We need change. Put a halt to the arrest. Prison releases. Maybe even reform the church."

How can you run and plot at the same time?

Should. Does it mean. Yes?

They're trying to cut you off!

You can definitely spot the female ones, can't you?

SVETLANA!

I have to go. I've got to call the President of Africa.

Stupid politicians feel real, because real politicians are stupid. Okay, video over thanks for watching make sure to like and subscribe. No, but seriously, we all know politicians are stupid. It's like a fundamental law of the universe.

But a political comedy that just made that joke, just poked fun at politicians for being dumb, it wouldn't really work. Comedy has to say something out loud that we know to be true but we haven't said before. That's when it starts to feel real.

And I think there's one guy who gets this, a guy who lets us laugh at stupid politicians, but also makes it feel real in a deeper way because he gets it in a deeper way:

Armando Iannucci!

Iannucci is a Brit, a guy who cut his teeth with satires of British politics like The Thick of It and In The Loop, yet he's been able to translate his humor and success to American politics with VEEP and even Soviet politics in The Death of Stalin. Totally different societies, times, and places, but it still works not because "politicians are always stupid." In fact, Iannucci doesn't even blame the politicians for their stupidity.

It's not about saying, “Oh, for God's sake, don't go into politics because, you know, they're all animals and and have no morals.” It's not about that. I think the more sympathetic people in those shows are the elected politicians. Actually, they feel the most human.

Instead, his comedy says something else out loud: something we're not so ready to admit to ourselves but that we know, deep down, is true. Stupid politicians don't feel real because politicians are stupid. Politicians aren't stupid. They just act stupid, do stupid things, because that's what the system demands from them, what we demand from them. Let me show you what I mean.

I. Chaos

This is Kent Davison from VEEP.

CLIP: Hi, Kent.

He’s the Vice President Selina Meyer’s pollster. His job is to ‘run the numbers’ and tell her what the public wants.

CLIP: So are we really not doing anything about the hostages now?

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

We are doing something.

Yeah. What are we doing?

Nothing. Until the numbers support intervention, doing nothing is the most positive thing we can do.

Not only is this a dubiously effective way of doing politics, not only is the man charged with intuiting public feeling completely devoid of human emotion, more ironic still is the fact that Meyer, a politician whose entire job is to hear and be responsive to public opinion, needs someone to tell her what they want because she is actually so completely out of touch.

CLIP: Hi y’all! Oh my goodness. Look at this. Walking the walk. Talking the pork.

Look at you. A grown woman with cotton candy. Pink like your cheeks!

I'm gonna give you both a hug.

Oh, gosh, that looks like finger lickin fun. That's a term I just coined today. Do you like it?

In turn, she frequently flip-flops — and looks like an idiot — as the numbers change, because she doesn’t actually have any principles beyond a distant concept of what other people want from her. But again, Iannucci isn’t just poking fun at her for being stupid. He’s explaining why that behavior happens, and Kent is just the tip of the iceberg.

CLIP: You hired the biggest bastard in D.C.?

Oh, yeah, well, I'm fluent in bastard, okay? It's one of my languages. Amy. I used Dan to get what I wanted.

To advance her agenda, Meyer hires a notoriously slimy power broker, and when the president nixes one of her pet policies, this guy has a scheme to still get it passed.

CLIP: I have an idea. What if we went to a friendly senator and suggested that he or she take the best parts of clean jobs, the sanctions on polluters, tax breaks for the good guys, and then added that as an amendment...

We can't do this, can we? We can't.

We can do anything we want.

But he goes ahead and does it anyway. Then, when the President orders her to veto the bill, Meyer is forced to go on the record voting against her policy. She looks like a total idiot.

CLIP: Wish me luck.

You got McCauley to add this amendment, didn't you? I know you did.

Whether pollsters or power brokers, Meyer is surrounded with specialists, experts, and underlings whose responsibilities are, in effect, to do all the politics for her, and in turn who often subvert her authority, her intentions, or the desires of the people who elected her. This is one of those things that Iannucci does that just feels real, because we all know no matter who we vote for, they’re not actually doing the job we elect them to do. In part, that’s because the modern world is so complex that delegation to some extent becomes a necessity, but it’s also emblematic of systemic illnesses that mean, for example, a politician’s primary responsibility these days is often not governing but raising money for re-election.

Either way, they do look like fools, but the problem is bigger than the politician.

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Now, back to those dumb politicians.

II: Approval

So if a politician isn’t taking the public’s temperature, isn’t trying to get policy passed, then what the heck are they doing?

CLIP: Can you please make sure Nicola's right in the middle? She doesn't look important enough. Can you just move her over? She just moved for a second. Perfect.

