Interlude: The Serious Business of Taking the Piss
From Evita Bezuidenhout and Nando's, to Screaming Lord Sutch and Count Binface, political satire has spent generations doing what power fears most: making itself look ridiculous.
Someone commented recently that they’re tired of hearing about Nigel Farage - fair enough, so am I. So today we’re stepping sideways from the man himself to look at something broader: the long and glorious tradition of using humour, ridicule and satire to puncture political power. If you’re enjoying the coverage, please share it, subscribe if you haven’t already, and consider supporting Bearly Politics if you’re able to.
If you’ve been following this odyssey of absurdity documenting what could be the final fall of Farage, you’ll know we’ve discussed the man at some length.
We have, in fact, done so to the point that I had an actual fever dream about the man - Farage, scones and, for reasons only known to my sub-conscious, a set of turquoise lederhosen. The less said about that the better; I’m still looking for the strongest mind-bleach imaginable.
So to give us all a bit of a break from the man (and hoping it’s not too late for my own psyche to recover), I thought it would be a good idea today to refocus. Because what’s happening in Clacton doesn’t just involve a fannywobble-induced by-election by a man in a flat panic, but also involves some of the most important instruments in politics and power.
Humour, Ridicule and Satire.
I am, of course, talking about the man of the hour, Count Binface.
Previously known as Lord Buckethead, before some copyright controversy, Count Binface does not only represent what is now Farage’s foe, but a long history of people taking the absolute piss out those in power.
But before we get to my current political hero, it’s worth introducing you to my own personal first political hero, who was a woman who wore pearls.
And before anyone has a bit of a panic, no, it wasn’t Margaret Thatcher - shudder the thought - but rather a certain Tannie Evita Bezuidenhout, who was the former ambassadress of Bapetikosweti. She was the ultimate representation of, what was at that time, the Afrikaner socialite and power broker in a deeply, deeply broken country.
She is, also, rather importantly not real - she wasn’t even strictly speaking a woman.
Born out of the imagination of Pieter Dirk Uys, a South African writer, performer and political activist came Tannie1 Evita. She first popped into existence in the 1970s when Uys, a gay man, was looking for the best way possible to get under the National Party’s skin. It’s important to understand that censorship in South Africa at the time was not to be trifled with - the laws of the time and their application were truly draconian2.
Now, I will be honest and admit my initial adoration of Tannie Evita didn’t come from being a politically precocious child3, but rather that she looked, to a tee, like my maternal grandmother who I dearly, dearly loved.
As I got older, though, I began to understand why the adults around me found her so funny, and why there was always just the faintest crackle of danger beneath the laughter.
Evita wasn’t just Pieter-Dirk Uys in pearls making jokes about politicians, she was a fully realised member of the apartheid establishment.
She had a National Party husband (Hasie Bezuidenhout), a diplomatic career, an entire fictional family and an intimate knowledge of the living rooms in which South Africa’s most powerful people reassured one another that everything was perfectly normal and nothing about segregation could possibly be pure evil.
Her former posting as ambassadress to Bapetikosweti was particularly inspired, because the country was every bit as real as the supposedly independent homelands Pretoria had created through flags, bureaucracy and an industrial commitment to pretending.
Uys, through Tannie Evita, didn’t attack that world from outside, he climbed right inside it, became one of its most confident inhabitants and allowed it to expose itself.
When the apartheid regime fell, Tannie Evita was there standing in it wreckage, and even had the true honour of doing a sit down interview with Nelson Mandela in Tuynhuys, the office of the president in South Africa.
You would think that at that point the pearls would be put away, the ambassadorial robes would be stored and the grand dame of South African humour would take a very well deserved retirement?
Well, my friend, I am very pleased to confirm that quite the opposite happened - Evita Bezuidenhout not only continued her sterling work as a razor sharp political commentator - she adapted. Hard. She joined the African National Congress and has spent the last nearly 32 years still keeping power straight in her crosshairs.
That was, and remains, Evita’s genius. She was never trapped by the regime that created her. She could effortlessly move from National Party grand dame to ANC member without losing sight of the real target, which was always power itself and the hypocrisies people use to make it respectable.
Charming, composed and entirely convinced of her own decency, she could pour the tea, ask after the children and then say something so casually monstrous that the ideology beneath the pearls became impossible to miss.
Uys understood Afrikaner respectability from within, and later understood the temptations and failures of the new political order just as acutely. The parties changed, the flags changed and Evita adapted with them, but the joke remained firmly trained on whoever was sitting closest to the levers of power.
His work taught me something that has stayed with me ever since: satire does not physically dismantle power, but it can break the spell around it.
Apartheid demanded solemnity. It emblazoned itself in religion, patriotism, titles, uniforms and the grave expressions of dour Afrikaner men pretending that cruelty was just another form of administration. Uys reduced those men to their voices, their vanities and their verbal tics. A system that wanted to appear permanent and historic suddenly looked provincial, pompous and deeply bloody silly.
