IS ARMANDO IANNUCCI a national treasure? He should be. But for entertainment — not political satire.

In a West End stage adaptation of Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley’s Dr Strangelove, an insane US commander orders a nuclear strike on Russia. Both sides flounder to prevent apocalypse.

The original film was Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, skewering Cold War archetypes from subservient RAF pilot to drunk Russian premier. Iannucci’s adaptation, also set in the ‘60s, has the Russian dictator modelled on Vladimir Putin, labelled in a punchline as “cold-blooded, neurotic — and short!” 

It strikes me that both Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky are the same height – 5’7. Indeed, Starmer, Sunak, Macron, Kim Jong Un, and Scholz are all within an inch of them. So, if you are going to do a (non-PC) joke about short people becoming insecure world leaders, why not commit to the bit? 

Isn’t it funny that we’re being dragged into Armageddon by the seven f—ing dwarfs — and we’re all too polite to mention it? 

Iannucci calls his play “horrendously relevant” and that it “feeds off” the “Orbans, Musks and Zuckerbergs.” But the Hungarian president and the head of X advocate negotiations with Russia. Zuckerberg stays schtum.

So, what is Armando Iannucci, CBE – Britain’s leading satirist – actually saying? I think he’s just name-dropping scary-sounding names to sell a politically safe play.

Similarly, in The Thick of It, Iannucci’s portrayal of spin was sharp, but reinforced a comfortable worldview – politicians are benign idiots. In In the Loop, the film’s critique of the Iraq War assumed the cause of the WMD debacle was buffoons rather than vested interests and ideologues.

Iannucci has always been brilliant at exposing absurdity, as in the hilarious The Death of Stalin, but it feels like the absurdity is an end in itself, rather than a means to interrogate power. Releasing a watered-down play about nuclear war precisely when “the stretched twig of peace is at melting point” (as The Day Today memorably put it), is perverse. 

Iannucci: “Our tale of nuclear annihilation seemed rather pertinent, but more as a dramatic metaphor for the various collapses of faith in political discourse [climate disaster, conspiracy theories, and Trump’s ‘lie’]...”

Eh? Isn’t nuclear annihilation “pertinent” enough right now, without using it as a metaphor for, what...? The perils of Instagram?

So, could Dr Strangelove have been set contemporaneously? “The Russians are stupid but they’re clever with it,” insists the revamped General Ripper. “They think that they’re smarter than us but they’re not but they look like they are — that’s how you spot them!” Ironic lines like these surely speak to the now. The media asks us to believe, for instance, that Putin is a ruthless threat to the “rules-based international order” while also a cowardly paper tiger. Similarly, when General Buck Turgidson says we must “pre-taliate,” it could be an embryonic point about Western strategy to “de-escalate through escalation.”

But Iannucci’s real-world view directly echoes the Western establishment. “It’s not just about Ukraine versus Russia,” he says. “It’s about freedom and democracy against authoritarianism and military rule... [autocracies mustn’t] get away with it.” Jeez. Seen the latest US democracy rating, military budget, or arms trade market share? 

Zelensky, Iannucci thinks, is a “flag-bearer of truth.” The same Zelensky who in 2022 falsely claimed, then doubled down, that Russia had bombed Poland in a “calculated” escalation? 

There’s surely a satire in WWIII but not while Iannucci lays all blame with our official enemy. 

I see no reference in any “satirical” work to laughable claims by the Wall Street Journal that the Nord Stream gas pipeline was destroyed by half-a-dozen drunken vigilantes (no way it could have been the CIA!) 

Is anyone still buying the supposed election-altering flood of Russian “disinformation” (ie a few cack-handed memes our own governments use as pretexts to shut down free speech)? And could there be anything more Strangelovian than the US air-dropping aid packages into Gaza, which crush their recipients to death? 

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, into ze mines ve go…

“Satire is a lesson, parody is a game,” said novelist Vladimir Nabakov — it requires a deeper moral and social critique. Where is this, exactly, on our screens and stages? 

In 2019, Iannucci’s savage colleague Chris Morris was promoting The Day Shall Come — a satire about the FBI’s infiltration of terror cells - when he commented: “The problem is… you do a nice dissection of the way things are in the orthodox elite and lo and behold you get slapped on the back by the orthodox elite who say ‘Jolly good! Can you do us another one?’”

Was this Morris’s gentle rebuke? Because it’s exactly what Iannucci has done — and what they have done for Iannucci.

Dr. Matthew Alford is a writer and performer. His work is available through https://drmattalford.substack.com