by Francessca Benelli
Italian ex Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been accused of suffering a sense-of-humour failure after his media group sued a comedian for spreading ‘lies and insinuations’.
Today, instead of broadcasting her stand-up political satire act on state television as planned, Italian comedian Sabina Guzzanti is preparing to decamp to a concert hall in Rome, disappointing the two million viewers who tuned into the first edition of her show last week.
Since Berlusconi’s media group Mediaset took legal action against the comedian, the state television company RAI has shelved the show temporarily, citing legal reasons.In the first instalment of the show, called RaiOt (pronounced ‘riot’) – Weapons of Mass Distraction, Guzzanti tore into almost every figure in Italian public life, including the Prime Minister and the state television director. She also touched upon issues such as the public display of crucifixes and international support for Israel.
‘Nowadays comedians have to say serious things… if you have a Prime Minister who tells jokes, what else can you do?,’ she asked, dressed up as Uma Thurman, one of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad in the bloody vengeful film Kill Bill.
‘Italy ranks 53rd in a worldwide index of media freedom, after Benin, Ghana and Bolivia,’ she said, referring to a list drawn up in 2002 by the campaign group Reporters Without Borders.
‘Did you hear anything about that in the news? No. But then again, if you had we would not rank 53rd, would we?’She also impersonated the Prime Minister media tycoon addressing television networks, sitting at a massive desk against a backdrop of huge gold-coloured curtains.
One feature of the show – a graphic which showed Mediaset winning hands-down in the advertising war with the rest of the country’s media – raised the wrath of Berlusconi’s billionaire media group, which saw shares drop on the stock exchange after the show.
‘The idea is to talk through an issue,’ Guzzanti explains. ‘Saying things that you don’t hear on TV we are taking on the job of filling that gap.’
A Mediaset statement accused the comedian of disseminating ‘lies and extremely serious insinuations’, which ‘harmed the honour of a company registered on the stock exchange’. The company complained that the programme was particularly offensive, since it was broadcasted on state television, a direct competitor of Mediaset.
RAI said that it was forced to suspend the show because of the huge legal costs – potentially running into millions of euros – that it could incur into. The remaining five shows are still in the making but will not be broadcasted, for now.
As Guzzanti prepares to improvise in Rome today, she said she had received thousands of emails expressing solidarity. More than 100 opposition MPs have signed a petition calling on RAI to run the show as scheduled. ‘I am determined to see this through,’ Guzzanti told journalists. ‘It is a serious precedent for freedom of expression. It’s like asking a journalist to write today’s newspaper for publication in three months’ time.
Political satire is increasingly becoming a site of contestation. In mid-February 2014, for example, Maurizio Crozza – known for satirical impersonations of politicians – started his performance with an unflattering imitation of a Silvio Berlusconi trying to buy the Italians’ votes. At the end people shouted that he should leave the stage, and that there should be no politics that night, making it apparently impossible for the comedian to continue. Although Crozza seemed affected and offended by the attack, and nearly walked off stage, necessitating the intervention of host Fabio Fazio, it is likely that the entire scene was set up so as to boost audience ratings. Nevertheless, it shows how important satire has become in debates about politics, and in society as a whole.
Satire mostly surfs the web, though. One comedian in particular has drawn advantages from this, creating his own, grassroots political movement which communicates and organizes itself primarily on the web, completely knocking over traditional politics.
His name is Beppe Grillo. After a career in commercial television and (initially) without any apparent political conviction, in the early 2000s Grillo began traveling across Italy, performing in theaters and out on the streets where he unloaded his anger over ecological issues, warfare and Berlusconi. In 2005, he created the “5 star Movement”, the Beppegrillo.it blog. In 2007 and 2008 he organized the so-called V-day (where the ‘V’ stands for ‘vaffanculo’, the Italian F-word), an unofficial protest day against traditional politics – from left to right – that took place across Italy.
Yet, there is a big downside to the “5 star Movement,” and to Grillo’s character. His blog, for example, is not really a blog, as Grillo himself admitted: it is mostly a site of communication and propaganda, with no interaction between Grillo and his followers. Nor did the two highly successful V-days originate “from below.” Similarly, Grillo’s political rallies – which are often filmed and put online –are more a one-man show, which, again, do not promote interaction but simply reproduce the stand-up comedian format of television. Accordingly, people who attend these meetings are spectators rather than demonstrators. His activities, therefore, represent no more than a shift from television to new media.
Things apparently change, but are essentially the same. Grillo’s success also shows how traditional politics are being affected ever more by the power of satire and democracy via the web. In a way, this is not very surprising, as Italy has been run for nearly 20 years by a man many consider a clown, and who has indeed built much of his popularity on the Italians’ (bad) sense of humor.
English