Within the social media fueled industry of American political satire, an industry that caters to an insatiable appetite for political humour, comic episodes are viewed, shared, and commented on millions of times more than any serious political discussion, let alone the work produced by research centres and scholars. That is why it is important to understand its current and potential political effects, particularly during the unfolding catastrophe of the war on Iran.
As aggression against Iran unfolds and its repercussions ripple across the region, millions of innocent people whose lives are directly threatened still cling to a misguided glimmer of hope that a well organised anti-war movement in America might stop this catastrophe from escalating into a full-fledged world war.
However, before we ask what transformative political actions are needed, we must first critically examine the kinds of political discourse and awareness that either enable or disable such actions.
This is where the importance of rethinking the role of mass-consumed political satire becomes urgent.
The prevailing discourse of political satire during this war is governed by the logics of the attention economy: it is consumer-friendly, emotionally pleasant, and structured to entertain rather than unsettle. It stops short of generating the kind of transformative insight that emerges from deeper, more radical ironies.
Examples abound. The irony of a democracy laughing at its own aggression, the irony of nuclear-armed powers unilaterally invading a sovereign nation over false accusations of potential nuclear development, and the irony of larger terrorist forces fighting smaller ones, to paraphrase ironies powerfully framed by Homi Bhabha as the “barbaric transmission of civilization“ and by Noam Chomsky as the “manufacturing of consent“.
I am emphasizing ironies because they often provide rich material for satire generated by talented and thoughtful comedians. Examples include exposing the gaps between lived and articulated realities, as well as the ironic contradictions between misconceived notions and the empirical realities they seek to deny. These and many other ironic conditions become sources of laughter.
I argue that framing the war as merely Trump’s personal miscalculations, prevailing political satires to absolve their consumers of any political or moral responsibility for the consequences of a war waged in their name.
Worse, they silence the war’s victims in sanitized ways, precisely the dynamic Cornel West warns against when he reminds us that “the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak“.
Jokes become transformative when they reveal deeper truth, not cover it up. I deliberately quote these American moral and intellectual giants to emphasize that America is not devoid of such critical voices. They do exist. But they do not survive the consumer test of the attention economy. Allowing the suffering of the empire’s victims to speak through political satire would disrupt the “free” “democratic” market’s demand for relaxing, hypnotizing content.
This is not to dismiss the genre of political satire entirely. I do not rule out that these satires are often amusing and can effectively deconstruct certain aspects of “Trump’s” war propaganda. They do address the war critically at times.
Consider, for example, when Jon Stewart on The Daily Show traces the long history of American and Israeli leaders announcing that Iran is only weeks away from possessing nuclear weapons, a prophecy perpetually renewed yet never realized. Or when a satirist, orchestrating a fictional dialogue with Trump, asks him, after the assassination of Iranian leaders and the destruction of missile bases, what his biggest remaining war file is to destroy, only to cut to a clip of the president answering earnestly, “Epstein files.” Or consider Bassem Youssef’s darkly comic interview on Piers Morgan’s flagship programme, along with many other similarly incisive moments.
I am neither ignorant of satire’s transformative potential nor arguing that such critical lines are nonexistent. In fact, the whole premise of this piece can be read as an attempt to reckon with that potentiality enormously silenced, tragically misguided, and waiting to be reclaimed.
However, what I find deeply problematic in mainstream line of political satire during the current war on Iran is how it individualizes the aggression by framing it as Trump’s erratic miscalculations.
What we need instead are questions that move beyond the psychologisation and individualisation towards the structural questions that reveal how this aggression is rooted in something far deeper, where deeper laughable tragedy lies, embedded in the very core of the American empire.
We are left asking: Where is your American democracy, the system that is supposed to prevent not just an unconstitutional war, but one that also violates international law? Where are the millions who voted for him and those who voted against him? Are they flooding the streets with anti-war signs, shaking the ground beneath Trump, raising the political cost of war? Where is the media of the “free world” when it comes to challenging, debunking delegitimizing Israeli American war propaganda? Where is the rule of law that holds leaders accountable? Where is your advertised commitment to human rights when over 150 schoolgirls are bombarded in Tehran by your democratically guided missiles? Where is… where is…?
