Private Eye flourishes in satire's new golden age of ridicule

“People say satire is dead. It’s not dead; it’s alive and living in the White House,” Robin Williams once joked.

The late comedian, who performed some withering impressions of George W Bush, has proved prescient.

If the comedic art struggled to adapt to the Teflon politics of Barack Obama and David Cameron, it has emerged triumphant in the face of Donald Trump, Brexit and the now ubiqitous threat of “fake news”.

The past year dealt severe blows to the established political order, and with politicians continuing to take aim at the mainstream media, the business of satire has boomed.

According to the latest ABC figures, the British satirical magazine Private Eye achieved its biggest ever print circulation in the second half of 2016, at a time when sketch shows in the US, such as Saturday Night Live (SNL), have also grown in popularity. Sales of Private Eye are up 9% year on year, and its Christmas issue was the biggest seller in the title’s 55-year-history, shifting 287,334 copies.

Ian Hislop, who has edited Private Eye for 3o years, believes people are more inclined to turn to satire during political upheaval, in a search for some form of release. “Rather than just being scared and saying ‘oh my God, Trump’s in’, you take it on and say ‘well, he is quite funny’, and there are also comic elements in the confusion around Brexit,” he said.

“The idea of a prime minister who wasn’t particularly keen on Brexit forcing through Brexit against an opposition who are quite keen on Brexit, you couldn’t make it up, and that’s great, that all helps. It is a golden time, but then Peter Cook, who used to own Private Eye, would say, well the really golden time of satire was Berlin in the 30s and it didn’t go so well after that.”

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The conversation around fake news, Hislop said, was nothing but a “delightful confusion”. “We were listed as fake news originally on one of those sites, and we had to point out that quite a lot of stuff in the magazine is deliberately not true. The queen as far as I know hasn’t signed the petition against Trump’s state visit this week, but we did put that on the cover.”

The lead-up to the Brexit vote, the referendum itself, and Trump’s election, made 2016 an “extraordinary year”, Hislop said. “People are so gloomy they want something to laugh at. They are also interested in a take that isn’t too obvious, the old inform and entertain ... At the moment, just about everything makes good satire.

“Two years ago I started putting on more pages of journalism in the back and more cartoons – there’s two large pages of cartoons now. I think just increasing content and spending money on the actual magazine itself has also helped. The cartoons look fabulous in print in a way they don’t anywhere else, and we’ve got a lot of new and younger cartoonists in.”

Having print-only content, Hislop added, was a significant factor in the circulation rise: “We’re saying you can’t have this, you have to buy it.”

In the US, SNL, along with weeknight talk shows hosted by Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, Seth Myers and Samantha Bee, has ridiculed the Trump administration. Whether it is because of or despite Trump’s ongoing criticism of the show and Alec Baldwin’s impersonations of him, the latest ratings for SNL are its highest in over 20 years, with total viewership up 22% compared with the same period last season.

Last Saturday’s episode, hosted by Kristen Stewart, had an impact around the world, thanks to Melissa McCarthy’s appearance as White House press secretary Sean Spicer. “SNL is completely revived, and so it should be, the sketch show with a really good Trump impression and a really funny Sean Spicer is great,” Hislop said. “It’s very good and exactly what you’d hope to happen, and it obviously hurts [Trump], which is going to make them delighted.”

Comedian Tiff Stevenson, who has appeared on UK shows Mock the Week, 8 Out of 10 Cats, and Russell Howard’s Good News, agrees it is a boom time for satire. “It’s more important than it’s ever been that we prick the powerful,” she said.

“Laughter is the bursting of their balloons. People are online all the time and they are keen to talk about events as they unfold. So when people read about Sean Spicer, they want to see how comedians interpret that, to feel a little less alone in the craziness they’re watching.”

Satire, Stevenson said, is in effect speaking truth to power. Her current solo show covers everything from Trump to immigration, and she has created a persona on Twitter called Bridget Trump, an imaginary mash-up of Bridget Jones and the US president. “Someone like Trump, who’s there because of narcissism and ego, can’t handle people mocking him or doing impressions of him, which means we need to keep doing it more … the weird thing with Trump is you almost run out of ways to satirise him because he’s self-satirising.

“It’s hard in the post-truth, fake news, alternative facts time to distinguish between what’s real and what’s comedy, but I do think we have to be able to laugh and make jokes.”

Her words echo South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who last week said they would refrain from “mocking everybody in government” in future episodes because “they’re already going out and doing the comedy”.

• The caption on the picture was amended on 13 February 2017. The original stated that Hislop was in his office at Private Eye. The image actually shows Hislop in a replica of the editor’s office at a V&A Museum exhibition.