Politics is Jokes

Beppe Grillo, one of the most famous Italian comedians around, has tried and failed to join the Democratic Party (DP), Italy's main opposition party to Silvio Berlusconi's government. His aim was to get elected into the party's secretariat, "to fill a space left empy in the Left". Despite being rejected, and derided, by everyone in the DP, he's going to try to get 2000 signatures to support his candidacy for the party primaries, which should be easy due to his overwhelming popularity in Italy.

Although this is something of a vanity project for him, multi-millionaire that he is, Mr. Grillo's policy platforms are good, if fairly basic in a civilised country. He wants to disallow anyone with convictions from running for Parliament, and he wants to place a limit of two terms on MPs. This last goal is incredibly important in a country with as established and sclerotic a political class as Italy.

This same political class has reacted strongly against Grillo's candidacy, calling him a "buffoon", and reminding everyone that he is "just a comedian, making jokes". This is what irks me most about this affair. Just as happened with the recent election of comedian Al Franken as Senator for Minnesota, a lot of people seem to think that comedians are inherently incapable of being "serious people", and that everything that they say and do must be a joke of some sort.

Leaving aside the fact that most comedians are real people and can thus have identities beyond their career, I'm against the idea that comedy is necessarily an inconsequential distraction. Given the amount of political comedy around, I'd think it was obvious that comedians are able to have actual insights concerning politics, and that these observations are consequential, even if they are funny.

When someone remarks on Picasso's Guernica and the statement it makes about the horrors of fascism, most people don't have the arrogance to shrug and say "pfft, it's just a painting."