He called laughter “the ultimate democracy”, and that phrase gets to the heart of why political ridicule is so effective. Anger can strengthen a politician. Hatred can feed the grievance machine. Even protest can be absorbed into a story about persecution.
Laughter, however, changes the relationship entirely - the person demanding fear becomes smaller than the people laughing at them.
Which brings us back from Bapetikosweti to Clacton, and to the particular British flair for turning politicians into punchlines.
The UK has its own rich and, from an outsider’s point of view, slightly demented version of this tradition. Political leaders here have spent centuries being drawn as grotesques, recreated as latex monsters and professionally humiliated by people with better timing. From Hogarth and Punch to Private Eye, Spitting Image, Yes Minister, Have I Got News for You and The Thick of It and even more recently online satirists like Sir Michael Take and even Larry the Cat, mockery has become part of the national infrastructure, never mind the furniture.
The joke candidate, however, takes that one step further by climbing directly onto the electoral stage.
Screaming Lord Sutch, the original founder of the Monster Raving Loony Party, turned election counts into political theatre, combining true weapons-grade nonsense with policies that occasionally sounded more sensible than anything offered by the serious parties. Over the years, ideas once presented as Loony proposals, including all-day pub opening and the abolition of dog licences, later became reality. Politics kept nicking their material.
Then came Lord Buckethead, the intergalactic villain who stood against Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Theresa May. After a copyright dispute, the performer behind the 2017 incarnation created Count Binface, an independent space warrior with a silver receptacle for a head and a manifesto containing affordable croissants, cleaner rivers and the restoration of the 99p Flake to 99p.
This is where the joke becomes useful. Count Binface doesn’t need to win, nor does he run to win. His purpose is to force the supposedly serious candidates to stand beside him and submit themselves to comparison. For a few minutes at the count, no title, mythology or carefully cultivated grandeur changes the fact that everyone completed the same forms and now has to wait for the returning officer to read out the numbers, which is truly beautifully democratic if you think about it.
Even this, however, has become too much for the entirely normal online political mind.
There are currently people sitting behind their keyboards earnestly trying to “investigate” who funds Count Binface, as though the metallic insurgent from Sigma IX might be the front end of a shadowy international influence operation, most likely funded by a truly evil combination of Jeremy Corbyn and George Soros.
Lewis Goodall summed up the derangement perfectly:
“Lads, no one funds him - he’s a bin!”
Quite.
I’m not saying there aren’t legitimate questions about how candidates are funded - there are, and this by-election was partly spawned by exactly that issue.
That said, Count Binface is a satirical candidate played by a comedian. He wears a bin. His flagship policies concern pastries, ice creams and Adele. The conspiracy is currently visible on his head.
This is one of the more exhausting features of our completely broken online culture. Nothing is allowed just to be funny. Every joke must be an insidious op. Every meme must be funded by somebody nefarious. Every person attracting attention must be a puppet of dark forces moving just beyond the edge of the frame.
People are literally creating full-blown conspiracies as a weird mix of coping and defence mechanism. If the public is laughing at your political hero, it cannot possibly be because he’s made himself look an absolute arse by his own doing. Someone must have paid for the laughter. Someone must have engineered the mockery.
The man with the bin on his head must have handlers!
Sigh. In the words of Tannie Evita, ag siestog4.
Bringing this to a bit of a close, I must also add that Evita Bezuidenhout and Count Binface are not equivalent, and neither are the political circumstances in which they emerged. Uys was working under apartheid, facing draconian censorship and a violent authoritarian state. Count Binface is participating in a British by-election whose chief indignity may be an overabundance of journalists near the pier.
What they do have in common though is the mechanism that they share: power writes a flattering story about itself, satire interrupts it with a well-placed fart joke.
Evita entered apartheid’s grand halls and made its assumptions sound demented. Count Binface enters the electoral process and makes the supposedly serious people standing beside him look strangely less convincing than the man with the metal head.
My grandmother’s resemblance to Evita got me watching. The politics kept me there, and somewhere between Tannie Evita’s pearls and Count Binface’s helmet, I learnt one of the most durable truths about political power.
The people who demand to be taken most seriously are the ones we most urgently need to laugh at.
Tannie is the Afrikaans word for Auntie - though it’s so much more loaded than anyone who has been at the receiving end of a slipper will know.
It also explains my aggressive disdain for people who howl that their free speech has been stolen merely because they said something revolting and racist, suffered consequences, and somehow remained entirely unarrested.
Though with that said, my Kindergarten had a very concerned chat with my parents about the fact that I knew that the South African president was FW De Klerk at the age of five. There would ultimately be many more conversations like that as I was growing up.
Roughly translated to saying “bless” in the most condescending way you can possibly muster.
We definitely need more piss taking in the current political landscape. And who better to do this than Count Binface.
The likes of Farage and Trump who, as you say, demand to be taken seriously find the use of humour against them as a personal insult and they can’t bear it. We need to point and laugh much more. I believe that’s one of the reasons Trump hasn’t attended any of the World Cup games - he’s already heard the crowds chanting and it hurts his fragile ego.
Thank you, Bear 🐻