The Pointlessness of Satire

10 February 2007 in Humour, Politics by Stilgherrian | 3 comments

That great satirist Peter Cook was once asked if he thought that satire had a political effect. He said:

Absolutely. The greatest satire of the twentieth century was the Weimar cabaret, and they stopped Hitler in his tracks.

Attributed to Stephen Colbert, in a Rolling Stone interview, thanks to Blog Them Out of the Stone Age.

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Tags: hitler, peter cook, satire

3 comments

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Richard on 11 February 2007 at 12:35 am

That’s a great link, thank you.

And thank you for the web, DARPA. Funny how a medium devised for disseminating hierarchical orders has created the so-called ‘horizontal information ecology’.

Funny, also, the amount of military doctrine that gets debated online. The staff colleges can’t keep up, but their imprimatur doesn’t matter any more — apart from getting the proverbial ‘tick in the box’.

Funny, a ‘network-centric’ miltary that aspires to be what Toffler called ‘third wave’, is still wedded to ‘second wave’ education and training. But they still want to fight in a ‘third wave’ way. Can we all say ‘cognitive dissonance’, kids?

(I can’t believe I’ve used that much despicable management-speak — however ‘ironically’ — in my own free time. Please kill me.)

Reply
Matthew Stibbe on 14 February 2007 at 7:53 pm

Reminds me that satirist Tom Lehrer quit when they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel peace prize. He claimed it was unfair competition.

Reply
Stilgherrian on 16 February 2007 at 4:51 pm

Thanks for the pointer, Matthew, yes a great reference. Love your work.

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