When does humour work?
There is something of the relation between overdrafts and credit worthiness here: the only people who can get them are those who don’t need them. Humour is only an effective weapon against regimes and governments who, whilst they do not like it, do not find it intolerable. Satire is an instrument of democracy, and one which will work only in democracies. So paradoxically, whilst it may be a defence against bad government and an incitement to good government, it works best where government is already at the good end of the scale, and hardly works at all where it is most needed. There is therefore, for those who seek satire as the secret weapon of democrats, a problem, in that satire is most effective in regimes against whom it is least necessary. Satire is a resource of citizens, rather than of those who are deprived of citizenship. So its presence is in part a symptom as much as a cause of open and intelligent politics. 9. Where is satire found, and what does its distribution tell us?
