Ian Hislop ‘I’ve spent most of my life making jokes about serious things’
As he curates the British Museum’s new show about dissent, Ian Hislop explores the rich history of satire across the ages
There is a wave of earnestness about at the moment. If you look at the bulk of Twitterstormery – or even the letters page of my magazine, Private Eye – you’ll find people saying jokes about certain topics aren’t acceptable, saying humour isn’t helpful, saying “I am offended by this, and therefore you should shut up.” It’s all rather puritan.
I’m inclined to disagree. No topic should be out of bounds, so long as you can justify the point behind it. I have spent most of my life joking about serious things, and I believe humour can be helpful, especially when important issues are at stake.
Peter Cook used to make fun of the idea that satire could make a difference – after all, he said, those wonderful Berlin cabarets did so much to prevent the rise of Hitler. But through history there are examples of satire having a real influence, and particularly in England.
It might not bring a government down, but mockery can crystallise an opinion. Daniel Defoe said the end of satire is reform. He didn’t say it’s revolution, or armed protest. Rather, he thought you could make people behave better by laughing them into it, and that’s still an aspiration. That’s the British tradition, from the art of Hogarth and Cruikshank onwards.
It’s something I’ve thought about a great deal lately, while curating a new exhibition about dissent and protest at the British Museum. One exhibit they have – George Cruikshank’s banknote – actually saved lives (or so he later claimed).
He was one of the most famous artists of the early 19th century. At the time, they hanged people for making or accepting counterfeit notes. So he produced a note of his own, to tell the Bank of England what it was doing. It was signed by the hangman, with the pound sign as a rope, and a wonderful picture of Britannia eating her own children. He said, “Alright, here’s a counterfeit note – what’re you going to do about it?” It was fantastically successful, and the law was eventually changed. That style of satire may be distinctly British, but the desire for dissent exists everywhere. There’s a bit of that spirit in all of us. At its most simple, it can be a workman defacing a brick in ancient Babylonia. At its most subtle, it’s the Chinese painting I was shown at the museum. To me, it was just a beautiful picture of two innocent-looking owls and it took half an hour’s explanation before I understood the references. It’s dissent alright, it’s just very, very well hidden.
Early in my life, I was very influenced by reading Juvenal, who was writing in Rome around 100AD. He writes this amazing whinge about how jockeys are paid an awful lot more than teachers. “I don’t know what sort of society we’ve ended up in where we pay entertainers and sportsmen huge amounts of money, but we don’t pay teachers properly.” When I read that, I thought, now this man I know – and he writes a column in a lot of papers.
I find it strangely cheering that there’s the same voice echoing across the centuries. In the exhibition, we have an 18thcentury garter criticising the Rump Parliament, embroidered with “Down with Rump” – and a 21stcentury “Dump Trump” badge.
Speaking of which, there are people who point to Trump and say satire is dead. “Look at him, you couldn’t make it up.” But clownish grotesques have been around forever. There are pieces in the museum’s collection which remind us that Mussolini was a buffoon long before he was ever seen as sinister.
Posing as a dissenter, or a disrupter, when you’re actually already an authority figure is nothing new. I was amused to find that one of the older exhibits in the museum is an inscribed clay tablet in which the king, Cyrus the Great, is saying of his vanquished predecessor, “Look, I’m just like you. Your king? He was rubbish – what you need is me.” I think Trump and Cyrus would have shared a point of view, in the way they use humour to attack people – and Cyrus’s stuff is funnier. Much of the time, dissent is simply ordinary people finding ways to say “no” to the ones at the top. People in power tend to say to subversives, and satirists in particular, “Well, where’s your constructive alternative?” And we say, “I haven’t got one – that’s your job. The bit I do is saying ‘No.’” But it can be more complex than that. You can even have reactionary forms of dissent, supporting the status quo. For instance, in the exhibition, right next to a penny with “Votes for Women” on it, we also have a “No Votes for Women” badge.
There’s another wonderful exhibit at the museum, a Cleopatra oil-lamp, which is fairly obscene – she’s riding a crocodile. At first I thought, “That’s very interesting, this is classic dissent – they’re mocking an unpopular queen.” But the curator said, “Well, not really. This was produced by Cleopatra’s powerful enemies in Rome – Octavian and his group.” It was mass-produced! Yes, people didn’t like Cleopatra very much, but they were encouraged not to like her by a specific, top-down, Roman propaganda initiative. It’s always worth having a look to where the satire is coming from, and what it’s really being used for.
I don’t defend all jokes. There was a phase when it was popular for stand-up comics to have a go at disabled people. As an audience member, I thought, “I don’t understand that. Why is that funny?” You’re meant to be punching up, not punching down. It’s that universal desire to punch up – to blow a raspberry at the powerful – that unites everything from the defaced Babylonian brick to the fake British banknote.
It was HL Mencken, the great American satirist, who said we should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. So long as you try and do that, you have a licence to joke about almost anything.
As told to Tristram Fane Saunders
‘I think Trump and Cyrus would have shared a point of view, in the way they use humour to attack people’