These are the transformative comic sources of irony that can unsettle audiences and move them toward reflection and action, rather than turning unfolding catastrophes into material for an insatiable and ultimately futile culture of comic consumption.
I raise these questions not because we ever believed these ideals have ever been taken seriously, but because you never stopped preaching them invading sovereign countries in the name of promoting their values.
This war is not the anomaly of a psychopathic president, as political satire would have us believe. Rather, it is a symptom of a deeply pathological system, characteristic of a declining empire. Stop psychologising it. Stop “Trumpising” it to absolve yourselves of responsibility. Framing this global aggression as the work of one man may temporarily ease moral discomfort, but it will not prevent catastrophe. It will not change the system, nor will it translate into transformative political action. The victims of these misguided narratives are waiting for more from you.
A Sudanese irony
I lived in Sudan under the previous Islamist military dictatorship. A regime that ruled with an iron fist and killed hundreds of thousands who dared to resist. The overwhelming majority of Sudanese had nothing to do with the US accusation that the regime had hosted the al-Qaeda operatives who bombed the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. In fact, the regime categorically rejected the charge.
Here is the irony.
The very Sudanese who paid the heaviest price, those who revolted against and were crushed by that same Islamist dictator, were later forced by a US Supreme Court ruling to pay $800 million in punitive damages to some of the victims of the embassy attacks.
This was a crime carried out by al-Qaeda, not directly by the Sudanese military dictator, and certainly not by the Sudanese people who had fought against the very regime accused of harbouring them. The penalty came due at a moment when a post-revolution transitional government was desperately trying to have Sudan removed from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism. What may seem like a forgettable sum in Washington was a crippling burden for a government struggling to meet heightened revolutionary expectations with a bankrupt national budget.
In trying to satisfy US demands, this payment, along with debt cancelation politics, the imposition of harsh neoliberal measures, the transitional government was steadily steered away from its revolutionary agenda. It lost legitimacy and was easily overthrown by military generals who hijacked the transition, diverting it from its intended course into the devastating war that ravages Sudan today.
So, how does this matter?
Because it exposes a staggering global irony: subjects of a dictatorship can be punished for crimes they did not commit while citizens of a democracy bear no responsibility for destruction carried out directly by their own elected and accountable government.
Let us, for a moment, imagine a just world. Imagine a world in which the destructive actions of democratically elected governments were paid for directly from the tax-payers money to compensate the millions of victims scattered across the globe.
In such a world, the citizens of those democracies would no longer have the luxury of laughing at the antics of their “elected dictator” from a safe distance. They would feel the cost of their empire in their own pockets, in their own lives. They would not dare to frame the problem as a problem of an individual clown ruling their country but would straight their back and engage in a transformative action.
I want to conclude with this joke from Sudan and the joke of a world that claims to be fair. I hope I have left you unsettled with these nasty jokes.
The aftertaste of laughter
The problem is not that Trump is a clown. The problem is that calling him a clown allows Americans to avoid seeing the system that produced him. It allows them to remain weak while believing they are free.
As James Scott wrote of authoritarian subjects, humour can serve as a “weapon of the weak.” But how is it that citizens of “the world’s greatest democracy” behave like subjects of authoritarianism, laughing instead of acting? The deeper irony is that, after decades of being told they are the most powerful citizens in the world, Americans still appear politically powerless when confronted with a catastrophic war carried out in their name and on behalf of Israel. Where is their agency? Where is the democratic power they are taught to believe they possess?
For Sudanese people who have lived under dictatorship, sanctions, proxy wars, and now a devastating “civil war” partly shaped by international geopolitics, these American jokes are not harmless. They are reminders that the violence of empire becomes entertainment somewhere long before it becomes death somewhere else.
