Christopher Hitchens once divided the world into the things he hated and the things he loved.
“In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation.
In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.”
What stands out is the inclusion of irony, an appreciation of which is one of the most reliable indicators of intellectual flexibility – the capacity to hold multiple perspectives without surrendering to one.
People without irony tend to be humourless, of course, but it goes deeper than that. You cannot be a fanatic and possess it. The two are incompatible. Fanaticism requires absolute certainty, whereas irony sees the gap between what’s said and what’s meant, between the ideal and the actual. This is why fanatics are so literal-minded. They cannot grasp ambiguity or complexity.
We see it in the comment sections and replies. It’s all over social media, naturally. Ironic writing on divisive issues gets hijacked by a noisy few – the sort who treat every utterance with unbearable seriousness. Every disagreement becomes a morality test because they see the world in black and white. They miss the point entirely, or pretend to, which amounts to the same thing.
The click economy rewards this. Literal-minded outrage in the replies is gold-star algorithmic content – the shrieking and melodrama, the rapid descent into Godwin’s law. Make a sharp ironic comment about Greta Thunberg – her strange silence about Iran, for example – and you’ll discover that you’re “bullying a young girl” (she’s 26). Correct “pregnant people” to “pregnant women” with an eyeroll while reading the BBC news, and receive a thousand complaints.
The fanatical among us operate in a mode where every utterance is examined for heresy, every challenge a threat to their sense of themselves as a good or right-thinking person.
It’s exhausting, which is rather the point. By refusing to recognise irony, they force you into endless clarifications and retreats. This is why it’s tempting to caveat every note and post, add a wink emoji here or a disclaimer there in anticipation of being misread. But it’s pointless in the end. Some people will see a provocation in anything.
The managerial class can’t stand irony either. It’s too slippery; it doesn’t fit their risk framework. When The Babylon Bee satirically named Rachel Levine – a transgender Biden administration official – its ‘Man of the Year’ in response to USA Today honouring Levine as ‘Woman of the Year,’ Twitter suspended the account. The platform demanded the publication delete the tweet or remain locked out. Humourless compliance was the goal, but the Babylon Bee refused to play along, only later being reinstated when Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X.
Most other satirists of the last few years have tended to comply. The 2010s and early 20s handed them the richest material in decades – institutional capture, authorities demanding we deny what we could see, and so on. Instead of savaging it, mainstream comedians played safe. They mocked the 'approved’ political targets and heterodox thinkers while leaving the real absurdities and societal evils untouched. The few who aimed their wit at fashionable orthodoxy – and you can probably think of a few examples – were fired or de-platformed.
None of this is new. Satire has always made those in charge uncomfortable. Jonathan Swift suggested eating Irish babies to solve poverty, and the pamphlet circulated for years before authorities could figure out how to suppress it. You can’t arrest someone for a modest proposal.
Voltaire mocked the church and state so effectively that he spent years in exile, but his books kept circulating anyway. Private Eye magazine spent decades needling British institutions, and while it faced libel suits, it survived because enough people understood that mockery is a public service. Then it too fell quiet when the targets shifted.
Today, the best satire can be found in a few corners of the internet. The Babylon Bee is one example, publishing satirical headlines and short pieces on X and elsewhere. It’s not always subtle, but it’s often very funny and brave, sometimes doing more work in a single headline than a thousand columns. Nietzsche had an ambition “to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book.” The Babylon Bee does it in ten words.
What’s changed with the internet is not simply distribution but the mechanisms of control. Previous generations had to ban books, arrest writers, or win costly court cases. That still happens, but now the arrests follow a Facebook post, by which time the satirist’s work is already done and circulating. That’s the real reason platforms like X get banned in certain countries: they threaten the state, not because they care about deepfake nudes or whatever the official excuse is.
The ultimate aim, though, is self-censorship. In the ideal world (as imagined by the authoritarian), you don’t need laws because the personal costs are high enough that everyone learns to speak carefully. That might take the form of professional ruin in the West or imprisonment or death in places like China. The desired effect is the same: irony becomes risky, satire gets reclassified as harm, and silence becomes the safer option.
Hitchens understood irony as a defence against tyranny. Dictators hate it, which is exactly why satire is so powerful. You can’t arrest a joke as easily as you can arrest its author.
The humourless tend toward the authoritarian because they need the world to mean exactly what they say it means. Authoritarians likewise tend to be humourless – or intolerant of it in others – because humour, and irony especially, undermines the fixed certainties on which their control depends.
This is why we should resist the temptation to self-censor. The more we can afford to laugh – at ourselves, at authority, at the fashionable delusions we’re expected to go along with – the more we know we’re still free.
Oscar Wilde once said we should be able to “play gracefully with ideas”. We can only do that when we’re free enough to laugh.
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Playing gracefully with ideas is what I’m trying to do with The Gadfly – not always as gracefully as I’d like, of course. Still, the freedom to think out loud, test ideas, and change our minds is essential to thinking clearly about the world. That's how I read Oscar Wilde's line.
Do you have any favourite satirists? Which targets are most in need of satire right now? Let me know your thoughts, and thanks for reading.
So very true! The Woke never joke.
I am glad to see a nod to Babylon Bee. I am a big fan of it - and I am getting loads of hate mail for sharing their gems. Because they are marked as “conservative”. And “good liberals” do not laugh to “conservative” humor.