Andrea Hajek’s post on the seamy side of satire and the Italian elections  and Iddo Tavory’s post on humor and the social condition got me thinking about the promise and perils of political humor. This has fascinated me ever since I made it a nightly habit to tune into Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart as a refuge from the madness that were the George W. Bush years.

I have wondered: why has my regular dose of political satire seemed so essential to my mental health? Why has it been so appealing to so many of us? On the other hand, I didn’t want to spend too much time wondering. Most scholarly accounts of humor seem to miss the point, and they are decidedly not entertaining. I feel like responding to the authors of such serious reflections: please just relax and enjoy.

But Iddo’s analysis, which is part of our on-going dialogue on the social condition, seemed to hit just the right notes: it moved our deliberations on the social condition forward, as it helped me understand important developments in global political culture, and it had a light informative touch, focused on a joke. A Jewish father warns his son not to marry outside of the faith, finding confirmation in his warning when the son’s new wife takes the faith too seriously, insisting that her husband no longer work on Saturdays, both the Jewish Sabbath and the most important day of his father’s business week.

The joke is funny in the telling. Social structure as it is manifested in interaction makes the “funny telling” possible. Social structure – the family, religion and the economy – informs the structure of the joke, which sets the stage for the performance. As Tavory maintains: “If we attend to the structure of humor, we can see that jokes work precisely because they shine light on dilemmas that are built into the social fabric.”

Political satirists work with this, for better and for worse. They provide momentary liberation from the unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) when they highlight the tensions we must live with, mocking easy, or foolish or dictated answers, the positions of the other, the distrusted, the opponent, the enemy, and even with friends, families, loved ones. But when they take their own answers too seriously, with too much self assurance, they skirt with danger, the danger we now see in Italy, but can be found in many other times and places.

I remember having a sick feeling watching Poland’s famous satirical cabaret, Piwnica pod Baranami in Krakow in the early 1970s. The cabaret was past its prime. In 1956, it was one of the key creative locations where Polish Stalinism was sharply questioned and overturned. They questioned totalitarian authority. They expanded the possible, by mocking the dictatorial. But the show I saw was odd. The audience seemed to be enjoying itself, but the performance seemed quite racist to me. There was one anti-China joke after another (this at the time of the Sino – Soviet split). I understood, as a friend explained, that when they said China, they meant and the audience heard Russia, but the mocking of the Orient was off putting. So much so that it stays with me. I thought of it then as an example of satire growing old and stale, in marked contrast with the student theater I was then observing. But now, I perceive more, thinking about my discussions with Tavory. The satire was drawn too easily. It referred to the sorry state of living in a society where a foreign power stifled daily life, but that insight was just too thin. That the Russians, or the Communists, were to blame for everything wrong in Poland explained too much with too little. Rather than confronting the social condition and providing relief from its tensions, the satire turned away from textured experience and flattened it.

On the other hand, take Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart, please! (I’m echoing Henny Youngman here, just for fun) In their nightly shows, they illuminate. Mocking the dogmatic, they show how simple-mindedness stumbles over complexity, how the social condition is ignored. Colbert is more clearly aiming at the nuttiness of the right, through his Bill O’Reilly impersonation. Stewart tries to be more even handed, reporting absurdities wherever he sees them.

Not all their jokes work. Sometimes, it seems to me, Stewart mocks difficulties that he and his audience don’t understand. Nonetheless, unlike the Polish cabaret, he and Colbert work with tensions and ambiguities, posing questions, rather than providing easy answers. Posing questions, not providing answers is their democratic role, like that of intellectuals more generally, which I explored in depth in my book Civility and Subversion.

This was especially evident in their mock mass demonstration on the Washington Mall, “The “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” Stewart was for sanity; Colbert for fear. It’s interesting to note how many participants and observers wanted the rally to be partisan, and how the comedians understood that this wasn’t their role or their point. They weren’t working as propagandists for the Democrats, or just attacking the Republicans. They weren’t working with a clear political end. They were fake activists, extending their performances as fake newscaster and commentator. And as such, they revealed the transgression of the fine line between the serious and the comic by those who purport to be serious. The comics understand the difference, while so many in the news media and in politics don’t. Brilliant and funny.

But satirists may lose sight of their distinctive role, becoming convinced their jokes can substitute for serious political analysis and engagement. They may come to believe and convince their audiences, as I saw in Krakow many years ago, that their mocking illumination of the powers’ insufficient packaged answers to the questions posed by the enduring problems of the social condition is the answer. Thus, the Italian case: from a satirical V, “vaffanculo,” Day, (fuck them all day) to a party that won 25% of the vote, and has continued to follow the “vaffanculo” line. Hajek observed before the elections about the intentions of the leader of the anti-political party, The Five Star Movement: “It is indeed likely that Grillo has no intention to govern, but simply wants to obstruct other parties and bring about some kind of revolution.”

