‘Woke comedy’ will never compete with the despair of the online Right
“No great movement designed to change the world can bear sarcasm or mockery, because they are a rust that corrodes everything it touches.” So wrote the Czech writer Milan Kundera in his novel The Joke.
Humour has long been a magic ingredient in unlocking political change. In the medieval court, jesters had an almost unique privilege in being able to tell the monarch what he didn’t want to hear, and were often tasked with presenting bad news. In totalitarian regimes humour was a daily act of undermining the regime, to the extent that on Stalin’s death 200,000 of the Gulag’s 2.5m population were there for telling jokes.
