and every single time, the conservatives
Speaker 1: and especially the strong conservatives would say, yeah, it's a joke,
Speaker 1: but he really kind of means it, So he really
Speaker 1: does sort of think she's a communist, and he really
Speaker 1: does sort of think there is a right and a wrong.
Speaker 1: And I agree with that, whereas the liberal would be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's clearly making fun of Bill O'Reilly. There's no difference
Speaker 1: in how funny conservatives and liberals find Colbert, and that's
Speaker 1: part of the magic, right, So that's why I would
Speaker 1: say he was a comedic genius. Lamar loves Colbert, and
Speaker 1: she thinks that what he accomplished with the Colbert Report
Speaker 1: was extraordinary. He created a character who managed to appeal
Speaker 1: to all side of the political spectrum simultaneously. Do you
Speaker 1: know how hard that is? Really? Really hard? But if
Speaker 1: you think he's somehow winning an ideological battle, you're wrong. Boy.
Speaker 1: The England Miller playing songs not made by him, parade eies,
Speaker 1: why gosh, we hadn't made This isn't the first time
Speaker 1: this has happened with politically motivated comedy. By the way,
Speaker 1: almost fifty years ago, when Norman Lear's All in the
Speaker 1: Family was the most popular show in American television, there
Speaker 1: was a huge debate over the show's star character, the bigoted,
Speaker 1: reactionary Archie Bunker. Isn't anybody else interested in not poland standards?
Speaker 1: Our wildest coming crumbling down the coonsh are coming? Bunker
Speaker 1: 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: Endfield 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 rays, 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 wash jeans and nylon shell and screams at them all,
Speaker 1: get back to work, you scum. Then he burns a
Speaker 1: ten pound note on stage and the room of nurses
Speaker 1: goes wild. They love it. He's perfectly captured what they're
Speaker 1: up against. But the other side, the side they're up against,
Speaker 1: they love it too. And it got sort of taken
Speaker 1: on by the Sun, which was a very right wing
Speaker 1: paper and the kind of left wing papers. Basically everyone
Speaker 1: took it on. Everyone decided it was theirs, you know,
Speaker 1: they made him their property. So the Sun looked on
Speaker 1: loads of money quite affectionately. Yeah, yeah, they thought it
Speaker 1: was great and it was a sign of Thatcher's Britain
Speaker 1: that all working class people were getting richer. That's what
Speaker 1: they That was the propaganda. That was how they interpreted it.
Speaker 1: I guess yeah, which obviously wasn't really the case. But
Speaker 1: it was quite funny. Were you taken by surprise by
Speaker 1: the reception that loads of money? Guy? I was, why, well,
Speaker 1: just because you know, I've done other characters and they've
Speaker 1: been all right, but this seemed to go very big
Speaker 1: and it got sort of action in Parliament, and Missus
Speaker 1: Sachet suddenly said we've got loads of money economy or something,
Speaker 1: and then the leader of the opposition said, you know,
Speaker 1: you've created the loads of money. And they were both
Speaker 1: using it. One of them was using it with pride
Speaker 1: and the other one with you know, contempt, and it
Speaker 1: was odd, very odd. I didn't expect it at all, Malcolm.
Speaker 1: It really is odd. There are cultural histories written other
Speaker 1: Thatcher years, and invariably they talk about loads of money
Speaker 1: and how the character was this great symbol of the era,
Speaker 1: and it's clear that enthusiasm for this grotesque markery was
Speaker 1: even greater on the right than it was on the left. Finally,
Speaker 1: Enfield just kind of gives up, tell me, how you
Speaker 1: killed him off? Oh, I think he got well. I
Speaker 1: think I just stopped doing him. And then we were
Speaker 1: doing comic relief over here, and I think we did
Speaker 1: a sketch where he got run over. He was run
Speaker 1: over by a van on Live Telly for charity. The
Speaker 1: loads of money problem happens because satire is complicated. It's
Speaker 1: not like straightforward speech that's easy to decode. It requires interpretation.
Speaker 1: That's what draws you in, that's where the humor lies.
