Metaphorically speaking, Italy has had its share of earthquakes over the past few years. After Berlusconi’s government was dissolved in order to make way for Mario Monti’s technical government, life was turned upside down with the introduction of new taxes, the eruption of financial scandals involving all major political parties, and the success of comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in the elections of February 2013.

Further, in May 2012, Italy was shook up in a more literal way. The Northern region of Emilia-Romagna was struck by a heavy earthquake, which was repeated ten days later. A year has passed and much has yet to be done. Nevertheless, during the anniversary, politicians and the media indulged in a triumphant rhetoric that highlighted the great commitment of citizens and institutions in the reconstruction of “Emilia” (the western and north-eastern part of the region, where the epicenter of the earthquake was based). A reconstruction has yet to begin, leading to an explosion of local grassroots committees consisting of people who were affected both by the earthquake and by a bureaucratic rigmarole. The state bureaucracy has complicated the lives of the locals, this in a climate of crisis and austerity. As the state has responded only to the degree that it serves private corporate interests, citizens were left to fend for themselves, repeating a historic pattern.

The Emilia earthquake represents the last in a series of natural disasters in Italy, which never really produced any progressive legislation capable of transmitting know-how to future generations. A law was first passed in the 1970s, in the wake of two catastrophes that drew wide media attention. In 1980, a disastrous earthquake in the mountainous Irpinia region (Southern Italy) further sensitized public opinion, leading to the creation – in 1982 – of the Ministry of Civil Protection. However, the national civil protection system originated only in 1992, whereas the first legislative decree that would give the Italian regions executive powers was created years later (for a brief history of civil protection in Italy see David E. Alexander, “The Evolution of Civil Protection in Modern Italy,” in John Dickie, John Foot and Frank M. Snowden (eds), Disastro! Disasters in Italy since 1860: Culture, Politics, Society, New York: Palgrave, 2002).

Rather than being focused on the prevention of catastrophes and the safeguarding of citizens, civil protection legislation in Italy has thus been subjugated to political games and economical lines of reasoning.

An earthquake that struck the Northern Friuli region, in 1976, played an important role in this process. For the first time, both the first aid and the reconstruction phases occurred on a more local level. As a consequence, the reconstruction of Friuli followed a logic which was also adopted after a 1997 earthquake in Central Italy: it consisted in the safeguarding of the original organization of the affected locations as opposed to relocation and decentralization, which had instead been applied in Irpinia in the 1980s and – more recently – in the city of L’Aquila, devastated by an earthquake in 2009. Here the Italian Civil Protection regained the hierarchical and centralized format of the pre-Friuli period, in line with Berlusconi’s attempts – throughout the 2000s – to expand the power of the head of government through the Civil Protection.

This reflects what Naomi Klein (2008) has defined “disaster capitalism” or “economic shock treatment”: the exploitation of the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks, such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, in order to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. In The Shock Doctrine, Klein criticizes Milton Friedman’s ideas about the pushing through of reforms in the wake of catastrophic events, a mechanism that was also adopted by the Italian civil protection system. In the management of the Irpinia earthquake of 1980, for example, “modern” forms of living were pushed through, such as the widening of the typically narrow streets of the medieval towns so as to create more parking space. Similarly, the imposition of a specific way of life upon people marked the reconstruction of L’Aquila, in particular through the creation of New Towns. The latter consisted of a mass of buildings in a peripheral area for some 15,000 evacuees, creating lucrative building opportunities exploited by major companies supervised by the state, at the expense of local businesses. In addition, the New Towns strongly isolated people from the urban context and eliminated those collective places where people used to meet and socialize, resulting in the persistence of a sense of trauma.

The city of L’Aquila itself, however, has remained untouched. Four years later it is a ghost town, a future prey to real estate speculation. The reconstruction process has turned out to be no more than a political and economical bargain for the Civil Protection and for Berlusconi’s government, aimed as it was at accelerating “processes of privatization and the embezzlement of space, power, rights, nearly always to the advantage of a few, and profiteering choices at the expense of a democratic decision-making procedure.” (Stefano Ventura in Sismografie, Ritornare a L’Aquila mille giorni dopo il sisma, 2012, p. 20).

The L’Aquila case, then, reflects the incapacity and unwillingness of the Italian state to intervene adequately in similar situations, as also happened after the Irpinia earthquake, where “[s]elf-help was the only form of aid” (Alexander, p. 171). The absence of the state is indeed reflected in the fact that Italians have often had to find alternative solutions to natural disasters, such as self-help and volunteerism. Similarly, delay in bringing aid has been “a recurrent theme in Italian disasters” (ibid.): first aid after the Irpinia earthquake was delayed by 24 to 30 hours, whereas squanders and scandals in the reconstruction process earned it the nickname of “Irpiniagate,” contributing to a highly negative, collective memory of earthquakes in Italy.

Perhaps it was this memory that induced the mayor of L’Aquila to make the provocative statement – in a TV interview during the 4th anniversary of the L’Aquila earthquake, in April 2013 – about “disconnecting” L’Aquila from Italy if funds were not released for the reconstruction of the city. His anxiety reflects the risk that L’Aquila will end up like the Irpinia region or like Messina, the port city near the northeast corner of Sicily which witnessed massive emigration after a devastating earthquake in 1908.

In spite of the rigid and military control of the Civil Protection in L’Aquila, in the tent camps that were set up after the earthquake, a number of initiatives developed in which local inhabitants tried to gain a more active and democratic role in the reconstruction process, allowing them to become social actors in a bottom-up process. The grassroots mobilization in Emilia offers another example of this type of engagement. If a state fails to provide adequate civil protection and resolve bureaucratic problems, all the while promoting a false image of the reconstruction process, it is up to the people – as happens too often in Italy – to speak out and claim their rights.

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.