Humor responds to and illuminates “the social condition.” Herein lies its personal and political significance and power, why Colbert and Stewart speak to me as I endure my daily struggles, and why it can matter, for example, in the role satire played around the old Soviet bloc. It can be a survival strategy for persecuted minorities, Jews and blacks, for example, and majorities, women, or just anyone, for example, in Youngman, husbands and wives. And because humor and satire refer to both the concerns of daily life and greater social structure, the social condition writ large and writ small, they have potentially significant political meaning and impact. But, handle with care.

With Italian media being largely compromised by political parties, cooperative companies, media and business magnates and financial strongholds, Italians have remained with only two real outlets for their frustration and disillusionment with contemporary politics and society, the Internet and satire. Blunders, scandals and a wide array of political issues that leak out into the public sphere instantly reach the web, where people vent their anger or have a (bitter) laugh at the guilty party by leaving comments on Twitter or circulating satirical cartoons on Facebook. And then there is satire, a particularly popular means of political criticism and contestation in Italy. Of course it is not new, and has been applied for a long time in the democratic world. Yet, with the various political scandals of the past year, as well as Monti’s harsh austerity policies and rigid attitude, seemingly unconcerned with the disastrous effects of these measures on the lives of many Italians, political satire in Italy is increasingly putting the finger on the sore spots, serving as a sort of mediatized vox populi.

And political satire is increasingly becoming a site of contestation. In mid-February, for example, Maurizio Crozza – best known for the satirical impersonations of politicians during his ten minute sketch on the weekly current affairs program, Ballarò, aired on the most left-centered of the three state-run RAI channels – was attacked by members of the audience at the yearly musical festival of San Remo. At the end of an unflattering imitation of a Silvio Berlusconi trying to buy the Italians’ votes, with which Crozza started his performance, people shouted that he should leave the stage, and that there should be no politics that night, making it apparently impossible for the comedian to continue. Although Crozza seemed affected and offended by the attack, and nearly walked off the stage, necessitating the intervention of host Fabio Fazio, it is likely that the entire scene was set up so as to boost audience ratings. Nevertheless, it shows how important satire has become in debates about politics, and in society as a whole.

Satire mostly surfs the web, though. One comedian in particular has drawn advantages from this, creating his own, grassroots political movement which communicates and organizes itself primarily on the web, completely knocking over traditional politics: Beppe Grillo. After a career in commercial television and (initially) without any apparent political conviction, in the early 2000s, Grillo began traveling across Italy, performing in theaters and out on the street where he unloaded his anger over ecological issues, warfare and Berlusconi. In 2005, he created, along with Gianroberto Casaleggio, an Internet entrepreneur who eventually became the guru behind Grillo’s “5 star Movement”, the Beppegrillo.it blog. In 2007 and 2008 the duo organized the so-called V-day (where the ‘V’ stands for ‘vaffanculo’, the Italian F-word), an unofficial protest day against traditional politics – from left to right – that took place across Italy. Grillo indeed claims to promote neither left-wing nor right-wing ideologies. (Hence, his recent opening up to the neo-fascist Casa Pound movement in the name of non-partisanship.)

It is mostly on the web that Grillo’s anti-politics take shape. Journalist Giuliano Santoro – author of an interesting study of the Grillo phenomenon (Un grillo qualunque. Il movimento 5 stelle e il populismo digitale nella crisi dei partiti italiani, 2012) – claims that Facebook in particular favors Grillo in that it creates “a bond between the Comedian and the People which makes possible keeping together […] both the propagandist strength of the “logo” that is so typical of the classical relation of consumerism, and the emotive and intimate power of ‘friendship,’ typical of social networks such as Facebook.” Put simply, Facebook allows Grillo to provide people with a sense of identity and belonging to community, a “product” which he can sell without having to gain the consumer’s confidence, considering his notoriety and Facebook’s capacity to create online – and subsequently also real – communities. And what Grillo has to sell, sells well, particularly since the political scandals of 2012. Recent opinion polls indicated that the “5 star Movement” is gaining support and may do well in the upcoming elections, due also to Grillo’s so-called “Tsunami tour” across the peninsula, these past few weeks. Grillo’s returning to old-fashioned street politics and online democracy seems to be paying off.

