The Satire Paradox

In the political turmoil of mid-1990s Britain, a brilliant young comic named Harry Enfield set out to satirize the ideology and politics of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His parodies became famous. He wrote and performed a vicious sendup of the typical Thatcherite nouveau riche buffoon. People loved it. And what happened? Exactly the opposite of what Enfield hoped would happen. In an age dominated by political comedy, “The Satire Paradox” asks whether laughter and social protest are friends or foes. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. 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. Harry Enfield,
one of England's best known comedians. He's talking about where

(00:37):
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 in the UK. And we
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

(00:58):
had huge wards of money and they'd take it out
and 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 out and
sort of, you know, flash it at the bar and everything.
Enfield hated Thatcher, hated what she represented, but the power
I took was a power to reduce the power of government.

(01:24):
Enfield and his partner Paul Whitehouse dreampt up a character
to embody Thatcher's England 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. His name was loads
of money. He was a construction worker, catapulted to sudden

(01:47):
delirious wealth by the eighties building boom oh, got piles falls.
He choose gum with his mouth open, whereas acid wash jeans,
white trainers, a yellow and green nylon jacket with white sleeves,
keys on his belt, drives a white convertible the countryside.

(02:10):
All performed with a kind of cheerful, unstoppable tastelessness. A
politics right all you need, and all about politics. He said,
miss Batch had done a lot of good for the country,
but you wouldn't want to shaggy. I mean, at the time,
everything was, you know, everyone was going missus, statue of this,
missus snatch of that, and you know, sort of very

(02:32):
obviously preaching to the converted. So we sort of did
it the other way, which is just to go look
at me, Auntie. Gray. Isn't money Gray. Everything else is rubbish.
Only money is good. 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

(03:01):
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

(03:29):
and six White House Correspondence Dinner, 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. I stand by
this man. I stand by this man because he stands
four things, not only four things. He stands on things

(03:52):
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. All the while
President Bush sits unhappily on the dais a few feet

(04:13):
from Colbert, squirming and grimacing and looking like you'd rather
be a 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. Well, Alaska and Russia are only separated by

(04:34):
a narrow maritime boarder. You've got Alaska here and this
right here's water, and the mets up there's Russia, so
we keep an eye on them. Who do you remember now,
Sarah Palin herself or Tina Fey's Palin. I've written opinion
pieces for newspapers and magazines, and there you have to

(04:55):
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 the 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

(05:18):
on her ambition, her humorlessness, her severity, her opportunism, all
the things that have always given people pause about her.
You're finally going to announce that you're running for president.
Oh my gosh, I don't know if I have it
in me. I'm scared. I'm kidding. Let's do best. Comedians

(05:39):
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

(06:01):
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. All he did was have money, shag birds, drink,

(06:26):
go to the opera. That was it kind of thing.
I didn't realize he went to the opera. 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'd go up to the bar and
flashes woods, you know, order champagne top, which is basically
like lager Top is a very big drink over here,

(06:46):
which is lager 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. Loads of Money run in the mid
nineteen eighties on a pipe of Friday Night Sketch Carmody
show on British television. It struck a nerve the first
couple of times you do this sketch, there is the

(07:07):
reaction immediate or is it kind of bills No, it's
absolutely immediate. I mean it was a sort of live
show and so it needed sort of big brush, loud
characters and this was one and people absolutely got it
straight away. 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

(07:35):
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 waiving huge
piles of pound notes it has three point three million

(07:55):
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.

(08:15):
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 to power. You know what he says,
he says it made no difference. That's what I want

(08:37):
to talk about. Let's call it the loads of Money problem.
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. When Harry Enfield told me

(09:00):
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

(09:23):
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

(09:43):
the studios there 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

(10:04):
out on set, he's going to be someone else. But
you don't quite believe him because 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. Okay, I'll get straight
to my problem with this. Okay, you know I've got

(10:24):
a problem with this, right I can't come as a
surprise to you. Yeah, okay, the New Yorker. Okay, you
think pieces that's you're right, You're right, think pieces, Why
do you want to make me think about my dog?
I feel about my dog, and my dog loves me
back on conditionally? Why ruin that with thinking about it? Now?

(10:44):
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

(11:05):
every time I swore I'd never go on again. You
say our dogs. Do you have a dog? I don't
have a dog. I don't have a dog. Okay, my
building doesn't allow dogs. I'm an aspirational dog owner, but
I really, yeah, I had you the ability, you would
own a dog. I would someday I hoped to own
a dog. Yeah. I grew up with dogs, and i've

(11:26):
you're raised by wolves dogs. 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 communication scholar named Heather Lamar, an assistant professor
at Temple University in Philadelphia. She's part of a group
of social scientists who have made a specialty out of

(11:48):
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. I have a lot of liberal friends,
especially in academia, but I also have a lot of

(12:09):
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. It
struck her as something worth examining in more detail. Why
are my Republican friends and family members watching him every
single night and finding him hilarious, but they see him

(12:30):
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'reiley. 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. Thank you so
much for coming to the show. It's good to be

(12:52):
stew 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. I don't know. I think that conservative
liberal lines are breaking down right, yeah, to right and wrong.

