After several weeks of heavy conversations about collapse, adaptation, and the state of the world, Zahra and Susan decided to do something a little lighter for this week’s Book Chat: watch Mike Judge’s Idiocracy.
Susan Harley had never seen the 2006 cult film, which imagines a future America so polluted, dumbed down, over-branded, over-medicated, and nutritionally ruined that the most average man cryogenically frozen in the past, goes on to become the smartest man alive in the future.
It’s a somewhat ridiculous film that is also uncomfortably prophetic.
We talked about the film’s now-famous jokes — crops being watered with an electrolyte drink, a lawyer who got his degree at Costco, hospitals that look like casinos, television programs like ‘Ow, my balls,’ corporations dominating everything, and a president who is more wrestling spectacle than statesman. But the deeper question was not whether Idiocracy is funny. It was whether modern satire can even keep up anymore.
That took the conversation into a broader discussion about what’s happened to comedy, especially political satire. In Britain, Susan remembered shows like Spitting Image, Yes Minister, and In the Thick of It — programs that gave people a shared language for laughing at power. In North America, Zahra Sethna talked about the uneven but important tradition of shows like Saturday Night Live, Canada’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and a prolific era of mockumentaries such as Spinal Tap, Best in Show, and Waiting for Guffman… a genre which seems to have disappeared.
A major cultural shift was noted, as well. The old water-cooler culture is mostly gone. People no longer gather around the same shows in the same way. Even pub culture is fading in Britain. Cinema clubs now have to be organized intentionally just to get people out of the house. Memes and clips have replaced the shared experience of watching something together and laughing about it the next day.
On top of everything, there is the fear of offending and being cancelled. Where comedy once worked by pushing into uncomfortable territory and reflecting our absurdities back to us, much of the public square now feels too brittle for that.
One of the strongest themes of the conversation was that satire is not frivolous. It has always been one of the ways human beings make sense of power, bureaucracy, propaganda, social pressure, and despair. Films like Brazil, Wag the Dog, The Truman Show, Don’t Look Up, The Death of Stalin, and even Iran’s Marmoulak (The Lizard) all use humor, absurdity, and exaggeration to reveal something true about the world.
The problem now is that reality itself has become so absurd that even satire struggles to exaggerate it. How do you parody a culture in which politics already looks like professional wrestling, medicine increasingly looks like automated button-pushing, language is degraded in real time, food is engineered for profit rather than nourishment, and AI is being offered as a substitute for thought, friendship, creativity, and even reality?
This was definitely not a doom session, however. In fact, one of the most important moments came early in the conversation, when a viewer questioned whether it was appropriate to talk about films and fun when so much suffering is happening in the world.
It is a fair question.
Our answer was that laughter is not denial or avoidance. Art, film, literature, comedy, and conversation are part of how human beings stay sane in difficult times. If all we do is carry the weight of the world every day, without ever setting it down, we eventually collapse under it.
There are certainly real things to be outraged about. But there are also countless ways we are manipulated into outrage, distraction, division, and despair. Sometimes the most rebellious thing we can do is pause, laugh, look around, and remember what is real.
Next week, Book Chat returns to more serious territory with Sarah Wilson’s I Eat the Stars, a new book on collapse, meaning, children, money, and the spiritual questions that come with facing a world in decline. Susan will lead that conversation on July 12, and Sarah Wilson will join Book Chat on July 19.
After that, we’ll take a short summer hiatus and return in September with more books, more conversations, and hopefully still enough humor to keep us honest.
