COMEDY

POLITICS 99horses “Adolph’” (Morreall, 1983:102). In 1935, the Berlin cabaretcomedian Werner Finck was imprisoned in a concentration camp for asketch that parodied limitations on the freedom of speech under Nazism(London, 2000:34). In Soviet Russia it was strictly forbidden to publishsatire that criticized the party or its officers—a crime punishable byimprisonment in labour camps. In the United States during the 1950s,the investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Committee onUn-American Activities, established to root out communistsympathizers and treasonous plots at home, drove humoristsunderground for fear of blacklisting or incarceration. In 1952, CharlieChaplin’s uncontroversial film Limelight was singled out forMcCarthyite suppression. Limelight was apolitical, but the millionaireChaplin, who had always retained his British citizenship, was thought tohold too much sympathy for the workers. Chaplin was refused re-entryto the United States until he had appeared in front of the ImmigrationBoard of Inquiry to answer questions of a ‘political nature and of moralturpitude’. He resettled in Switzerland and returned to the USA onlyonce to receive an Oscar in 1972 (Boskin, 1997:75–76). Comedy mightside with freedom of speech in these examples, the laughers againstparanoid and totalitarian regimes, but it is equally the case that comedycan be used in the service of repression, what Christopher Wilson callsthe ‘cryptic conservative’ (Wilson, 1979:226). The denigration ofdifference found in racist and sexist comedy, for example, reinforcesand validates a discourse of power that relies on the systematichumiliation of targeted groups to secure its own sense of identity. InAlbert Cook’s view ‘comedy is approval, not disapproval, of presentsociety; it is conservative, not liberal’ (quoted in Carlson, 1991:15).Clearly Cook overstates the case, but the question of what we laugh at,and how it is censored or condoned by authority, is a highly politicizedarea, and comedy can be the site of manifest ideological struggle.COMEDY AND THE STATE: FROGS ANDBRASS EYEIn its earliest form, comedy engages with politics and the state.Aristophanic comedy, for example, frequently defames identifiableAthenian public figures and derides their policies. Each of Aristophanes’eleven surviving plays is broadly based on a political theme pertinent toAthenian institutions and democracy, or individuals within the polis.Abuse that we would now consider libellous was a fundamental part ofthe comedy, with named officials, military officers, and prominent