This is nothing new, but it’s a situation that more people are familiar with: There’s an excellent comedy show about international geopolitics on the networks, made of Sesame Street-style puppets. Better yet, it does not exclude anyone, from the right, left, or center. It’s “Puppet System” (“Puppet System”, a not-so-subtle pun), produced by GZero Media, a company associated with consulting firm Eurasia.
When the program was created in 2018, a key question for political analyst Ian Bremer, founder of Eurasia, was why a major political and economic consulting firm would spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours to produce videos that were less than two minutes long, Bremer reported on his LinkedIn.
“As a political scientist, I realized that the most important thing I could do was to get people to voluntarily step out of their ideological comfort zone,” Bremer says in the post. “The easiest way to do this is (1) humor and (2) engaging youth.”
Since 2018, things have gotten worse. After 371 episodes, Bremmer and the man behind the series, journalist, political scientist and director Alex Clement, have made good on their promise. The “puppet system” is not for those who have a beloved politician. Or maybe it is, as long as you’re willing to laugh at your favorite bad guy, whether right-wing or left-wing.
Over the course of the eight seasons, there was Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Elon Musk, Donald Trump again, Kim Jong Un, and Mohammed bin Salman. Brazilians Jair Bolsonaro (PL) and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (PT) appear frequently, and the voice dubbing is excellent, including national characters. Clement, who lived in Brazil as a correspondent, is responsible for it as well as for the scripts, direction and artistic conception.
Being an American vehicle, Trump is naturally the most consistent figure. But there are funny sketches starring others, such as the podcast starring Putin and Xi called “Authoritarians.” The Russian autocrat, in the puppet version, is obsessed with American pop singers, and the Chinese leader never gives up his cigarette.
Recently, the “intimacy” between Bolsonaro and Trump became the target of the show, when a depressed Jair called his friend Donald, complaining that he had traded him coffee. This was a reference to Trump’s decision, after his meeting with Lula, to suspend tariffs on Brazilian products. “No coffee, it was coffee, meat, maga, acai… although I don’t even know what that is,” Donald replied.
The emergence of political comedy talk shows on American television over the past two decades, and their repercussions in Brazil and elsewhere, has marked a change in the way young people learn about recent events. But over time, and with the attacks on democracy promoted by Trump, the line of these programs changed from generally progressive to radically progressive, alienating a large portion of the public.
The “puppet system” does not suffer from this problem, as it makes everyone an object of ridicule. That’s why it’s so great, no politician should be an outcast. After all, one of the functions of humor is to provoke thinking, including thinking about our own thoughts.
Current link: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click on the blue letter F below.