Trying to get attention and approval. To feed the TV ratings, the social media algorithm, whatever it is that a politician thinks will gain them popularity and prestige…and eventually, votes.

In one episode of The Thick of It, Iannucci’s breakout TV series lampooning British politics, he takes us along for the ride as the Minister for Social Affairs attempts to announce an exciting policy initiative that will boost his career. But on the way to the announcement,

CLIP: Should does not mean yes. Now, there's only one thing to do here and it’s what I'm going to tell you to do. Kill it.

I can't, I can't kill it. I'm on my way to make the announcement, there are going to be television cameras and everything!

He finds out the Prime Minister has canceled the policy. So, terrified of canceling the appearance and making a fool of himself, the minister starts brainstorming with his aides.

CLIP: National spare room database.

What about zoos? My kids went to a zoo, you know, the other day, and they said. They said it was fucking disgusting. You know, the state of it. That's shit, isn't it?

They get nowhere, but the show must go on.

CLIP: Here we go.

Well. That was a fucking disaster.

And the Minister makes a fool of himself.

Then, Iannucci followed up The Thick of It’s success with a movie satirizing the UK’s entry into the Iraq war alongside America. In one crucial scene, the protagonist Simon Foster, terrified of saying the wrong thing about the possibility of war, yet equally terrified of saying nothing when he finds himself face to face with a bunch of TV cameras, remarks,

CLIP: To walk the road of peace, sometimes we need to be ready to climb the mountain of conflict.

Both these men could have, should have shut up. But Iannucci’s point is that they actually can’t. Becoming a successful politician means turning yourself into an effective attention-seeking machine. And that isn’t really their fault. That’s the way the system works, the way you win votes, the way you stay alive.

And that makes you do stupid things, because you’re always trying to say the popular thing, even when the popular thing isn’t tru or possible. You’re always hunting for,

CLIP: Something that's eye-catching, and that is free and universally popular and instantly applicable. No one could possibly object to it.

Yeah, right.

And this makes Iannucci’s comedy compelling because it implicates us in the thing that we all hate, in a way that we all intuitively know is true, even if the politicians, like VEEP’s Selina Meyer, are incredibly egotistical.

CLIP: It means we're going to have un-diva my party. We're going to have to lose those huge photos of me. I know, they're great photos. I know, but there's no way we can have— it’s a good idea, we don't want you to look like--

Stalin.

I was going to say Eva Peron.

Because they satisfy their egotism through our attention and approval. That's democracy, baby. But Iannucci also exposed a similar dynamic at play in dictatorships.

CLIP: So you’ll get a doctor.

I am the doctor. I'll see to everything.

Come on. Come on. He'll be fine. Smells like a Baku pisshouse in here.

In Death of Stalin, a black comedy following the, well, death of Stalin and power struggle in and literally at his wake — also, my favorite of everything Iannucci has done — Nikita Khrushchev keeps a journal of what makes Stalin laugh and what doesn’t.

CLIP: Did Stalin laugh?

Yeah. Made a joke about the Navy. No laugh.

No more Navy jokes.

And even after he’s dead Stalin’s inner circle can’t stop jostling with each other to fawn over their dear leader,

CLIP: He's heavier than I thought he'd be.

You think Stalin’s too heavy?

No, no, no, it's a compliment. Gold is heavy.

leading his deputy, Malenkov to dress up like an idiot in an attempt to imitate and flatter the dead dictator.

CLIP: I've scheduled some telephone calls later.

Then tell me later.

Here, the objective isn’t public adulation. It’s the favor of the strongman. Yet the upshot is the same, as the people with the responsibility for governing end up behaving like total fools.

III. Helplessness

Taken together, Iannucci has revealed how the stupidity of politicians is motivated by systemic problems of bad incentives: a job too complex for one person to manage and media and reward structures that gratify shamelessness. The upshot is politicians who don’t just act stupid but are, in a sense, totally helpless and addicted to the attention and approval of others. In other words, they’re children.

After In The Loop’s Simon Foster makes a total fool of himself, he gets in the car… and loses it.

CLIP: Fuck! Fuck! Why didn't we nail the line?

Simon, I did try to warn you.

Yes, yes. You tried to warn me, but you didn't actually stop me.
I can't tackle you—

like shouting train at somebody as they get hit by a train. You should go “Train! There's a fucking train!"

It’s inconceivable to him that he could be responsible for making a fool of himself, because he lives in a world where he’s constantly managed and, yes, babied, by his subordinates, such that he has no idea what it means to be responsible for anything.

CLIP: It's difficult, difficult, lemon, difficult.