Yet, there is a big downside to the “5 star Movement,” and to Grillo’s character. His blog, for example, is not really a blog, as Grillo himself admitted: it is mostly a site of communication and propaganda, with no interaction between Grillo and his followers. Nor did the two highly successful V-days originate “from below.” Rather, they were programmed and effectively “sold” by the Casaleggio-Grillo duo. Similarly, Grillo’s political rallies – which are often filmed and put online –are more a one-man show, which, again, do not promote interaction but simply reproduce the stand-up comedian format of television. Accordingly, the people who attend these meetings are spectators rather than demonstrators. His activities, therefore, represent no more than a shift from television to new media. Things apparently change, but are essentially the same.

The obsession with new media reached a climax when it was decided that people could present themselves as candidates for the 5 star Movement primaries in 2012 by uploading videos of themselves to the Internet, where they would receive votes, a form of democracy from below. But this failed horribly as only a very small number of Italians voted, which was to be expected, with Italy still lagging behind in Internet usage.

Grillo’s hierarchical and undemocratic nature, finally, was revealed when he expelled a regional and a communal councilor of the “5 star Movement” in the city of Bologna. One of them had participated in the abovementioned TV program Ballarò, a decision which clashed with Grillo’s number one rule of complete absence from the mainstream media, although he does not always apply that rule to himself. In October 2012, he pulled off a publicity stunt as he swam the Straits of Messina for the launch of his local election campaign in Sicily, where the “5 star Movement” would be very successful.

Clearly, Grillo is afraid of losing control. Or maybe he just doesn’t like it when someone draws attention away from him, as also became clear after a member of the “5 star Movement” was elected mayor of Parma during local elections in 2012, leading to polemics with Grillo who tried to dictate his next moves. The Movement does indeed come across very much as an army of little soldiers, who are dismissed as soon as they step out of line.

So how would they govern Italy, should they win the elections? Of course, they won’t, but if they would, Grillo-Casaleggio would probably dissolve the movement. It is indeed likely that Grillo has no intention to govern, but simply wants to obstruct other parties and bring about some kind of revolution. At a local level, though, the Movement is doing well, which illustrates an increasing call for local activism and participant democracy, due not in the least to a discontent with European politics in these times of crisis and austerity.

Grillo’s success also shows how traditional politics are being affected ever more by the power of satire and democracy via the web. In a way, this is not very surprising, Italy having been run for nearly 20 years by a man many consider a clown, and who has indeed built much of his popularity on the Italians’ (bad) sense of humor.

Yet, to a certain degree, Grillo’s assault on the political caste is a good thing. In a country where traditional political parties have exploited ordinary citizens for far too long, distracting them with semi-nude ballerinas or simply brainwashing them through television, it is time people wake up and smell the coffee. But I’m afraid Grillo is not our man. Although many of the things he says are true, they do no more than feed grudges. Grillo does not offer any real alternative, so that voting for him is not a vote for something but against, and that is never really productive.

In a previous article I argued that Italy is witnessing a sort of end of ideology: Prime Minister Mario Monti’s technical government responds to the economic market alone, while Beppe Grillo’s a-political grassroots movement is winning over disappointed voters. But with the elections in sight, the old political guard is warming up, eager to regain control over the country. Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has governed the country on and off since 1994, is first in line: after months of tactical holding off, the Cavaliere – as Berlusconi is also called – decided to get back into the game as it became clear that Monti might run for the elections. For some weeks now he has been appearing on every single political and current affairs show on Italian television, primarily on his own TV channels but also on the more critical, independent La7, where he engaged in a highly media hyped duel with a critical journalist Berlusconi managed to have removed from state television back in 2002. On another talk-show, old times again revived as Berlusconi took it out on magistrates who ordered the former PM to pay €36 million ($48 million) a year in a divorce settlement with this ex-wife Veronica Lario: they were accused of being Communists and now also feminists.

The sense of history repeating itself was reflected in a satirical cartoon, where we see Berlusconi’s face on TV as he yells “Happy 1994!” to a terror-stricken viewer. Unless Monti’s newly found political list, “Civic choice,” can put a stop to it. Positioned neither to the left nor to the right, Monti seems to want to do away with traditional polarities in politics for good and give continuity to his technical government, with no one to respond to but the European Union. In fact, when criticized for the rigorous measures taken in order to bring down the government bond spreads, i.e. the spread between Italian benchmark 10 year bonds and safer German Bunds, Monti inflexibly shifted responsibility to bad management by previous governments. In the name of rigor and economic reconstruction, he has thus been able to pull off tricks none of his predecessors could ever have dreamed of getting away with. “Europe wants it” and “I respond to the market,” were Monti’s stoical replies to criticism.