Speaker 1: But that act of interpretation has a cost. How the
Speaker 1: Lamar calls this the paradox of satire. So the trade
Speaker 1: off with satire becomes all of the thinking, or a
Speaker 1: lot of the thinking becomes devoted to what the comic means,
Speaker 1: who the target of the joke is, and as they
Speaker 1: interpret that, then they spend less time thinking about whether
Speaker 1: that warrants any kind of real consideration or counter arguing
Speaker 1: sort of the merits of that message. This doesn't happen
Speaker 1: when you listen to a straightforward discussion of politics. You
Speaker 1: just think about the arguments. But with satire here you're
Speaker 1: spending all of your time thinking about the nature of
Speaker 1: the comedy, which leaves very little mental resources available to
Speaker 1: think about. The comedy has truth. There's a brilliant essay
Speaker 1: written on its very subject in the July twenty thirteen
Speaker 1: London Review of Books. It's called Sinking Giggling into the Sea,
Speaker 1: and it's by the writer Jonathan Co. You should read it.
Speaker 1: Co takes the argument against satire one step further. He
Speaker 1: says the effectiveness of satire is not just undermined by
Speaker 1: its complicated nature, by its ambiguity. Co says, it's undermined
Speaker 1: by something else, the laughter it creates. Laughter, in a way,
Speaker 1: is a kind of last resort. If you're up against
Speaker 1: a problem which is completely intractable, if you're up against
Speaker 1: a situation for which there is no human solution and
Speaker 1: never will be, then okay, let's let's laugh about it.
Speaker 1: In say, the Humor of Laurel and Hardy, Co says
Speaker 1: that kind of laughing is perfectly appropriate because when you
Speaker 1: see them taking on some ridiculous sciphean task like pushing
Speaker 1: a piano, an endless flight of stat failing time and
Speaker 1: time again, then you know what they're asking you to
Speaker 1: laugh at. There is the human condition and the intractability
Speaker 1: of the forces of nature and the forces of physics,
Speaker 1: which we can do nothing about, so of course we
Speaker 1: have to laugh. With political problems, it's slightly different. I mean,
Speaker 1: some political problems are intractable, but some political problems can
Speaker 1: be solved, and perhaps instead of laughing about them, we
Speaker 1: should try and do something about them. I just hope
Speaker 1: that tonight the lamestream media won't twist my words by
Speaker 1: repeating them verbatim. Back at the beginning, I mentioned Tina
Speaker 1: Fey's brilliant impersonation of Sarah Pale and on Saturday Night Live,
Speaker 1: I love those sketches. I think Tina fe is a
Speaker 1: comic genius, but after listening to Heather Lamar and Jonathan Coe,
Speaker 1: I can't help but think that her comic genius is
Speaker 1: actually a problem. SNL brought Tina fe into skewer Pale
Speaker 1: and out of a sense of outrage that someone this
Speaker 1: unqualified was running for higher office in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: lots of people felt this way. Palin was the running
Speaker 1: mate of John McCain, an elderly senator of uncertain health.
Speaker 1: She could easily have been president. SNEL was trying to
Speaker 1: hold Sarah Palin to some kind of scrutiny to say
Speaker 1: this is who she is. But looking back now, I
Speaker 1: don't think it worked because Tina Fey is too busy
Speaker 1: being funny. Please welcome the lovely Tina Feye. In October
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight, just before the election, Tina Fey
Speaker 1: does an interview with the talk show host David Letterman. Now,
Speaker 1: you would think with the vote looming, Faye and Letterman
Speaker 1: would want to talk about the subject of her satire,
Speaker 1: or the intention of her satire, the fact that someone
Speaker 1: this unqualified might be less than a month away from
Speaker 1: the vice presidency. But they don't. They talk entirely about
Speaker 1: the mechanics of Faye's satire. She got that crazy accent.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit Fargo with a little bit Rhese
Speaker 1: Witherspoon and election. And it also I tried to base
Speaker 1: it on my friend paul as grandma, because her grandma
Speaker 1: was the sweet, sweet old lady from Joliet, Illinois, and
Speaker 1: she would always say like, oh this and that and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, and I think that might be our
Speaker 1: next vis president. Oh no, but it's it's It sounded
Speaker 1: to me a little and I don't know what the
Speaker 1: connection would be. It sounds a little like Upper Midwest
Speaker 1: kind of Great Lakes region. Yeah, she dropping the gesus,
Speaker 1: you know, and her rs are she really loves, you know,
Speaker 1: like these terrorists and William errors and she did those hers.
Speaker 1: I think she thinks there's oil in those arts. Indeed,
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. There's certainly been a strange reaction to it.
Speaker 1: And then I've seen people who say, oh, no, you're
Speaker 1: helping them. You're helping them because people, it's people, it
Speaker 1: seems next seem nice or you know, or it's or something.
