Free speech is a good thing: ask Iranians who’ve been pounding at Trump with jokes and memes on X. It won’t win them the war, but it’s certainly winning them fans worldwide. How ironic! A regime that won’t let its people speak up – reportedly they killed over 30,000 protesters in Jan – is riding freedoms first made sacrosanct in world’s oldest democracy, aka, US of A. One just hopes Iranian diplomats’ memeing and joking aren’t happening at gunpoint.

No, seriously, autocracy and humour are strange bedfellows. In Stalin’s time, Soviet comedy aimed to “kill with laughter”, enemies, and “correct with laughter”, loyalists. Although what it begot was Stalinist jokes, like the one about a peasant saving Stalin from drowning, and then pleading: “Don’t tell anyone I saved you.” Regardless of what it did for the regime, humour made life liveable for hoi polloi . As Gorbachev famously said, “The jokes always saved us.” And no doubt, whether in Russia, China, N Korea, or Iran, there are jokes aplenty about rulers.

But what about “real” democracies? Do wit and humour have a place in their lexicon? Absolutely. The chief flaw in govt messaging everywhere is that it’s too dry, like a civics chapter in school. The vast majority gloss over it, making the message, effectively, undemocratic. But it needn’t be so. During WW2, US got Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss, to write a light-hearted pamphlet on malaria prevention for troops. Across the pond, Lord Woolton, Britain’s food minister, deployed wit even more effectively. His advice, “One for you, one for me, and none for the pot,” reportedly saved Britain 50 shiploads of tea every year. He was even more successful with his rhyme on potatoes: “Those who have the will to win/Cook potatoes in their skin/Knowing that the sight of peelings/Deeply hurts Lord Woolton’s feelings.”

We need some LPG and petrol/diesel rhymes ourselves.

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