By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 3rd, 2013 
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 . . .
Read more: The Personal and Political Significance of Political Satire
By Andrea Hajek, February 22nd, 2013 
 With the Italian general elections of 24-25 February 2013 around the corner, electoral campaigns are putting the country upside down. Nothing out of the ordinary, though competition among Italian politicians always seems to go a little further than elsewhere in the Western world. Only recently Berlusconi made a “shock” announcement, promising not only to abolish the council tax Mario Monti’s government introduced if his center-right coalition wins the elections, but even to refund Italians for the council tax that has already been paid in 2012. Just this week, a letter – highly reminiscent of an official income revenue document – with details on how to claim the money back was sent to millions of voters. In a more pathetic vein, various political leaders posed before cameras or appeared on TV shows cuddling puppies in an attempt to win over the Italian electorate.
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 . . .
Read more: The Upcoming Italian Elections and the Seamy Side of Satire
By Andrea Hajek, January 14th, 2013 
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 . . .
Read more: Mario Monti’s Midway: A Civic Choice in the Italian Elections?
By Andrea Hajek, December 11th, 2012 
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 . . .
Read more: The Phantom of Subversive Violence in Italy
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