Admittedly, there lacks a vigorous tradition of satire in the nation: their impulse is always to affirm rather than deflate. Satire is thus at odds with the idealizing tendency of American culture. It’s the opposite of that most depressing type of humor, good clean fun. The days of the great Tom Lehrer, who sang of chopping up babies and poisoning pigeons in the park, are long gone. For all his admirable readiness to speak up against power, Stephen Colbert is no Frankie Boyle and David Letterman is no Stewart Lee.

England, by contrast with the States, boasts of a rich lineage of satirists — from Chaucer, Ben Jonson and Dryden to Pope, Swift, Byron, Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis. (Waugh hasn’t always received the recognition he deserves: a few years ago, on a radio quiz show, the contestants were asked who he was, to which one of them replied “Hitler’s girlfriend”.) And over the centuries, a good many English politicians have feared the lampoons of Grub Street hacks, many of whom wrote anonymously or pseudonymously to avoid the wrath of the state. The satirist is a scourge of vice, but he punishes you by making you look pathetic rather than wicked. Stephen Colbert belongs in this distinguished company.

It’s common enough in political circles to hear people complain that “words just aren’t enough, we need to do something”. But authoritarian regimes have never underestimated the power of words, which can be as much a form of action as tearing down a fence. If all the supporters of Palestine Action were to hold placards reading “Plasticine Action”, as one protesting satirist did recently, the police might be forced to hire literary critics to determine whether this constituted a criminal offense. And what — as happened with another wag — if the words “Palestine” and “Action” appeared at different places on a sign? Perhaps the police would suggest there were nefarious intentions here; but appeals of this kind can always be taken too far, as with the police officer some years ago who arrested an anti-Royalist carrying a blank placard on the grounds that they may have intended to write something on it just before the royal limousine sailed past. It’s what one might call a subjunctive theory of crime — crimes that might be committed, thus allowing you to arrest anyone with saliva on the grounds that they might spit in someone’s face.

Satire mauls its object rather than elevates it, and is often too negative to be enjoyable. Swift’s suggestion that the starving Irish should cook and eat their own children stretches the permissible almost to breaking-point, fueled as it is by a furious sadistic energy. But Waugh and Amis can be extremely funny, and in any case all humor has a utopian dimension, however scurrilous and abrasive it might be. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, not the most rib-tickling of English authors, describes laughter as “sudden glory”. One might see it as the language of the body, as language proper disintegrates into a set of meaningless grunts or chortles and the body dissolves to the uncoordinated state of an infant. Comedy is, quite literally, a bodily disorder. The symmetry of everyday life encounters a sudden contradiction or incongruity, which means that for a precious moment we can stop investing our unconscious energy in the business of keeping things shipshape and release the energy we’ve saved in the form of laughter.

This melting away of meaning and coherence is part of humor’s subversive effect, since disorderly bodies of one kind or another have always been a target for authority. Laughter signaling a loss of self-discipline, is potentially dangerous. The body must be smoothly coordinated, as well as appropriately clothed. In the days when men regularly wore ties, the rebels and dissenters among them took to wearing roll-neck sweaters. This meant that you weren’t wearing a tie, thus preserving your nonconformity, but nobody could see that you weren’t, thus satisfying convention. There was anxiety as well as insolence in the question of the American reporter who asked President Zelensky why he wasn’t wearing a suit.

But humor can do more than question the status quo. It can also outline an alternative to it, one in which the sharing of pleasure and friendship becomes an end in itself, and is thus akin to art. Jokes might impress or cajole or disarm, but, like play in general, most don’t get you anywhere. But they can as a critique of a civilization in which getting somewhere is considered a sacred obligation. To mention Dante’s great poem is to recall that the word “comedy” can have a deeper meaning than anything that can be found in Derry Girls. The Divine Comedy doesn’t yield the reader many laughs, unless seeing people tortured in hell makes you chuckle, but that’s not what the poem’s title means. It refers to a condition in which all things are fundamentally well, whatever appearances to the contrary may suggest. It’s from this sense of serenity that true humor springs, so that the two meanings of “comic” converge.

