Or how about Theresa May, the short-lived prime minister who was quickly forced out of office after failing to take the country out of the European Union: during a trip to Africa, she performed a dance that one commentator likened to that of a “baby robot giraffe”.
And then there’s Liz Truss: Her collapse as prime minister was so dramatic that a British tabloid livestreamed a clump of lettuce asking which would last longer. The vegetable (i.e. the lettuce) won.
That’s not just an impression: British politics is more entertaining than politics in other countries, says Steve Gimbel, a philosophy professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and author of “That’s Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy.”
“In a way it goes back to the Roman concept of satire,” he said, where poets like Juvenal and Horace used caricatures to humiliate politicians and make them change their ways. “In the case of English politics, they are satirizing themselves.”
Never mind the tradition of Prime Minister’s Questions, where political leaders respond with scripted barbs and their party MPs erupt in forced laughter, some of Britain’s funniest moments come when you least expect them.
Unlike in the United States, where Ivy League politicians such as Bill Clinton, Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis try to portray themselves as men of the people, many British politicians, particularly those in Sunak’s Conservative Party, pretend to an aristocratic sophistication that is easily, and often comically, spotted.
