Sometimes the freedom and openness of comedy means it is better able to respond to world events than news media. Take South Park’s raucous, unhinged and visually disturbing depictions of Donald Trump – most recently, cheating on Satan (who is carrying his spawn) with JD Vance in the White House. Fair enough: Trey Parker and Matt Stone very much own this terrain.
But there’s no reason why satirical TV programmes such as The Daily Show should have to take on the role of news provider, investigative journalist and critic. And yet, over the past three decades, the failings of the US corporate media to adequately cover the country’s dilapidated politics has pushed people such as Jon Stewart into filling the void.
The problem was identified as long ago as 2000 by the US economist Paul Krugman. He castigated the press for being “fanatically determined to seem even-handed”, to the point they were unwilling to call out outrageous untruths. “If a presidential candidate were to declare that the Earth is flat,” Krugman wrote, “you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.”
It was this context that provided American satire’s cathartic triumph in the first years of the 21st century. The Daily Show began conducting harder-hitting interviews than most primetime TV shows. Stephen Colbert rose to prominence by playing a fake conservative talkshow host, in an open parody of Bill O’Reilly’s mid-2000s show on Fox. And then John Oliver pioneered “investigative comedy”, frequently doing a better job of breaking scandalous stories than the news programmes he was satirising.
As two researchers from the universities of Innsbruck and Groningen argue in a paper published last summer, “affective shifts” among the public enable late-night comedians to build trust with their audience, “which ultimately allows political comedy to act as a form of opinionated journalism”.
A new generation of stand-ups seem to understand this power instinctively. “Comedians don’t have to play by the same rules, so they can point out the glaringly obvious – so obvious it feels subjective,” Parisian journalist and standup comedian Charles Pellegrin told me. Meanwhile, Safia Benyahia, who runs a Paris-based comedy production company, said that standup has grown in popularity “because everything is more political and divisive. People are walking on eggshells and they trust comedy to engage difficult topics in a safe way.”
But the lines have become ever more blurred. From the absurd official statements issued by the White House to comedy writers straining to satirise serious and horrific events, political news has come close to breaking comedy.
“Trump gave us so much fodder that you could only approach it at a superficial level, and a lot of viewers, I think, went: you’re just recounting the day,” millennial American standup star Gianmarco Soresi told me. Comedy at its best, he continued, “is trying to blow things up. Comedy should question power, and the second that comedy becomes power, it’s lost its efficacy, and that’s why it was so offensive when comedians kind of saddled up to Trump.”
However, Soresi was also quick to say that comedy cannot replace politics: there are limits to its powers. “Do I think we can create a space for relief? Yes. Do I think it can create a space for reflection? Yes. Do I think – as an American Jew – it can poke holes in Israel’s geopolitical agenda? Yes,” says Soresi. “Do I think it can build a political movement that takes down Netanyahu? No.”
I go to a fair amount of standup comedy in Parisian basement bars, where the scene Pellegrin and Benyahia are part of is thriving. I’ve had my fair share of laughs at the latest season of South Park, and I know the likes of Stewart, Oliver and Colbert regularly help save the sanity of my American friends. But there is a danger in what we’re asking comedy to do: to take on journalism’s responsibility to inform the public, and to act as a public forum – but without any of journalism’s institutional safeguards.
When I first moved to France, in 2012, I wondered why there didn’t seem to be the same prevalence of satirical political comedy shows on French TV as there was in the US. I slowly realised that this was because the news media were doing their job properly. The evening politics show Des Paroles et Des Actes on France 2 included live factchecking of claims made by its guests. Presidential debates were more than just a collection of 30-second soundbites: moderators followed up with candidates, sometimes multiple times, and fairness was ensured by tracking overall speaking time.
Over the past decade and a half though, things have been declining in the French media sphere too. Two right-wing billionaires in particular have gobbled up television stations, radio stations and newspapers. CNews has positioned itself as a French version of Fox, trust in news media has fallen and disinformation has taken a stronger hold. At the same time, French society feels more polarised and the far right has increased its electoral performance.
I worry that France is headed down the same path as the US, whereby the traditional news media become weaker and more partisan, politics becomes a farce and comedy steps in to fill the void: see, for example, satire site Le Gorafi busting Sarkozy over his absurd prison memoir, after just three weeks in jail.
Anti-politics thrives where anti-media have taken root, leaving comedy to be both catharsis and cause. I don’t know if this can be reversed, but I do know that we have to try. Whatever the cost, the long-term return will be far greater. Without it, we risk turning the comedian’s stage into our most important public forum. That’s dangerous for society, and also the opposite of what comedy should be.
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist. His memoir, Generation Desperation, is published in January 2026