If Donald Trump really wants to be a king, he should stop bullying satirists and find himself that most indispensable member of any royal entourage, a Fool. Though arguably the American President already has one: himself. Like Boris Johnson, he’s both monarch and clown, switching in a second from regal petulance to baby talk. He’s retained the cap of the traditional Fool but not the bells. Jesters, though, do more than make their masters laugh. His job is also to cut him savagely down to size, as with the Fool in King Lear. He holds up a mirror to the monarch’s feebleness and finitude, which most autocrats hardly find gratifying. When the distraught Lear cries: “Who is it who can tell me who I am?” The Fool replies “Lear’s shadow”, meaning that the king is a shadow of his former self but also that he, the Fool, who shadows his master wherever he goes, is the only one who can resolve the problem of his identity. When power goes mad, only the riddling, enigmatic talk of the jester is able to penetrate it. When it threatens to expand almost beyond limit, the satirist must step in to debunk and deflate it.

The Fool punctures the grandiose delusions of power by reminding it that it has a body and is therefore vulnerable. Just as we can never truly see our bodies in the round, so we can never entirely integrate them into our consciousness. The body hovers between being subject and object, and part of the jester’s task is to remind the rulers of this crippling incongruity. It’s this that Lear discovers in his wanderings on the heath. He thought he was everything, he mutters, but he is not “ague-proof”. Power is mortal, potentially diseased and desperately fragile, even though it behaves as though it will live forever.

Trump, having survived an assassination attempt, behaves like he is invincible. But you have to find some way of anticipating your death if you’re to live fully. To acknowledge a limit is to begin to transcend it. But Trump isn’t a man for limits or defects. Everything in his manically hyperbolic universe is fine, beautiful, fantastic, best ever, gonna be great. That’s why he needs the Colberts of this world, and also why he can’t abide them.

Tragedy recalls us to a sense of our fragility, but also of our value. We wouldn’t mourn for creatures we didn’t regard as precious. Not many of us are devastated by the death of a flea. A cynic is unlikely to lose sleep over Covid deaths in Indonesia.

If we are living through a tragedy, it is a collective one. The Greeks would have understood this too: the point of the Chorus, a bunch of ordinary citizens who sing and dance their way through the tragic drama, is to socialise the disaster, making it more than just the affair of a few patrician figures. Even so, you couldn’t have a cook or a cobbler as the hero, since their lives weren’t considered important enough. Those who fall from the greatest height make the biggest splash.

The death of Achilles or Agamemnon is a momentous event which sends shockwaves through the public realm, whereas the passing of a slave is private. It has no more significance than the killing of a flea. It doesn’t count as a historical event. Back then you couldn’t have a tragedy called Death of a Salesman, even if there had been salesmen in ancient Athens. It would be as bizarre as calling your play The Fall of Troy: A Farce in Three Acts. 

None of this class distinction survived the emergence of mass democracy — a political idea which, ironically, was born in ancient Greece. In the 20th century, by far the bloodiest hundred years on record, tragedy became universal. Once you develop weapons like bombs, you globalise suffering and lamentation. As the tattered old cliché has it, we really are all in this together. You just have to take anyone from the street and push them to their limit. You can even have a tragedy about plumbing, as in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. 

One of the ancient Greeks’ deepest fears is of hubris — the pride or presumption which leads you to overreach yourself and bring yourself to nothing. When the citizens of Thebes or Athens observed such arrogance they trembled and looked fearfully to the skies, aware that it would have its comeuppance. A species which dominates and destroys its natural habitat in the name of power and acquisition is now reaping the fruits of its overreaching.

Those like King Lear who would be everything must be taught the lesson that humanity is nothing — frail, sickeningly vulnerable and driven by animal need. Kings must be reduced to vagrants, as Lear wanders the heath with fools and madmen. Once you acknowledge that you’re nothing, you have a chance of becoming something — but only, like Lear or Oedipus, by being hauled through hell. For Lear, this repentance comes too late to prevent his death. Whether this will prove true of humanity as a whole remains to be seen. It isn’t looking good.

The problem is that hubris is built into the human species. Because we live not just in a physical world but a world of meaning, we are able to overreach ourselves all the time. Our bodies can build themselves a prosthesis known as civilisation. Technology is an extension of our bodies, but one that can escape our mastery. Badgers and squirrels by contrast, can’t create weapons of mass destruction, unless they’re being very furtive about it. They can’t extend very far outside themselves. They aren’t universal creatures, unless squirrels in California are somehow in touch with squirrels in the Ukraine.

This inability to overreach themselves means that they can’t blow themselves up, but neither can they read Marcel Proust. This is because they don’t have language; but this lack of language or developed concepts is also what keeps them safe from nuclear warfare. (One might make an exception here for dolphins, who after a few lessons might be able to write as well as Jacob Rees-Mogg).

