Iraq State TV’s Anti-ISIS Comedy is the Plan 9 from Outer Space of Political Satire

Iraqi TV’s State of Myths has better music than that movie, but Iraq could use some more Lebanese on its A.V. squad. There’s much better stuff than this on LBC’s Bas Mat Watan (which translates as both Smiles of a A Nation and A Nation That Died), a sketch comedy show that was a major hit in the last decade and is still running. Back in 2006 Hezbollah goons burned tires and beat up Christians over a Hassan Nasrallah sketch on Bas Mat Watan. It looks like LBC is also still showing Douma Kratiye, a Spitting Image-style political satire whose title puns the word puppet (douma) with the word democracy. I could not understand anything in these shows but I testify that they are both funny. They are also popular, and it says something about Lebanon that its private media can still draw viewers to the Spitting Image model, one of the greatest forms of television comedy, while apparently the entire English-speaking world no longer can.