Yet even Foster is made of sterner stuff than Selina Meyer: the Vice President with a bagman more like an emotional support dog than an actual assistant.

CLIP: Gary?

Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am.

I need something.

Okay. Is there anything specific?

I don't fucking know. I just need something!

Without him, she’s completely unable to function, even going so far as to deputize him to break up with her boyfriend for her.

CLIP: I need you to end it with Ted.

Okay? What?

Yeah. I want you to let him know I'm letting him go.

And though Stalin wasn’t subject to electoral pressures demanding constant deference to public opinion, Iannucci still suggests the man of steel may in fact have been less secure than we might think. Not only does he have a habit of gulag-ing even the most minor — and imagined — critics of his regime, revealing a profound insecurity in his political position.

CLIP: All right, let's get going.

Time for a cowboy movie. Who's in my posse?

He also demands that his subordinates hang out with him and stay up late watching an American western movie.

CLIP: Goodbye, old friend.

Nor are even they safe from Stalin,

CLIP: On the list.

Or from the descent into childish stupidity after he’s dead.

CLIP: He said all of you.

No, no, I was over there.

No.

And he went, all of you. All of you.

All of you. No, no.

Yes. All. All of all of you.

And though throughout all of this, we can laugh along, there’s one thing Iannucci doesn’t let us forget.

CLIP: I see myself as someone who makes funny things or who makes things that are mostly funny. You know, there was elements of The Death of Stalin, which I knew wouldn't be funny.

The Thick of It was his breakout comedic success, but it expressed deep frustration with the state of contemporary British politics —

CLIP: I'm going to have to mop up a fucking hurricane of piss here from all of these neurotics.

a frustration Iannucci brought to culmination in the biting critique of In The Loop: a satire of the country’s bumbling entrance into the Iraq War: a conflict that practically nobody really wanted, least of all those very real people — many of them totally innocent — who were shortly thereafter bombed, shot at, and killed.

CLIP This is all going to spin along from here, and we're going to have a vote. We're going to go to war, and we're going to fight people, and we're going to kill them, and our children are going to get killed. And this is exactly the sort of thing that I didn't want to do when I went into politics. This is the opposite of what I wanted to do.

And VEEP, though not commenting on one particular moral crisis of politics, revealed one deeper and more intensely serious than perhaps even Iannucci realized, as for nearly a decade since a few years after it first aired, American politics has been tormented by an egomaniacal manchild whose sole particular talents seem to be a world-historical capacity for spinelessness and for the total captivation of media attention through perfectly-orchestrated absurdity.

We're going to build a wall.

I love the poorly educated!

They're eating the dogs.

Transgender for everyone!

I call it the n word. There are two n words and you can't use either of them.

And it would be easy to take away from all of this a deeply cynical lesson about democracy. Isn’t this whole way of doing politics a sort of sick joke, an embarrassment? But Iannucci isn’t that cynical, and we shouldn’t be, either.

CLIP: Is this what I came into politics to do, Amy? It's a rhetorical question. Obviously, I didn't come into politics to do this.

For starters, consider the opening scene in Death of Stalin. Two sound techs at a Moscow orchestra receive a phone call.

CLIP: Who was it?

The Secretariat of the General Secretariat of the general secretary. Of the Secretary of the--

General Stalin.

He wants a recording of the concert. But they don’t have one, so they scramble. They stuff the hall with people off the streets to help the acoustics, basically kidnap a conductor, and nearly lose their minds, because they must appease comrade Stalin. Because if they don’t,

CLIP: Shoot her before him, but make sure he sees it. Oh and this one, kill him, take him to his church, dump him in the pulpit. I'll leave the rest to you.

In regimes like Stalin’s, it’s not just politicians who have to curry favor. It’s everyone. And while an improvement over Stalinism is on its own no great endorsement of democracy, the point is important. Delegation, deference, and helplessness turn people into fools.

In a democracy, at least that’s limited to politicians. At least they’re compelled to debase themselves for us. The brilliance of Iannucci’s comedy isn’t merely that it offers catharsis: an opportunity to laugh at self-obsessed maniacs. It’s that he paints a picture of the system of politics. His work reverberates so deeply, because it actually exposes the incentives at play and explains why these people act like fools. And in doing so, Iannucci allows us to consider how we might be able to fix those incentives that produce the stupidity.

Stupid politicians feel real because we all see it, because they all act stupid, because we all reward them for it. And if it’s our attention and our approval they’re after, maybe we ought to stop giving it away so easily.

Sources

Iannucci, Armando. 2009. In the Loop.
Iannucci, Armando. 2017. Death of Stalin.
Iannucci, Armando. 2012-2019. Veep.
Iannucci, Armando. 2005-2012. The Thick of It.