Wit as a Political Weapon: Satirists and Censors

Political satire—the mocking of every aspect of the political process—is offensive, acerbic, disrespectful. Its practitioners take particular relish in aiming their fire at the politically powerful. Some of those targeted are not amused and try to censor the satire and its authors. This is especially the case in authoritarian systems, but censorship of political satire also exists in democracies. In this essay I compare the constraints on political satire in authoritarian and democratic systems in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, an era when new mass media and institutional changes brought a vast expansion of political satire as well as increased efforts to suppress it.