Does Satire Live?

The frequency illusion is, ironically, quite real. Having written a post about “laughtivism,” I began to see it—or related forms of satirical comedy/activism—everywhere.

Threatened with abolition in 1984—Oliver Double writes in Alternative Comedy—the left-wing Greater London Council turned to CAST (the Cartoon Archetypal Slogan Theater) for a comedy campaign in its defence, touring all 32 London boroughs. (Alas, the campaign failed.)

A year earlier, the GLC had funded the pro-disarmament Nuclear Bunker Party “featuring acts like Pauline Melville, David Rappaport, Benjamin Zephaniah and the Oblivion Boys—[organizer] Tony Banks seeing this as ‘first and foremost a weapon of propaganda.’”

And one year later, February 1985, “alternative cabaret performers picketed outside Neasden Power Station, entertaining as they did so.” According to Ronald Muldoon, who helped to plan the protest, “it was the only time the pickets closed any power station down, in the whole of the miners’ strike”—because,…