America Needs a Real Political Comedy

H ollywood and politics are a bitter cocktail for conservatives. And when served in the glass of the entertainment industry, it is pungent and progressive but rarely entertaining or thought-provoking.

Yet the industry could be playing a more productive role in politics. Television, in particular, has the potential to fill a gaping hole in the cultural landscape with a national political satire. There’s a civic good here: A study by Amy Becker of Towson University showed that exposure to such satire increases the likelihood that people, especially young people, will participate in politics. So, as many disengage over polarization, comedy could serve as a possible corrective. But there’s also a market motivation. Where is such a show right now? There isn’t one.

America, to be sure, has had acclaimed political dramas in the past such as The West Wing and House of Cards, which took viewers into the nave of government with its light and dark shades. Late-night shows such as Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show draw comedy from politics, but they skew left. Some shows devoted to political satire have found a broad and loyal audience. Parks and Recreation, about local politics and government in small-town Indiana, was beloved. The hugely successful Veep, which ended in 2019, came perhaps the closest to such an idea, but its humor, often deriving from cringe situations, was sometimes not as sharp as it was silly (though plenty of Washington insiders found something familiar in its portrayals). Alpha House was also strong but short-lived, ending nearly a decade ago.

Each of these productions offers fragments of the show that could be: a sitcom about the federal government, caricaturing national issues and the Beltway actors involved (the president, Congress, the courts, press, lobbyists, and bureaucrats). It need not be highbrow. By focusing on the relationship between officials — i.e., “how the sausage gets made,” a process usually kept well out of sight — a show of this sort could quench Americans’ thirst for palace intrigue while making them laugh and even educate them about the way politics really works. Where such a show has been tried, it has taken off.

Take Yes Minister, a BBC show of the 1980s and a personal favorite of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. With a cast of essentially three, its motif was the relationship between Jim Hacker, a clueless government minister, and Sir Humphrey Appleby, his Machiavellian civil servant always looking to dupe Hacker so he could really run the system. In one episode, Hacker finds himself charged with rolling out a “Europass” ID card, ordered by EU bureaucrats in Brussels for all British citizens to carry — an unpopular policy that would damage Europe’s reputation in the U.K. (this should sound familiar). When Hacker questions why Britain’s Foreign Office agreed to it in the first place, Sir Humphrey is quick to explain:

The Foreign Office is pro-Europe because it is really anti-Europe . . . Britain has had the same foreign-policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause, we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we stop now, when it’s worked so well?. . . We can make a complete pig’s breakfast of the whole thing! It’s just like old times.

Or take another instance, when Hacker finds himself challenged by Humphrey for worrying about bad press coverage. Among the British, his response has been evergreen:

Don’t tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; the Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; the Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; the Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

When asked by Humphrey about people who read the Sun (a tabloid), Hacker’s private secretary Bernard Woolley chimes in: “Sun readers don’t care who runs the country, just as long as she’s got big tits.”

It’s this combination of wit and wisdom (and naughtiness) that made Yes Minister the rave of political comedy in the 1980s. Thatcher herself once did a TV spoof while in office with the two main characters — a testament to the show’s wide popularity and the reach of its influence. An American show along these lines about Washington, D.C. — say, featuring a bumbling, clueless president and the White House staff that must clean up after his gaffes and fill in his blanks, or a weak speaker of the House pushed around by junior congresswomen — could have enormous appeal in a market of 120 million households addicted to streaming.

More recently, Servant of the People — a 2015 Ukrainian TV comedy about a teacher elected president after a classroom rant on corruption goes viral — has demonstrated how popular and effective the genre can be. Volodymyr Zelensky, portraying the fictional president Vasily Goloborodko as he tackles oligarchy and corruption, resonated so strongly with audiences that, in 2019, voters elected him the actual president of Ukraine to do the same thing. The show is proof of political satire’s power — to draw huge interest and potentially shake up politics all the way to the top.

To be skeptical about such a project’s success in the U.S. today, however, isn’t unreasonable. The country is grappling with unprecedented division, contests over the truth, cancel culture, and hair-trigger sensitivities — especially in the entertainment business. To make it work, creators of such a program would have to avoid the industry’s ever-present and often overwhelming temptation to slap together yet another piece of progressive commentary masquerading as comedy. The writers would have to create a political program without succumbing to their own partisan temptations.

Could it work? It just might. For all of our political problems and Americans’ reported disgust with politics, they still can’t seem to get enough of it, especially when framed as entertainment. Donald Trump, most of all, personified the entertainer-politician role in 2016 — though to divisive effect.

A TV political satire that aims not to divide but to offer droll and incisive commentary that people across the ideological spectrum could enjoy might just be what viewers (and voters) want. It could even unite them — after all, there’s nothing like laughter to bring people together.