I am turning now to Juvenalian satire—dark, angry, bitter humour—and with examples that have to do with world politics. I’ll start with the British satirical fortnightly magazine, Private Eye, which was edited for many years by the brilliant humourist Peter Cook. This carries plenty of examples of Horatian satire (tolerant and gently amused), such as a regular item titled “Great Sporting Insights”, which picks up idiotic remarks made by sports commentators.
I’ve written on this before in a piece I called “Football and me”, but here are two recent clangers, on the Winter Olympics.
“After yesterday’s drama, today is the turn of the men in the women’s snowboard event.” And (and this one leaves one puzzling, what on earth did the commentator mean to say?) “I think athletes are like people.” But a lot of Private Eye is much darker.
For example, as we come out of Covid (more-or-less) but with the ghastly, the brutal invasion of Ukraine then in its early stages, there was a cartoon showing the four horsemen of the apocalypse—skeletal figures on skeleton horses—peering down at Planet Earth.
One of them is slumped forward in his saddle and the team leader is saying: “Look, Pestilence is exhausted. War, why don’t you pop down there and have a go?” That’s a fine example of Juvenalian satire—dark, bitter and angry. It made me laugh and then shiver.
Private Eye is famous for its covers. There is even a book reproducing over a hundred of these. The cover of each issue features a real-life photo depicting some topical event, with a made-up headline and/or thought or speech balloons.
My all-time favourite appeared during the apartheid era in South Africa. The photo showed two Zulu warriors, dressed in leopard skins and carrying spears and shields, leaping high in the air in absolute joy. The headline read: “President Verwoerd assassinated. A nation mourns.”
These covers work through the juxtaposition of the headline and/or speech balloons with the photo. In the above example there is a disjunction between the photo and the words. Turning to the present and the atrocious attacks carried out by Russia on Ukraine, Private Eye devoted the bulk of a whole issue to that event, and here the cover works in a different way, with the words giving a twist to the image in the photo.
Here was the monstrous Putin consulting with two of his generals. As always, Putin is sitting at the head of a gigantic desk (I’d estimate around six metres long) and the generals are just visible sitting at the other end.
There are speech balloons: from one general “Victory is as near as he is” and from the other “Oh no! It’s Vlad the Insaner” (Putin’s first name is Vladimir and the comment refers to Vlad the Impaler, ruler of Wallachia, Roumania, in the fifteenth century, who was the inspiration for the fictional character Dracula).
Putin’s speech bubble reads: “If anyone calls me a mad mass-murderer, I’ll blow up the world.” The headline reads: “Ukraine War: Is Putin losing it?” which works on a double meaning, losing the war and/or losing his mind. The cover as a whole brilliantly sums up the insanity and brutality of what Russia has been doing.
Before I return (next week) to the subject of satire, I’d like to pick up on my reference to Vlad the Impaler and to say something about the novel Dracula and the various films made of this. The novel, published in 1897, is by the Irish author Bram Stoker, who was a theatre manager as well as a writer, and it’s a kind of hybrid between serious fiction and a popular horror story.
There have been numerous film versions from the USA and the UK, as well as a German film loosely based on it and titled Nosferatu, which is one of the masterpieces of early (silent) cinema.
The American and British films are more-or-less enjoyable as horror flicks, but pretty silly. One of them includes one of my favourite ludicrous film moments. At a point, when the community is being terrorised by a vampire, the police enter Dracula’s house and interrogate his servant, who lives in a state of constant dread of his master.
They ask him “Does the name Dracula mean anything to you?” and he practically jumps in the air, shudders, covers his face and moans pitifully and then says “No, never heard the name before.” They don’t make them like that anymore.
To be concluded
Chris Dunton