was, in my naivety, and perhaps nostalgia, rather looking forward to the reboot of Spitting Image. How welcome, in the middle of the darkness of a pandemic; how timely, considering that the cabinet is made up of self-parodying politicians; how urgent even, at a moment when so many in the press fail to hold their negligence to account. On delivery, it was worse than a disappointment. The puppets are a technical masterpiece, the caricatures are all competently drawn – Dominic Cummings is an alien in a gilet, Priti Patel an incoherent dominatrix, Michael Gove her boring punter who gets off on cruelty (and also does coke! Haha!). Beyond the superficial visual merits, it was satire by numbers. The jokes were excruciatingly obvious, seemingly written by committee rather than the result of a stroke of inspiration. In one sketch, Boris Johnson finds out that students are trapped in their universities because of Covid restrictions and, pretending he is a student himself, rushes over for some shenanigans only to find the students earnest and woke (I am bored even recounting the box-ticking anecdote). It felt safe, purposeless and entirely unsuited to the political moment. Satire is a tricky business. Mimicry by its nature sits too close to affection when you take a powerful figure and reduce them to an unthreatening cartoon. Comedy that goes no further than observation is flattery. Satire goes one step further: it draws out the absurdities at best, or darkness at worst, of those in power by contorting their images into grotesque caricatures. In moments of political turmoil, satire’s role is to communicate to the public, via seemingly innocuous comedy, that something is seriously wrong with the system, and not just the characters that inhabit it. In Egypt, following the Arab spring, the satirist Bassem Youssef lampooned figures in the public eye, but was pulled off the air when he turned his attention to those responsible for the country’s dysfunction – the Egyptian military. By lampooning those in power, we don’t just see the ugliness beyond their quirks, sometimes, we glimpse that ugliness reflected in ourselves. And so we squirm with complicity, but also laugh with a sense of catharsis, at the revelation of the thing that we know about ourselves, but dare not utter. There is jeopardy in it. The laughter comes not from amusement, but from discomfort. Much of my knowledge of the UK’s social fabric comes from this sort of comedy. Bewildered and unable to make a dent in my ignorance of the UK when I arrived as a student from the Middle East, I found that irreverent comedy deconstructed the complex class and power stratas in the UK, enabling me to make sense of it all. Whether it was the excruciating class anxiety of Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances forever failing to be read as middle class, the racial role reversals of Goodness Gracious Me, or the profane ridiculing of Catholicism by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, I came to understand the topography of the country and to see my own place in relief. It would not be an exaggeration to say my diet of iconoclastic classic British comedy informed my politics. Today, we have an odd inversion on our hands – the powerful receive a light ribbing, but the bile seems to be reserved for those on the margins. Some comedians seem to have confused the thrill of the taboo with a childish impulse to offend, and mistaken bullying for bravery. “Just because you’re offended, doesn’t mean you’re right,” is one of Ricky Gervais’s most popular quotes. This apparent elevation of lazy comedy into the so-called anti-establishment movement has given us “woke”-slayers Jonathan Pie and Titania McGrath, and Gervais’s own popular set comparing gender transition to identifying as a chimp. This sort of comedy is in keeping with the current trend of rounding on soft targets and pretending that they are the most influential forces in society. It feels cheap and majoritarian, and seems to have benefited from the cynical leveraging of free speech to prop up an entire complex of normalised prejudice against minorities in the press and politics. The result is a toothless performance from a jester that, as Chris Morris describes it, “placates the court”. This authoritarian establishment is unable to counter dissent, and claims that comedy in the UK discriminates against the right and that the BBC is biased towards the left and “must be brought into line”. We are in our second decade of Tory rule in a country gripped with anti-left sentiment, and the Gervaises of the world are not being cancelled any time soon. Perhaps the task is simply too big. Just as Donald Trump’s excesses are often beyond satire, it is impossible to reveal anything about a British political ruling class that is so naked in its disdain and flagrant in its motives. Perhaps there are simply so many people who have died – from austerity, and from a disastrously mismanaged pandemic – and so many more lives at stake, that some comedians feel it’s useless ridiculing those in charge. Maybe the world of entertainment has become more exclusive and we have lost the outsiders, the working class, the radicals and the immigrants for whom political comedy was about reflecting their life, not formula. The energy is elsewhere. For political comedy that isn’t created by those who are the spitting image of its targets, head to TikTok. Young people post righteous text about today’s injustices alongside inane pop songs – what could be a more appropriate reflection of the times we live in? • Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist