The Witty Seven: Late Socialist-Capitalist Satire in Hungary

摘要

This article adopts the comparative framework proposed by anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Alexander Yurchak (2010), who establish a “family resemblance” between the aesthetics and ideological contexts of contemporary Western political satire and a late socialist Russian and Eastern European mode of irony defined by overidentification with its satirized object or idea. I discuss the long-running Hungarian postsocialist satirical talk show Heti Hetes as a linchpin between late socialist and late capitalist forms of political satire. The program bears the characteristics and legacies of both and reveals unexpected similarities between public discourses otherwise radically separated into two different political systems during the Cold War. Heti Hetes provides the ground for a multilevel analysis, which accounts for the national specificities of a long legacy of political cabaret as well as the shared regional circumstances of late socialism. The broadest goal of the article is to draw up the global historical trajectory of contemporary Western television satire.View full textDownload full textCorrectionRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2012.638567