Satire’s Funny Like That

In the March/April issue of Film Comment, Lauren Kaminsky wrote about Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin: "a delirious historical mash-up that compiles sometimes independently factual details in utterly counterfactual ways. It can therefore convey nothing about causation and is largely apolitical, but it is a spot-on satire of socialist realism and the authoritarian political culture of high Stalinism.” In our digital age, the prominence of news satire and satirical news has helped make politics more immediate—Iannucci being a prime mover through work like In the Loop and Veep—but the intermingling of humor and facts brings its own complications. FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca spoke with Kaminsky about the Russian humor this film exerts within the context of Anglo-American satire of today’s political events.