More from this author

The emptiness of Evil

By Terry Eagleton

Being a linguistic animal is both a blessing and a curse. In fact, the ancient term “sacred” means both. Because human beings live in a richly developed conceptual world, they can create things which are in danger of slipping from their control and taking on a tyrannical life of their own. Yet having language also means that they can be closer to each other than mere physical contact. They can share their inner lives with each other. Love relationships consist mainly in talking, unless I’m missing out on something.

Civilisation, so Freud claims, is a product of Eros, meaning the creative drives as a whole. There is, however, a problem. Eros is not the only source of civilisation. In order to build bridges and cathedrals, you also need to harness the power of Eros’s old enemy, Thanatos, or the death drive. The death drive for Freud is turned outwards and used to subjugate Nature. Only in this way can cities and social orders be built. Thanatos, however, is a notoriously unreliable servant. It doesn’t want to subjugate things; it wants to tear them to pieces in an orgy of obscene enjoyment. So the very force which is intended to overcome chaos is secretly in love with it. Anarchy lies at the very heart of authority.

Tragic figures aren’t exactly guilty, but they aren’t exactly innocent either. If they were deep-dyed villains, they would forfeit our sympathy and we would be indifferent to their fate. Napoleon may have been a tragic figure, but Hitler wasn’t. Yet tragic heroes aren’t blameless, because the tragic crisis results from their own actions, however little they may intend it.

Oedipus, who has been described as a “guilty innocent”, doesn’t mean to kill his father and marry his mother, but he contributes without knowing it to a network of cause and effect which causes these things to occur. His own past actions return to plague him in alien form. “We are neither the innocent nor the wicked,” remarks the protagonist of William Golding’s novel Free Fall. “We are the guilty. We fall down. We crawl on hands and knees. We weep and tear each other.”

Suggested reading

Who set Greece on fire?

By Aris Roussinos

It is just the same with climate change, which nobody ever intended but which is the consequence of billions of individual acts. Nobody ever turned the ignition key in their car or heaped a shovelful of coal on the fire with the idea of wiping out the human race. As Inspector Clouseau might say, no-one is guilty and everyone is guilty.

It’s the same with the Christian idea of original sin, which means that we are sinful but not responsible for it. In the tangled web of human actions and relationships, you can’t move without hurting someone somewhere. Our actions spin out of control and breed monstrous consequences which can come to dominate our own lives. The ancient Greeks knew all about Marx’s concept of alienation. It’s just that they gave it the name of Fate. We are weaving our own inescapable destiny all the time, and doing so through actions which are genuinely free.

The good news is that free action to avert total collapse is still possible for us, if only just. We can take heart from the fact that not all stage tragedies end badly. The first great piece of tragic art we have, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, ends on a positive note. The blind, beggarly Oedipus is finally gathered to the gods, while Shakespearian tragedy usually ends with the tentative emergence of new life. We come away from many a tragic drama remembering the dignity or defiance of those who go to their deaths, not just their agonies. A tragedy isn’t always a piece of theatre which ends in total ruin. It’s a situation in which you have to be broken and remade if you’re to have any chance of redemption, and even then there are no guarantees. As the poet W.B. Yeats writes, “Nothing can be whole or sole/That has not been rent.”

Suggested reading

The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

We shall, for instance, weather Covid, but not reducing the planet to flood and desert is a different matter. To avoid that, we shall need to renounce the urge to power and possession which has driven us so far, and learn instead to live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. That means undoing an awfully long history, and history is what we mostly are made of.

It’s true that people will do extraordinary things if the only alternative is to die. Certainly nothing short of such an alternative will cause governments and the transnational corporations to abandon their death-dealing habits. But people will also do extraordinary things if they think they are going to die anyway, such as murder, rape, loot and hunt for vengeance.

We haven’t thought enough about what kind of existence we will have if doom becomes unavoidable. People who have nothing to lose are dangerous. I wouldn’t like to be a racist cop if those I’ve beaten and humiliated know they can hang me from a lamp post without being put away for twenty years because the world won’t last that long. One thing is for sure: being broken and remade rules out mere reformism. Reformism wouldn’t have kept Lear alive, and it won’t keep us alive either.

Terry Eagleton is a visiting professor in English at Lancaster University.