Laughter as Resistance: The Rise of Political Satire in Croatia and Serbia

Abstract

With the recent rise of the Right Wing throughout the world, there has been a significant increase in production of countervailing political comedy and satire. In the USA, figures such as Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer have increasingly figured as objects of unbound satire, in shows from Stephen Colbert’s to Saturday Night Live. Political satire has been recently developing in the Balkans as well, especially in Croatia and Serbia, with the work of Croatia’s News Bar and Serbia’s 24 Minuta and Njuz.net. Contemporary media theory and political science have begun to stress the importance and influence of this type of resistance to authoritarianism from the point of view of participatory democracy and active citizenship. This article presents the modus operandi of Croatia’s and Serbia’s political satirists and examines their approaches to resistance by engaging with a set of representative texts and videos.