It feels like the time of spectacular gaffes, John Prescott walloping someone for throwing an egg at him, Gordon Brown's live reaction to finding out he'd been recorded calling someone a bigot, Ed Miliband and his EdStone, are over. It seems as though we're now instead in the time of conspiracy theorists and the tinfoil hatters have taken over the mainstream or that perhaps social media storms are sucking the fun out of everything.
My hope is that it's because more news coverage online and alternative sources means that your typical "satirical" lines fall flat. For satire to work, you need at least the appearance of a consensus about something being silly.
You can still make fun of Theresa May's dancing and other inconsequential stuff, if that's really your thing. But maybe people are realising that it's meant to be more than just a sideshow?
Are you mad? You only need to look across the pond for your fix. Trump is president of the United States! My entire life I wondered how the Roman empire could possibly end up with insane emperors how people could just let that happen. And now one has.
>>84501 >I mean, I know George W Bush brought us the War on Terror™ but he was never responsible for the circus of a sexual assault public cross-examination.
That was his father.
>>84502 Is that the woman who accused Clarence Thomas? He fascinates me. Apparently he went something like 20 years without saying a word on the bench because he feels judges should be listening, not talking.
>>84498 A lower calibre of politician. Even in 1997, The Times was calling Theresa May out on being a Robo-Politician.
Blair, Brown and Prescott were equally a step down from men like Callaghan, Healey and Benn who'd fought in the war, and even they were the B-team to Attlee and Churchill.
The other problems are economics and time. You've already got weaker raw material (political personalities), now you've got to satirise them on a shoestring budget, and you need to have the whole thing written, filmed, edited and on telly by next week because we want it to be topical and even on this timescale, by next week your satire is going to seem dated. Under these circumstances, is it surprising you get so many out-of-touch, received wisdom, this-isn't-very-funny takes on Trump, May and Corbyn from people in the same social circle?
>>84499 I think even apart from alternative news, it's partially the collapse of mass media. Even if you stick to a single news site, the non-linear way you can explore it means we could both come out of a visit to the BBC News site with a completely different impression of the world. Compare with television where you'd got 4 broadly similar channels and you had to pick one of them even if it meant sitting through a documentary about flower arranging.
>>84501 On Trump, I like the line a friend gave me from the Simpsons: The pie gag only works when the sap's got dignity! The Clinton campaign shooting itself in the foot was quite funny, if you're a bit of a political wonk type of a certain persuasion, but Trump clowning around wasn't funny because he was just an undignified clown. He couldn't lower himself, and Bush had already lowered the office.
>>84505 >You've already got weaker raw material (political personalities), now you've got to satirise them on a shoestring budget, and you need to have the whole thing written, filmed, edited and on telly by next week because we want it to be topical and even on this timescale, by next week your satire is going to seem dated.
HIGNFY gave up long ago and is now largely "here's some things we hastily found on Twitter."
>>84505 > Even in 1997, The Times was calling Theresa May out on being a Robo-Politician. Blair, Brown and Prescott were equally a step down from men like Callaghan, Healey and Benn who'd fought in the war, and even they were the B-team to Attlee and Churchill.
