The first time I was introduced to satire, my jaw dropped—and not just because it was the first time I’d ever seen a naked woman. I was 8 when my older brothers snuck me into a London cinema to see Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Although my underdeveloped brain may not have fully grasped the critique of religion or internecine fights among political leftists, I loved the feeling of being surrounded by 300 people screaming with laughter.
Over the next few years, I inhaled an array of comedy greats: Peter Sellers, Peter Cook, and Not the Nine O’Clock News, with its biting commentary on Thatcherite Britain. Then came a personal breakthrough. At the age of 20, I spent six months studying with an intimidating French clown.
The late Philippe Gaulier was one of the all-time great teachers of clown and modern theater. Gaulier kept a drum handy while we were onstage, banging it to cut short a performance he considered “sh-t,” which was often. His goal, and greatest gift to us, was helping his students discover what he called their “inner idiot.” Gaulier introduced me to the satirical archetype of the bouffon.
In his telling, the tradition dated back to 11th century France, where societal outcasts—gay people, heretics, those with deformities—would be let back into their villages once a year to put on shows viciously mocking the ruling class. It was the humor of the dispossessed. Whereas clowns were naive idiots, bouffons savagely undermined the people in power.
They were doing something important: using biting and at times cruel humor to undermine systemic injustice. It’s what satirists have done throughout history. And along the way, some people, instead of laughing, wince—or worse, take offense.
The Greek playwright Aristophanes brilliantly lampooned the militarism and demagoguery of his day. Yet because he deployed phallic jokes so obscene they would make even Ali G blush, critics like Plutarch sneered at Aristophanes’ “coarseness ... in words, vulgarity, and ribaldry.” We celebrate the Roman satirist Juvenal, but his contemporaries barely acknowledged him. Nearly two millennia later, Lenny Bruce’s four-letter comedy was branded “sick” in the pages of this magazine in 1959.
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