Why aren’t there more comedians in politics?

It’s been the running joke of a gruelling fortnight: the surreal example of a comedian doing rather well as a world leader. The premise had previously seemed laughable (“The Comedian-Turned-President Is Seriously in Over His Head”, Olga Rudenko, NY Times, 21 Feb) as if other outrageous stand-ups might transfer their acts to the world stage. Here’s Prime Minister Russell Brand at the next NATO summit with his shirt open to his creepy navel. There’s President Frankie Boyle of Scotland admonishing the press like the front row of the Glasgow Apollo.

“Ya don’t feel so funny now asking ya clever questions, do ya, ya bawbag?”

The thought is ridiculous and frightening, and Volodymyr Zelensky an aberration, because no sane person would ever expect a mere comedian to lead a nation through its most perilous moments of war.

One can almost understand the sneering. We are culturally predisposed to demean the comedic. There is, after all, a reason why so few comedies win the Best Picture Oscar. Even The Great Dictator – suddenly feeling so apt and timeless – lost to the arguably lesser but “serious” film, Hitchcock’s Rebecca, in the 1940 awards.

Although it’s significantly harder to be funny than serious (and harder still to be, as Chaplin often managed, seriously funny), humour has a bad rep, as do those who write and perform it. Comedy is supposedly trivial and lacks intellectual heft. It is preoccupied with vulgar matters and prefers pulling things apart rather than putting things together. It is disruptive, chaotic, and not respectable in the way that politics is meant to be.

Yet comedians and politicians are not really such odd bedfellows. They work across the same medium, are creatures of the zeitgeist, and rely on their wits to do their business in a very public and often hostile space. The surprise is that fewer comedians have tried their hand at politics. Giles Brandreth was briefly MP for Chester, and Al Franken made a good job as the US Senator for Minnesota until his career was ended by a fatuous controversy around a photograph taken in his celebrity days. More successful still, perhaps, was comedian Beppe Grillo who started Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement, currently the biggest party in parliament. Yet, for the most part, comedians running for office have been a novelty, treated as little more than a protest vote, such as when Al Murray ran for South Thanet in 2015, winning just 0.6% of the vote.

One exception is Boris Johnson, who built a brand on Wodehousian pastiche. He was the originator of the “inverted pyramid of piffle”, the “great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies”, and other brilliant rhetorical flourishes that borrowed more from comedy than statesmanship. All those myths of EU bureaucracy now attributed to Johnson, from bendy bananas and the standardisation problems of the Italian condom, might later have become risible politics but they remain masterstrokes of the comedic art. Said Willy Hélin, former spokesperson for the EU, “[Johnson] was the paramount of exaggeration and distortion and lies. He was a clown – a successful clown.”

One can understand Johnson’s rise. With only a few exceptions, most prime ministers have grown to understand the role they must play. Gordon Brown never mastered the performative side and remained dour and unyielding until the end, but others were more attuned to the way politics works at the highest level. They might not be overtly comic but nor are they entirely serious. In political terms, it’s described as a “lightness of touch” or “likability”. In comedic terms, it’s called “schtick”, being that gimmick the performer uses to endear themselves to the crowd. Even John Major made the most of his limited resources by playing up his ordinariness. Margaret Thatcher’s character as Prime Minister has been deconstructed many times, but the key was the way she divested herself of her anaemic intellectualism in favour of a more grounded stage persona, much like Tony Blair changed his manner and voice to create the stage character of “Tony Blair”.

At times of peace, these conventions – these hooks that politicians use to sell their message – tend towards the affable – from Harold Wilson’s “working class” pipe rather than the cigars he is said to have preferred, to Theresa May being so comically straightlaced even as she danced. Yet, at times of crisis, contexts change, and the broadest character traits can become something greater, as Churchill proved so many times. They become the stuff of the archetype that helps the individual transcend the moment, find light in the darkness, humour in the bleakest prospect, and conjure hope in the face of hopelessness.

Other than his bravery at a time when weaker men might have fled, President Zelensky has been succeeding by doing what comedians regularly do. He laughs when others would cry, talks over the heckling guns of his enemy, and keeps on performing. When speaking to reporters, he grabs a chair and moves it to the front of the dais and directly engages with his audience. His memorable lines have the pithy qualities of comedic one-liners. When the Americans offered him safe passage out of Ukraine, he is said to have told them: “I need ammunition, not a ride”.

This is not to demean what appears effortless to Zelensky but to underscore how comedians reach into the existential void to find something risible to laugh against. “Comedy is an escape,” wrote Christopher Fry, “not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith […] not by a vulnerable optimism but by a hard-won maturity of delight.”

Watching events unfold in Ukraine, the spirit of Ukrainians in the face of an unimaginable terror, the phrase “hard-won maturity of delight” constantly comes to mind: from the farmers towing away the Russian tanks, the driver asking stranded Russian troops if they wanted a tow back to Moscow, or the old lady who downed a Russian drone using a jar of cucumbers. It doesn’t much matter if these are real or propaganda. Myths are being created in a spirit that channels the energy of their President and surely provides further proof that Russia and its mirthless leader can never win this war.