Is satire dying? Zoe Williams asks in the Guardian whether the shrinking of permissible speech is killing comedy. To make her point, she wonders if the mid-1990s satire The Day Today would be tolerated in 2016 and whether ‘its surrealism belongs to another age’.
The spoof news show, which in some ways seems slightly prophetic 20 years later, was sometimes edgy, and often surreal, and Williams recalls one scene in which a presenter announces in a dead pan manner that the Bank of England had issued ‘an emergency currency based on the Queen’s eggs, several thousand of which were removed from her ovaries in 1953 and held in reserve’. But, as she says:
‘If you told Morris’s joke today, there would be a pearl-clutching, royalist faction (let’s term it, for brevity, the Daily Mail) outraged that jokes were being made (with taxpayers’ money/where children might see – delete according to the channel) about the Queen’s gynaecological apparatus.
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