During an international conference on protest cultures in Italy, sociologist Donatella della Porta argued that Monti’s government disguises a “corrupting democracy” and what she coins as “clean corruption,” in that it presents itself as an a-political and neutral government while in reality it is very much immersed in economical politics in the Euro zone (unsurprisingly, Monti is connected to Goldman Sachs). Consequently it has pushed through anti-Constitutional measures that may work in Northern countries such as Germany, but not in Italy. Sponsored (at least until recently) by politics on the left and on the right as well as by mass media, Monti’s government thus follows a neo-liberal program with a highly non-democratic way of decision making, where trust is not sought among citizens but economic markets.

And Monti is not ready to give that up yet. Before his formal decision to participate in the upcoming elections, during the holiday season, he declared that he was “open” to lead the government if he was “asked” to do so. More recently, he invited the Italian center-left to “silence” the more radical, anti-reform elements in its ranks, including the left-wing union organization CGIL. Should the “civic choice” he is offering Italians perhaps be read in ironical sense then? It leads Della Porta to conclude that Monti is more Berlusconian than Berlusconi, whose many trials, gaffes, indecent behavior and political incapacities have made him the official laughing stock of Europe. Monti, on the other hand, is somewhat of a wolf in sheep’s clothing: with the European Union behind him, the serious and polyglot professor is far more respectable than his predecessor. He is indeed the absolute counterpart of “Mr Bunga Bunga,” and even those Italians who didn’t/don’t see through Berlusconi’s game seem to get that: opinion polls reveal that what people most appreciate about Monti is the fact that he has given back “credibility” to the country, a catchy formula which is often repeated in the press, but actually reflects a linguistic media habit where complex issues are reduced to slogans.

In reality, he is not as innocent as he would like us to believe, and I’m not so sure Monti is really doing Italy any good. Recent figures show that youth unemployment has reached 30%, while more and more companies and factories (and not just small and medium enterprises) are closing or being relocated to East-Europe, Asia and Latin-America. Even Fiat, the country’s biggest private-sector employer, is no longer made in Italy. Italians’ purchasing power is staggering, as they are continually faced with tax increases and new taxes such as the much debated council tax, whereas wages – for those who can claim any – fail to grow accordingly. All these problems are arrogantly sidetracked by pulling out the “Europe wants it” story, or by placing Italy on the same level as other European countries, forgetting that Italy seriously lags behind wages – again, for those who (still) have a (paid) job – and civil rights, in comparison with Northern European countries. And what about Monti’s raising of the retirement age? Surely, he could have made exceptions for old age pensions? Contrary to more advanced European countries, in Italy many workers from older and poorer generations have been working since their early teens, and therefore no longer see the end of it. On top of all of this, Monti’s ministers have attempted to defend the measures indulging in offensive, selfish and downright stupid comments, for example about Italian youngsters being “choosy” and pretentious when it comes down to getting a job, completely ignoring the privileged positions of their own children who have clearly been favored by their parents’ connections.

Perhaps Monti’s “Civic Choice” list is an attempt to make amends, and make up for some of the harsh measures he was “forced” to carry out by the European Union? He has in fact announced that he wants to modify the law on council tax and suspend a future tax-increase. But is he to be trusted? Or does Italy risk ending up with something worse than Berlusconi?

Forty three years ago, on 12 December, 1969, a bomb exploded in a crowded bank in Piazza Fontana, Milan, killing seventeen and wounding eighty eight. This bomb was the first in a series of terrorist massacres performed as part of the so-called “strategy of tension,” a political climate of terror orchestrated by a variety of right-wing organizations which aimed at promoting “a turn to an authoritarian type of government.” (see Anna Cento Bull’s study on Italian Neofascism) Other major bomb massacres followed: in 1974, during an anti-fascist demonstration in the Northern city of Brescia and on a train traveling from Florence to Bologna. Bologna was also the stage of another dramatic massacre, when a bomb exploded in the waiting room of the central railway station, on 2 August 1980: eighty-five people died (including a three-year old girl), two hundred were wounded.

Needless to say, the 1970s have a bad reputation, in Italy. Notwithstanding the fact that two neo-fascist terrorists were sentenced for the Bologna massacre, there are still too many unresolved issues and (state) secrets for Italians to make amends with this difficult past. In fact, the so-called “years of lead” are known mostly for the large number of terrorist attacks carried out by both left-wing and right-wing terrorists, as well as other forms of “subversive” violence. These have given shape to a “collective trauma” which the country has failed to come to terms with, in spite of official monuments and annual commemorative rituals that really only contribute to the silencing of memories.