(13:15):
Let me talk about the right estate. 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. 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

(13:37):
it at Colbert, but then just as quickly takes it down.
I know exactly how she feels. I heard you or
a firebrand will bring it baby. What does Lamar find
when she studies audience reactions to a clip like this?
She finds that the more liberal you are, the more
you see Stephen Colbert as a liberal skewering conservatives. But

(14:00):
the more conservative you are, the more you see Stephen
Colbert as a conservative. Skewering 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. 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

(14:24):
actually is a kind of communist and someone is finally
calling her out on it. 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,

(14:48):
he's clearly making fun of Bill O'Reilly. There's no difference
in how funny conservatives and liberals find Colbert, and that's
part of the magic, right, So that's why I would
say he was a comedic genius. Lamar loves Colbert, and
she thinks that what he accomplished with the Colbert Report
was extraordinary. He created a character who managed to appeal

(15:08):
to all side 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. Boy.
The England Miller playing songs not made by him, parade eies,

(15:29):
why gosh, we hadn't made This isn't the first time
this has 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,

(15:50):
reactionary Archie Bunker. Isn't anybody else interested in not poland standards?
Our wildest coming crumbling down the coonsh are coming? Bunker
was created to satirize conservative attitudes on race and sexuality,
but in the end, the consensus among social scientists seem

(16:11):
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

(16:33):
the same thing happens with loads of money. At one point,
Endfield does a benefit for British nurses who are all
on strike. Nurses in the UK are public sector employees
and they want a modest rays, 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

(16:56):
stage as loads of money in his white trainers and
acid wash jeans and nylon shell and screams at them all,
get back to work, you scum. Then 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,

(17:17):
they love it too. 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. So the Sun looked on
loads of money quite affectionately. Yeah, yeah, they thought it
was great and it was a sign of Thatcher's Britain

(17:39):
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. Were you taken by surprise by
the reception that loads of money? Guy? I was, why, well,

(18:00):
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 action in Parliament, and Missus
Sachet 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

(18:21):
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.
It really is odd. There are cultural histories written other
Thatcher years, and invariably they talk about loads of money
and how the character was this great symbol of the era,

(18:42):
and it's clear that enthusiasm for this grotesque markery 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? 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

(19:03):
over by a van on Live Telly for charity. 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.

(19:24):
But that act of interpretation has a cost. How the
Lamar calls this the paradox of satire. 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

(19:45):
that warrants any kind of real consideration or counter arguing
sort of the merits of that message. This doesn't happen
when you listen to a straightforward discussion of politics. You
just think about the arguments. 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

(20:08):
think about. The comedy has truth. 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 Co. You should read it.
Co takes the argument against satire one step further. He
says the effectiveness of satire is not just undermined by

(20:31):
its complicated nature, by its ambiguity. Co says, it's undermined
by something else, the laughter it creates. Laughter, in a way,
is a kind of last resort. If you're up against
a problem which is completely intractable, if you're up against
a situation for which there is no human solution and
never will be, then okay, let's let's laugh about it.

(20:52):
In say, the Humor of Laurel and Hardy, Co says
that kind of laughing is perfectly appropriate because when you
see them taking on some ridiculous sciphean task like pushing
a piano, an endless flight of stat failing time and
time again, then you know what they're asking you to
laugh at. There is the human condition and the intractability

(21:15):
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. I just hope

(21:36):
that tonight the lamestream media won't twist my words by
repeating them verbatim. Back at the beginning, I mentioned Tina
Fey's brilliant impersonation of Sarah Pale and on Saturday Night Live,
I love those sketches. I think Tina fe is a
comic genius, but after listening to Heather Lamar and Jonathan Coe,

(21:56):
I can't help but think that her comic genius is
actually a problem. SNL brought Tina fe into skewer Pale
and 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.

(22:19):
She could easily have been president. SNEL 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. Please welcome the lovely Tina Feye. In October

(22:41):
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, Faye 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

(23:03):
the mechanics of Faye's satire. She got that crazy accent.
It's a little bit Fargo with a little bit Rhese
Witherspoon and election. And it also I tried to base
it on my friend paul as grandma, because her grandma
was the sweet, sweet old lady from Joliet, Illinois, and
she would always say like, oh this and that and
stuff like that, and I think that might be our

(23:28):
next vis president. Oh no, but it's it's It sounded
to me a little and I don't know what the
connection would be. It sounds a little like Upper Midwest
kind of Great Lakes region. Yeah, she dropping the gesus,
you know, and her rs are she really loves, you know,
like these terrorists and William errors and she did those hers.