Speaker 1: The Republicans say it's sexist. That's, you know, just crazy
Speaker 1: because if you have to be able to goof on
Speaker 1: the female politicians just as much, otherwise you really are
Speaker 1: treating them like they're like they're weaker or something. And
Speaker 1: this Sarah Palin is a tough lady. She kills things. Speak.
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 fe 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 Fey
Speaker 1: goes on Letterman, Sarah Palin appears as a guest on
Speaker 1: Saturday Night Live, right beside Tina Fey. No, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to take any of your questions, but I do
Speaker 1: want to take this opportunity to say, live from New York,
Speaker 1: it's Saturday Nights. They let Sarah Palin in on the joke,
Speaker 1: and Pale and Tina Fey dress up in identical red
Speaker 1: outfits with little things in their hair and put on
Speaker 1: identical glasses, because that's even funnier. And what are you
Speaker 1: left with? You left with one of the most charming
Speaker 1: and winning and hilarious comics of her generation, letting her
Speaker 1: charismo wash over her ostensible target, disarming us, disarming Sarah Palin,
Speaker 1: And now I'd like to entertain everybody with some fancy
Speaker 1: pageant walking. Sure we laughed, but it's kind of heartbreaking,
Speaker 1: isn't it. At least Harry Enfield was trying to take
Speaker 1: a bite out of the establishment with loads of money,
Speaker 1: Saturday Night Live has taken out its dentures and is
Speaker 1: sipping the political situation through a straw. Lord help us
Speaker 1: if some other, even less qualified and more frightening political
Speaker 1: figure comes along. I think the pleasure that laughter generates
Speaker 1: can be deceptive. That's writer Jonathan Coe again. To make
Speaker 1: an audience laugh is very it's a very solid and
Speaker 1: very tangible thing. I think it's it's only after the event,
Speaker 1: maybe years after the event, that you pull back and
Speaker 1: ask yourself, well, what's 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 Life. What I
Speaker 1: mean is they're not English, They're not the English stock.
Speaker 1: I mean you only have to look at the names
Speaker 1: left of its rebel bits Vassily, and those are demonish
Speaker 1: names they're used to be. Cook later started a comedy
Speaker 1: club in Soho in London called The Establishment. Peter Cook
Speaker 1: kind of his genius and also his curse, was that
Speaker 1: he he saw all these contradictions as soon as he started.
Speaker 1: Really was he was under no illusions that he was
Speaker 1: going to change the world through satire, and I yes,
Speaker 1: that the l he used with the establishment was that
Speaker 1: he was modeling it all on all those wonderful Berlin
Speaker 1: cabarets from the nineteen twenties, which had done so much
Speaker 1: to prevent the Right of Hitler and the beginnings of Nazism.
Speaker 1: There's a television show in Israel called A Wonderful Country
Speaker 1: Rits Nadered. 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 want 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 Fay were. But
Speaker 1: there's a difference. It's more political, and it's a little
Speaker 1: more rugged and hardcore, because life in Israel is much
Speaker 1: more rugged and hardcore. That's Mooley Segev, the show's executive producer.
Speaker 1: A Wonderful Country airs Friday night at nine after the news.
Speaker 1: Practically the whole country watches it. The stomach of reality
Speaker 1: viewers is much more adjustable you know, they can adjust
Speaker 1: too much tougher material. Firstly, because the news broadcast that
Speaker 1: is on the air before US shows so many gruesome
Speaker 1: stuff and horrible things that naturally the comedy after that
Speaker 1: will be the same. A wonderful country goes further than
Speaker 1: the kind of TV satire that we have in the
Speaker 1: US or the UK, maybe because the stakes are so
Speaker 1: much higher in Israel. Maybe in a country with a
Speaker 1: tortured history, suffering under constant threat, the boundaries that satire
Speaker 1: needs to push up against are more real, and we
Speaker 1: have very, very bad reactions sometimes. Can you give me
Speaker 1: an example of a sketch that brought about a bad reaction.
Speaker 1: Let's say, like a couple of years ago, we made
Speaker 1: a sketch that was a parody on a game show
Speaker 1: called a One Versus a hundred. You know that show
Speaker 1: One versus one hundred was a quiz show where one
Speaker 1: supposedly brilliant contestant known as the One, squares off against
Speaker 1: a hundred people sitting in little cubicles in the audience.
Speaker 1: The One and the audience are asked a question and
Speaker 1: whenever someone in the audience gets it wrong, they're eliminated.