The lack of a commonly shared, official memory of these events might explain why there are so many cultural products that take on the issue of 1970s political violence. A number of movies produced since 2000, for example, have tried to narrate the story of the 1970s, in different ways and with different purposes.

Recently, acclaimed filmmaker Marco Tullio Giordana has attempted to visualize the traumatic memory of the Piazza Fontana massacre in Romanzo di una strage (“Piazza Fontana. The Italian Conspiracy,” 2012). The movie focuses not so much on the massacre itself but on the mysterious death of an anarchist who was arrested after the massacre and interrogated for three days, before he was thrown out of the window of the police headquarters. No legal truth has ever been reached on this incident, which was put off as a tragic accident. Giordana too fails to bring light on it, though he probably didn’t even intend to do so. Using the genres of the detective story and the Italian cop film, he presents a tale of mystery and secrets where the responsibility for the massacre is split between neo-fascists and anarchists, perhaps in an attempt to forge a symbolical reconciliation, which, instead in my judgment, only reopens the wound.

And so the phantom of the 1970s continues to haunt the country, as happened in May 2012, when the chief executive of a leading Italian manufacturer of thermoelectric power plants in Genoa was kneecapped by two men. Mainstream media instantly and dramatically called back memories of (left-wing) terrorism. In fact, the term “years of lead” primarily refers to left-wing terrorists, who used fire arms (“lead” being a metaphor for bullets) rather than bombs, and thus ignores right-wing terrorism which mostly had recourse to bombs, as in Piazza Fontana or Bologna. Of course it is not impossible, in times of crisis and social malaise, for some wannabe Che Guevara to decide to have a go at revolution again. But to talk about the return of the “subversive violence” of the 1970s is senseless. We are in a completely different social and historical context. More importantly, there has been a change of mentality which excludes any possibility of a new terrorist generation: Communism is no longer in, and most young people are more worried about how much money they have in their cell phones than about bringing down capitalism.

In fact, I think that we have been witnessing a sort of end of ideology in Italy: Mario Monti’s “technical” government responds primarily to the economic market, and the highly successful “5 star Movement,” led by comedian Beppe Grillo, explicitly has presented itself as an a-political party which promotes neither left-wing nor right-wing ideologies, but ideas. The traditional left, finally, has had its own demons to fight with: Florence’s mayor Matteo Renzi, a young and highly overestimated politician whose political views seem closer to the neoliberal right than to his own party. In a move not dissimilar to the one with which Silvio Berlusconi managed to win over the Italians in 1994, 37-year old Renzi had a go at the presidential primaries for the Democratic Party last month, promoting vague ideas about generational change and modernization. In doing so, he built strongly on the American model, with his Obama-like blouse with blue tie, tour bus and catchy slogans. Although such attempts to break with the hierarchical and rigid schemes of Italian politics is necessary, Renzi’s incapacity (or reluctance) to take discussions beyond the idea of generational change and engage in more serious political debates make him a highly inappropriate candidate. His success both among disappointed left-wing voters and right-wing voters in search of a new leader is another sign of Italy’s current struggle to define a political identity and outline a future direction, a struggle exemplified also by Berlusconi’s neoliberal right.

Over the past few months, Forza Italia has been desperately seeking a new political leader, up to the point that the party announced its own presidential primaries with some twenty candidates, an unthinkable situation when Berlusconi was still in charge, the party being constructed entirely around his figure. This has further fragmented the party, pushing right-wing voters in the direction of Renzi. However, this may also have been Berlusconi’s strategy – to create the impression that his party, and the country as a whole, cannot do without his leadership.

Berlusconi purports to be needed, motivating his umpteenth change of mind about going back into politics for the good of the country. Not very convincing, though: the day after Mario Monti’s announcement of resignation, the bond spreads rose instantly. The country risks losing the confidence of economic markets which Monti so painfully obtained. He brought the spreads down from nearly 600 in 2011, when Berlusconi resigned, to some 300 before Berlusconi announced his return, earlier this week.  Now, Berlusconi seems to be building his election campaign on a new enemy: the ‘scam’ of the bond spreads.

The world no longer seems to be run by politics or warfare, but predominantly by economic markets. People too are tired of politics and ideology, and ready for a new start. This increases the tendency to talk about difficult memories of political violence in terms of stereotypes and clichés. Interpreting acts of violence like the attack in Genoa in May 2012 as the reproduction or continuation of something that happened 40 years ago reveals a lack of critical analysis, an unwillingness to take responsibility for what’s happening today, and a turning away from problems which have their roots in the present. It’s the “easy way out,” and yet another sign of how the past continues to haunt the country and obstruct the way forward.