In his heyday George S Kaufman was noted for being one of Broadway’s most expert writers of comedy and a sardonic mainstay of the group of New York wits that comprised the Algonquin Round Table. As such, he knew a thing or two about the dangers of what could best be described as the lengthy lampoon, once tartly noting after a play of his flopped out of town: “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.”
Kaufman was right on the money. The extended send-up of a hierarchical system or a personage is riddled with tonal problems and narrative traps. Do you deride a totalitarian brute by imitating him comically, as Chaplin did so brilliantly in his Hitler send-up, The Great Dictator? Do you enter the realm of dark metaphor – like Orwell’s vision of Stalinism in Animal Farm? Or do you attempt to recontextualise, in the form of absurdist fable, the fatuousness and repellence of a contemporary monster?
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