British satire, everyday politics: Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci and Charlie Brooker
| Author | James Brassett,Alex Sutton |
| Date | 01 May 2017 |
| Published date | 01 May 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148117700147 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117700147
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2017, Vol. 19(2) 245 –262
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148117700147
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British satire, everyday
politics: Chris Morris, Armando
Iannucci and Charlie Brooker
James Brassett1 and Alex Sutton2
Abstract
This article develops a critical engagement with the politics of British satire. After first engaging
the mainstream critique of satire—that it promotes cynicism and apathy by portraying politicians
in stereotypically corrupt terms—we develop a performative approach to comedy as an everyday
vernacular of political life. Beyond a focus on ‘impact’, we suggest that satire can be read as an
everyday form of political reflection that performs within a social context. This argument yields an
image of Morris, Iannucci and Brooker as important critics of contemporary British politics, a point
which we explore through their interventions on media form, political tragedy and political agency.
Keywords
British politics, British satire, comedy, critique, everyday politics, resistance
… the world has changed and so has political comedy and satire. The rise of the 24/7 media
machine with ever more pressure on ratings combined with the rich pickings offered by mass
market DVDs and large-scale arena tours has fuelled a transition best captured in David Denby’s
notion of the change ‘from satire to snark’. The latter being snide, aggressive, personalized: ‘it
seizes on any vulnerability or weakness it can find—a slip of the tongue, a sentence not quite
up-to-date, a bit of flab, a flash of boob, a blotch, a wrinkle, an open fly, an open mouth, a closed
mouth’, but all designed to reinforce the general view that politics is failing and politicians are
bastards. (Flinders, 2013)
Introduction
Recent years have seen a growing scepticism towards the role of satire in British political
life. This view, which has been expressed across policy circles, the media and academia,
suggests that making fun of politicians and political parties can foster cynicism and apa-
thy among citizens that diminishes healthy political engagement (Fielding, 2012, 2014a,
1Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
2Department of History and Politics, University of Chichester, Chichester, UK
Corresponding author:
James Brassett, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: j.brassett.1@warwick.ac.uk
700147BPI0010.1177/1369148117700147The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsBrassett and Sutton
research-article2017
Article
246 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(2)
2014b). In more sweeping variants, a norm of subversion, especially snark, within the
public sphere is taken as (at least) permissive of a ‘hollowing out’ of political life (Denby,
2010; Flinders, 2013). A kind of ‘post-truth’ malaise emerges whereby politicians them-
selves—most notably Boris Johnson—are able to profit from an increasingly symbiotic
relationship with satire (Coe, 2013; Iannucci, 2015, 2016). The once cutting edge of
British satire is not only blunted but also actively turned to the ends of a de-politicised,
spectacular form of politics where gesture, form, personality and humour trump engage-
ment, deliberation, transparency and accountability.
While sympathetic to this view, not least for underlining the political significance of
comedy, we develop a critical engagement that extends in a more performative direction
(Butler, 2010). Although satire has certainly grown in significance and circulation within
British politics, we argue that the political analysis of comedy should not be reduced to
an instrumental logic of ‘impact’ but can also entertain the plural possibilities and limits
that might be in a process of construction and change. As Julie Webber (2013: 7) observes,
‘few political science scholars examine political comedy, and when they do, they ask an
outdated disciplinary question: does it promote civic engagement? Or does it make citi-
zens cynical toward government?’ Straightforwardly, there is more to critical politics than
parliament, parties, politicians and elections. Part of the argument against contemporary
satire seems to imply that the resolution of public engagement via the state form of poli-
tics is straightforwardly the best option. On this view, satire either supports the process of
resolution or not. But rather than begin with this fixed understanding of what politics ‘is’,
to which comedy is then ‘added’, we think it is more productive to ask: how does satire
conceive of politics? What possibilities and limits are performed? Rejecting the idea that
satire should work as an instrumental force that influences the world of politics (for good
or ill), we develop a performative approach that engages political satire on its own terms
as a far more contested and insurrectional domain.
Broadly speaking, we question the objective separation between a domain of culture
on one hand and a domain of politics on the other, in order to develop a conception of
satire as an everyday vernacular of political life (Brassett, 2016). Comedy is not ‘good’ or
‘bad’ for politics. Comedy is politics. Anthropologists have long understood that small
things like laughing at, subverting or otherwise ridiculing elements of political life sug-
gest an important everyday agency for reflection and critique (Scott, 1987). But what this
agency does or does not do, or what it is used for, and by whom, are entirely open ques-
tions. The interesting point for us is that British satire exists as a vernacular record of
political thought in its own right: it raises questions about the state form of politics, sug-
gests radical limits in the mediatisation of political life and can, in certain circumstances,
anticipate novel ways in which political agency might be changing. This view has impli-
cations for the study of political comedy, which go beyond the objective orthodoxy of
audience studies, to anticipate how satire works as an everyday language of politics.
Satire is fundamentally situated in the social relations that it seeks to criticise and, as
such, the performance can both critique and embody the problems and contradictions of
that society. This is not necessarily ‘direct’ in the sense that the satirist intends, because
these contradictions manifest—in part—through the performance itself. Thus, the signifi-
cance of the satirical performance is not predetermined and should not be treated as a
‘closed’ event. Rather, the manifestation of these contradictions through the performance
is open ended, and the satire can develop its form of critique in unintended directions. We
therefore recognise an important ambiguity in the politics of comedy that others have
identified, which is that it can as easily uphold, as well as critique, established forms of
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