Why satire is dangerous for autocrats

Joseph Stalin loses his pipe and informs his security chief. He later finds it behind the sofa. “That’s impossible,” says the henchman, “three people have already confessed to stealing it!” Many jokes have been made about the Soviet generalissimo, and they have continued to circulate long after his death. For example: Stalin’s ghost visits Vladimir Putin. “Kill your opponents and paint the Kremlin blue,” he advises. “Why blue?” Putin asks. The ghost smiles: “I knew you wouldn’t question the first part.”

While the tyrant was alive, it was foolish to tell such jokes in public or in front of anyone who might report them. Even just listening could be fatal. “Who built the White Sea Canal?” goes one quip about the monstrous infrastructure project. “The right bank was dug by those who told jokes - the left by those who listened to them.”

“Every joke,” wrote George Orwell, “is a small revolution.” To silence comedians, some autocrats use torturers and the gulag; in modern-day Egypt and other unfree places, the punishment for mockery can be imprisonment and exile. In America, the tools are comparatively mild, including threatening regulators, as host Jimmy Kimmel found out. Yet whatever the fate of comedians, the jokes themselves always survive.

Autocrats are inherently funny. Humor thrives on pretense and deception—and the tyrant is always pretense. He presents himself as a savior, but he is actually a brute; he pretends to be all-powerful, but he is as imperfect as other mortals, or even more so. If he has an ideology, it is flawed. Sensitive and narcissistic, tyrants rarely tolerate jokes, which makes them risky, but also funnier. The Nazis banned “The Great Dictator,” in which Charlie Chaplin mocked Adolf Hitler, but the Führer is said to have watched it twice. Saddam Hussein tried to kill the cast of a satirical film.

Political jokes, meanwhile, are the perfect weapon for the weak. Even without the Internet, they spread like wildfire, crisscrossing the country before censors can even get their pens out. (According to a report cited in a BBC documentary, the KGB found that a single joke could spread across Moscow in just a few hours.) The key is that a good joke has a conspiratorial effect: it wins listeners over to the side of the one telling it—or, more precisely, makes it clear which side they are already on. They can’t help but laugh, and it’s funny because it’s, in essence, true. That connection can serve as a springboard for politics, as was the case with Beppe Grillo in Italy and Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine.

Autocrats are inherently funny. Humor thrives on pretense and deception—and the tyrant is always pretense. He presents himself as a savior, but he is actually a brute; he pretends to be all-powerful, but he is as imperfect as other mortals, or even more so. If he has an ideology, it is flawed. Sensitive and narcissistic, tyrants can rarely take jokes.

Autocrats, of course, fear that people will see that others think like them. According to the maximalist logic of repression, the fact that laughter is intimate, spontaneous, and fleeting only increases its appeal as a target: if rulers can stifle wit, they can control everything. But they can’t. As Ben Lewis recounts in his book Hammer & Tickle, about humor under communism, trying to suppress a joke usually makes it spread even faster.

When the laugh police give up this unequal struggle, it's a sign of liberalization, whether voluntary or not. Towards the end of the Soviet Union, even Mikhail Gorbachev, its last leader, was cracking jokes about discontent and shortages. ("The working class is spending a lot of cognac - through its elected representatives.") A major comedy festival in Riyadh, which opened on September 26, was supposed to promote Saudi Arabia's new freedoms. Hmm: Tim Dillon, an American stand-up comedian who was supposed to participate, says he was pulled out because of a joke the organizers didn't like.

Cunning autocrats see the benefit of letting the jokes flow. “If they tell jokes about me,” Leonid Brezhnev reportedly remarked, “it means they love me,” and he wasn’t entirely wrong. No matter how biting, satire always carries a hint of homage; after all, one never satirizes anonymous people. Humor can be a safety valve for dissent and a homeopathic dose of pluralism. It can also provide raw insights into the national mood, conveying hard truths and bad news, as medieval court jesters sometimes did to their kings.

But the most cunning of the powerful, including some of today's populists, are seizing the audience. In an age when the struggle for power is also a battle for attention, they are like fairground entertainers in the public square, using jokes and theatrical provocations as much as political agendas. As politics becomes entertainment, showdowns - with comedians and others - become part of the show, and the threat to freedom of expression is obscured by the spectacle.

The story of Bim-Bom, a pair of circus clowns, is a dark parable. Performing in Moscow in 1918, they made jokes about the Bolsheviks, which did not go down well with the secret police agents present. The thugs rushed on stage to arrest them. Thinking that the chase was part of the act, the audience roared with laughter.

Translation: A. Š.