Jonathan Coe on satire

From today's Guardian:

I'm frequently told that I'm a satirical writer, and although I don't think the label really fits me any more, it probably does apply to What a Carve Up!. But the problem with most satire, I've started to feel, is that it doesn't just preach, it preaches to the converted. Satire – besides being what Milan Kundera disparagingly called a "thesis art" – actually suppresses political anger rather than stoking it up. Political energies which might otherwise be translated into action are instead channelled into comedy and released – dissipated – in the form of laughter.

An interviewer recently asked me if I thought there was a dearth of political satire in this country at the moment. I would argue that there is too much. Our comedians have a default position – comfortably left-liberal, slightly sneery, relying on sharing rather than challenging the assumptions of their audience – and this keeps up a low-level rumble of cynical chuckling which allows our political masters to keep on doing whatever they want to do, completely untouched and unthreatened. And there is an element of this, I feel, in What a Carve Up!. Over the years I've found that one of the reasons its admirers like it so much is because they already share its politics.

Amen. Amen. Amen. I tried, and probably failed, to say something similar when discussing 10 O'Clock Live.