Oliver Callan: Donald Trump has killed satire

Satire is a powerful tool for telling the truth. Saturday Night Live sketches parodying Donald Trump have tens of millions of views online.

Highlighting facts through comedy gets attention more readily than sombre columns or serious news panels.

There is a problem with satire, however.

It doesn’t work.

Trump was easily the most parodied candidate in US election history and he still won. George W Bush was the president satirised more than any other and he secured a second term.

Enda Kenny is the most successful Fine Gael leader – in spite of a decade of lampooning.

Even where satire is hugely popular, it doesn’t change anything.

Margaret Thatcher won an election during Spitting Image's run. In the case of Scrap Saturday, the show suffered more than its target Charlie Haughey, whose career outlived it.

The 1960s comedian Peter Cook said he modelled The Establishment club in London on the political cabarets of Berlin in the 1930s "which did so much to prevent the rise of Adolf Hitler".

His bitter irony shows that satirists can be just as disenchanted with their own artform as with their view of its targets.

Post-truthers

Satire is defined as using humour and exaggeration to make a point. But, how do you exaggerate the exaggerators?

Parodies of post-truthers such as Brexiteers, Donald Trump and our own Danny Healy-Rae can’t change people’s minds because supporters revel in their ridiculousness.

Take The Colbert Report, a send-up of a Republican media pundit on Comedy Central. The character skewered the Fox News mantra that all liberals are communists. Ohio University academics examined audience reactions to the show in a study entitled The Irony of Satire.

It found both sides of the divide equally regarded the show as funny. Liberals who watched it saw it as satire on conservatives. Conservatives viewed it as a parody on liberal values.

The study concluded that audiences see what they want to see. Fans of Bush, Trump, Thatcher, Haughey or Kenny can enjoy the satire and come away with their views unaltered.

It’s depressing.

When I visited the Dáil last year, I was taken aback by the warm greeting from TDs and Ministers regularly mimicked on Callan’s Kicks.

I’d faintly hoped they would recoil bitterly from my presence, so hurt were they by stinging satire. Some certainly are, but the majority are only delighted to be mentioned.

The two extremes of politics today are making it harder. On one side, you have the excessively PR-groomed politician who is left with no real persona to poke fun at. David Cameron was the perfect example. He was so polished you could see the reflection of Eton on his chin.

Nothing hidden

On the other extreme, you have the Nigel Farage, Trump and Healy-Rae examples who give such extreme portrayals of themselves, there’s nothing hidden to jeer.

On RTÉ radio in 2010, I portrayed the then government in sketches called Biffo and his Drinks Cabinet.

My Brian Cowen caricature slurred and spilled pints while his ministers cheered ideas that helped them avoid the recession.

Eventually, RTÉ ordered me to stop portraying the Taoiseach as drunk.

Months later, Brian Cowen did his infamous radio interview that resulted in derision over his late-night drinking.

Initially, I felt exonerated.

Then it sank in.

I couldn’t resume the sketches because there was no point to make any more. The subtlety of the comedy was gone. Worse, nobody ever remembers how satire often beats the news to the truth.

There are added complications in Ireland, such as strict defamation laws. While the comedy eventually gets to the truth, it travels there by exaggeration on a road paved with fiction. It's enough to make lawyers come out in hives.

There is the problem that the arts establishment hates comedy. It’s seen as a low form of art.

Opposite effect

When RTÉ does its “real” arts programmes, tweedy people salivate over Banvilles, le Brocquys, Colgans, Sheridans and Hansards.

Not Tiernans or O’Carrolls.

The 1916 arts events did not involve any figures inclined to poke fun at the Rising. President Michael D Higgins was a great advocate for the arts, yet no satirist nor comedian has ever been invited to his Áras love-ins.

If outrage is the fuel of satire, it empties the tank before it can transport the citizen to action.

Spitting Image writer John O'Farrell told the Guardian recently: "The thing I've learned over the 30 years of doing it is that satire doesn't work. It has the opposite effect. Our outrage turns into elation and a joke. It's a release valve."

Satire is a tool all right.

It cajoles, talks with promise but ultimately achieves nothing. It may have more in common with its political foes than we thought.