Speaker 1: The light in their cubicle goes off and we can't
Speaker 1: see them anymore. In A Wonderful Country's version, the one
Speaker 1: was the Prime Minister at the time, and the audience
Speaker 1: was made up of one hundred and nineteen people. One
Speaker 1: hundred and nineteen was a number of Israeli soldiers who
Speaker 1: died in the two thousand and six Lebanon War. He
Speaker 1: was asked, why did you go to that war? Why
Speaker 1: did you do that? Why did you do that? And
Speaker 1: all the hands that he gave was were wrong. Naturally,
Speaker 1: it was the one versus the one nineteen, And with
Speaker 1: every wrong answer from the Prime Minister, the light went
Speaker 1: off underneath one of the soldiers in the audience. They
Speaker 1: vanished from sight, and that was very graphic and very
Speaker 1: hard to watch, but it was but it was for
Speaker 1: us to say so that this war was unnecessary at
Speaker 1: the time. Can you imagine Saturday Night Live doing that
Speaker 1: sketch during Near Rock War? Of course not. I think
Speaker 1: we've forgotten what real satire is in the West. That's
Speaker 1: real satire. It uses a comic pretense to land a
Speaker 1: massive blow. The first A Wonderful Country sketch I ever
Speaker 1: saw was from five years ago. It was done right
Speaker 1: at the time when liberal Israelis began to despair about
Speaker 1: the direction of their government under Benjamin net and Yahoo.
Speaker 1: The sketch I saw is styled in the manner of
Speaker 1: a government funded documentary, a kind of promotional video for
Speaker 1: a new educational initiative in the schools. It's said in
Speaker 1: a classroom full of adorable kindergarten students, seriously adorable a
Speaker 1: warm and very compelling teachers at the front of the room, Yola.
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 and 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 middle,
Speaker 1: the least who knows what we call the rest of
Speaker 1: the world, and the children chant in unison, anti Semitic.
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 revisionist history dot com.
Speaker 1: And it's doubly difficult to explain comedy from another country.
Speaker 1: But believe me when I say the kindergarten bit is hilarious.
Speaker 1: I laughed out loud. We try to put it in
Speaker 1: this situation where kids in kindergarten and learning it, and
Speaker 1: you see how bleak it is, how sad it is
Speaker 1: to raise a generation with no hope. And that's exactly
Speaker 1: the idealogy of Nataniell. Things are only going to get worse.
Speaker 1: All the world is against us. We're alone in the world.
Speaker 1: We have to build a fortress around us and pray
Speaker 1: for God to save us. It's not in our hand.
Speaker 1: There's nothing we can do. And that's it for the
Speaker 1: rest of your life. Kids, I said, I laughed out
Speaker 1: loud the first time I saw that sketch, but the
Speaker 1: second time I saw it, I didn't laugh at all.
Speaker 1: That's what we're aiming for. In a lot of our sketches.
Speaker 1: It appears to be funny, and then it sinks in
Speaker 1: and you think about it once more, and then maybe
Speaker 1: something will touch you and you feel the pain that
Speaker 1: you know driven us to write that the fundamental truth
Speaker 1: when you think about it, is kind of sad. Can
Speaker 1: someone read this sketch the wrong way? Like Stephen Colbert
Speaker 1: got read the wrong way? Could some viewers think this
Speaker 1: sketch satirizes left wing Israeli? Thinking maybe, But I think
Speaker 1: the intentions are pretty plain. They're not hard to decode.
Speaker 1: We have children mouthing the absurd, dead end arguments of adults,
Speaker 1: and if laughter is normally the great distractor, the laughter
Speaker 1: dissipates awfully quickly. Here satire works best when the satirists
Speaker 1: is the courage not just to go for the joke.
Speaker 1: The teacher says, do you want to play nobody gets
Speaker 1: to preach to us about morality. The kids shout out yes, yes.
Speaker 1: The teacher pulls out a tambourine and starts chanting the Italians.
Speaker 1: One little girl chanced back, they collaborated with the Nazis
Speaker 1: in 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. I am lordsla mad Novan.
Speaker 1: The kids are waving their fist 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 we thing History is trying to tell us.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you liked 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 Revisionist history dot com or on your
Speaker 1: favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia LaBelle,
Speaker 1: Roxanne Scott, and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Music is composed by Luis Guerra and Taka Yasuzawa. Flawn
Speaker 1: Williams is our engineer. Our fact checker is Michelle Sirocca.
Speaker 1: Thanks to the Penalty Management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bowers
Speaker 1: and my old and dear friend el Hafe, Jacob Weisberg