(23:49):
I think she thinks there's oil in those arts. Indeed,
they want the laugh, so they make fun of the
way Sarah Palin talks. And the way she talks is
not the problem. 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

(24:10):
seems next seem nice or you know, or it's or something.
The Republicans say it's sexist. That's, you know, just crazy
because if 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. Speak.

(24:37):
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 fe just come out and
admit that her satire is completely toothless, and then what
happens the very next day, The day after Tina Fey

(24:59):
goes on Letterman, Sarah Palin appears as a guest on
Saturday Night Live, right beside Tina Fey. 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. They let Sarah Palin in on the joke,
and Pale and Tina Fey dress up in identical red

(25:22):
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
charismo wash over her ostensible target, disarming us, disarming Sarah Palin,

(25:43):
And now I'd like to entertain everybody with some fancy
pageant walking. Sure we laughed, but it's kind of heartbreaking,
isn't it. At least Harry Enfield 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

(26:06):
if some other, even less qualified and more frightening political
figure comes along. I think the pleasure that laughter generates
can be deceptive. That's writer Jonathan Coe again. To make
an audience laugh is very it's a very solid and
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, what's that the effect that I wanted?

(26:27):
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 Life. What I
mean is they're not English, They're not the English stock.
I mean you only have to look at the names
left of its rebel bits Vassily, and those are demonish

(26:48):
names they're used to be. Cook later started a comedy
club in Soho in London called The Establishment. Peter Cook
kind of his genius and also his curse, was that
he he saw all these contradictions as soon as he started.
Really was he was under no illusions that he was
going to change the world through satire, and I yes,

(27:08):
that the l he used with the establishment was that
he was modeling it all on all those wonderful Berlin
cabarets from the nineteen twenties, which had done so much
to prevent the Right of Hitler and the beginnings of Nazism.
There's a television show in Israel called A Wonderful Country
Rits Nadered. It's been on the air since two thousand

(27:31):
and three. It's satire, very political. The show's writers belong
to the beleaguered Israeli political left. They want 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 Fay were. But

(27:54):
there's a difference. It's more political, and it's a little
more rugged and hardcore, because life in Israel is much
more rugged and hardcore. That's Mooley Segev, the show's executive producer.
A Wonderful Country airs Friday night at nine after the news.
Practically the whole country watches it. The stomach of reality

(28:16):
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. A wonderful country goes further than

(28:37):
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, and we
have very, very bad reactions sometimes. Can you give me
an example of a sketch that brought about a bad reaction.

(29:00):
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 a hundred. You know that show
One versus one hundred was a quiz show where one
supposedly brilliant contestant known as the One, squares off against
a hundred people sitting in little cubicles in the audience.

(29:20):
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

(29:42):
died in the two thousand and six Lebanon War. 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. 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

(30:02):
vanished from sight, and that was very graphic and very
hard to watch, but it was but it was for
us to say so that this war was unnecessary at
the time. Can you imagine Saturday Night Live doing that
sketch during Near Rock War? Of course not. I think
we've forgotten what real satire is in the West. That's

(30:23):
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 net and Yahoo.
The sketch I saw is styled in the manner of

(30:43):
a government funded documentary, a kind of promotional video for
a new educational initiative in the schools. It's said in
a classroom full of adorable kindergarten students, seriously adorable a
warm and very compelling teachers at the front of the room, Yola.

(31:08):
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 and the occupied territories. A truly

(31:30):
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.

(31:52):
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,
the least who knows what we call the rest of
the world, and the children chant in unison, anti Semitic.

(32:23):
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 revisionist history 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. We try to put it in
this situation where kids in kindergarten and learning it, and

(32:47):
you see how bleak it is, how sad it is
to raise a generation with no hope. And that's exactly
the idealogy of Nataniell. 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 hand.

(33:09):
There's nothing we can do. And that's it for the
rest of your life. 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.
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

(33:29):
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. 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 Israeli? Thinking maybe, But I think

(33:52):
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. Here satire works best when the satirists
is the courage not just to go for the joke.

(34:19):
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 chanced back, they collaborated with the Nazis
in the Holocaust. The teacher chance the French. A child replies,

(34:41):
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. I am lordsla mad Novan.

(35:04):
The kids are waving their fist 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

(35:25):
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.

(35:46):
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

(36:08):
we ignore we thing History is trying to tell us.
You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you liked what
you've heard, please do us a favor and rate us
on iTunes. You can get more information about this and

(36:29):
other episodes at Revisionist history 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. Flawn
Williams is our engineer. Our fact checker is Michelle Sirocca.

(36:49):
Thanks to the Penalty Management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bowers
and my old and dear friend el Hafe, Jacob Weisberg