Creator of ‘ Veep’ uses satiric bite to emote, explain

Armando Iannucci likes to tell a story that might explain his take on politics.

When the filmmaker’s father was a teenager in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, he wrote for an antifascist newspaper, going on to fight, as a partisan, against “il Duce” and Hitler during World War II. But after immigrating to the United Kingdom, where his son would grow up, the elder Iannucci never applied for citizenship or registered to vote.

Iannucci, who dropped out of doctoral studies at Oxford to become a comedian, writer and filmmaker, asked him why — after all, the son said, “You fought for democracy.”

“Ah, democracy,” Iannucci recalled his father saying. “The last time I voted, Mussolini got in.”

The anecdote sounds like a joke from one of Iannucci’s projects — including the Oscar-nominated film “In the Loop” (2009) and the award-winning TV shows “The Thick of It” and “Veep.” But it helps to understand the 54-year-old director’s worldview: “Just don’t think that, because it’s democracy, bad things can’t happen. ... They can.”

Iannucci’s film “The Death of Stalin,” expected to open Friday at the Gateway Film Center, is a factbased farce set during the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet premier’s death in 1953.

The period piece (starring Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Michael Palin and Simon Russell Beale) has a surprising contemporary resonance and a nasty bite.

Iannucci, who lives in London, talked recently by phone from New York, where he was promoting the film.

Q: A few years ago, in an interview with John Oliver, you referred to what you do as “harmless fun.” I wonder whether “harmful fun” might not be a better, if oxymoronic, term for the art of the satirist.

A: I’d love to know exactly what kind of harm you think I’ve ever achieved. Political satire can be various things, but I’ve never felt you can change, say, how people will vote.

Q: No. For that, you need Facebook.

A: (Laughing) If you want to change people’s minds, you should go out and campaign. or you should become a journalist or a lobbyist. All I’ve ever tried to do is to respond when I’m suspicious of something that doesn’t feel right. I’m looking for ways in which I can articulate that by channeling various emotions: bewilderment, anger, frustration.

Q: Sounds like a form of therapy.

A: Laughter is healthy. We are the only animal that makes jokes. But I’m also trying to show how certain things can happen. How is it that, under Stalin, lots of people who were perfectly intelligent still acted like crazies?

Q: So you see yourself as more evangelist than therapist?

A: I’m just trying to explain — through all that I’ve encountered and through my observation and my research — how these things come about.

Q: “The Death of Stalin” is very funny, although people get tortured and shot in it. It also plays as a veiled allegory of the present moment.

A: It’s interesting that I felt I had to go all the way back to 1953 to make that point. My next film is going to be an adaptation of “David Copperfield,” which is set in 1840. And then I’m doing this comedy series for HBO, which is set 40 years from now, mostly in space. It’s almost, like, “Anything but the present.”