Shambolic comedy is his sword and shield (Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images)

Last Wednesday, as the scandal of Downing Street’s mysterious Christmas party entered its grimly farcical second week, The Thick of It predictably trended on Twitter. Armando Iannucci’s Westminster sitcom, in which politicians and advisers stumble through an endless minefield in a perpetual flop sweat, certainly felt apt. But it’s worth asking why a show that debuted during the dog days of New Labour and bowed out midway through the coalition years remains the default reference point nine years later.
Political satire has been in a confused state these past five years, since Donald Trump short-circuited it so dramatically that it is yet to recover. It became a cliché to say that the things Trump said and did on a daily basis would have had you laughed out of any writers’ room if you’d invented them. How could you parody a man who, vaccinated against embarrassment by his total absence of humour, parodied himself? Boris Johnson is a very different character — a sense of shambolic comedy is his sword and shield — but similarly hard to spoof because he caricatures himself.
After The Thick of It, Iannucci went to the US and launched Veep, bringing a dissonant note of panic and incompetence to a country where fictional presidents are usually very good (Jed Bartlett from The West Wing) or very bad (Frank Underwood from House of Cards), but generally on top of things either way. He left the show after three seasons in 2015 so that he could direct movies, just in time to avoid having to grapple with the conundrum of a president who made Veep’s Selina Meyer look relatively decent and proficient. David Mandel, his replacement as showrunner, didn’t so much solve the problem as ignore it. Veep remained very funny but it lost much of its relevance by unplugging itself from the wild new reality of Washington DC. It ended in 2019, a few months after House of Cards.
Nothing has come along to replace those shows. The old warhorses of satire roll on — Have I Got News for You and the revived Spitting Image in the UK; Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show in the US (a British version of SNL is in the pipeline). But where are the dramas and scripted comedies? Politics is not where the action is.
When I interviewed Iannucci recently, he chose Succession and The White Lotus as the most biting satires around. Both shows coolly dissect the callousness of the very rich, and show the casualties they leave behind. Inevitably, some of that wealth comes from tech. Nicole Mossbacher (Connie Britton) in The White Lotus is the CFO of a popular search engine. In this series of Succession, Waystar-Royco’s old-media empire is seeking a life-saving deal with Lukas Mattson (Alexander Skarsgaard), the bored and ruthless CEO of the streaming company GoJo. The most powerful character in Iannucci’s own Avenue 5, a sci-fi sitcom about a society under pressure, is tech billionaire Herman Judd, played by Josh Gad as a vain man-baby. And it’s telling that Adam McKay, whose 2018 movie Vice was a black comedy about Dick Cheney, is making his next picture about Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal.
There’s a novelty factor here. Next to most politicians, the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are fascinatingly weird characters with literally cosmic ambitions. Mark Zuckerberg, in his public appearances, comes off as less a human being than a beta-version AI — a flesh-and-blood demonstration of the uncanny valley. This is good material. Take Christopher Evan Welch in Silicon Valley, whose character Peter Gregory always looked as if he were on the verge of teleporting back to his home planet, Oscar Isaac’s malfunctioning hipster hermit in Ex Machina, or Nick Offerman’s glumly deranged schlub-genius in Devs. Succession’s Lukas Mattson combines a killer instinct with airport-bookstore self-help mantras and the distinct impression that he could tank GoJo’s share price with a single ill-judged tweet composed while tripping at Burning Man.
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