As Donald Trump attacks Venezuela, AI slowly takes over, and devastating wars rage on Ukraine and the Middle East, it’s bleak out there for 2026 – but we have a weapon that must be protected and championed at all costs: comedy.
Of course, comedy can’t broker world peace alone. It can’t help people who are torn from their families and homes in any seriously transformative capacity. But in a world where truth blurs and extremes boom, often preceding catastrophic events, comedy can give us much-needed perspective.
In 2025 we saw Donald Trump try to cancel Jimmy Kimmel, celebrating the erasure of his two-decade prime time talk show following his poke at the Republican’s MAGA agenda after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Broadcaster ABC’s decision to suspend his show indefinitely after pressure from the White House was a terrifying and potentially benchmark-setting move, but thankfully after a vocal outcry from the Hollywood hills and beyond, Kimmel was reinstated.
Despite order being restored in the entertainment world for now, this whole debarcle showed how vulnerable our vital comedy scene is to powerful political sway – and why we need it more than ever in 2026.
Good comedy tells the truth
While comedy can be sheer, joyous escapism – and that’s valuable in itself in grim times – it is not funny unless it speaks the truth. Even the most alt comedy says something about being human.
Among the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe’s most enjoyable acts (and I saw a lot) was a naked clown writhing around in goo and urinating on stage in Rosa Garland’s Primal Bog. She exposed, though waves of knowing laughter, the audience’s shared taboos and insecurities. Clown Rosa took us on a journey into our shared murky minds and taught us we’re just all lumps of desire, flesh and urine. It was captivatingly human, and hysterical.
On the other end of the spectrum, straight down the line satire can leave very little room for nonsensical counter-arguments, which we hear a lot of in political debate.
Jim Jeffries’ gun control segment of his 2015 show BARE – in which he slam-dunked the USA’s devastating rigidity on the matter – would have left Donald Trump stumped.
The reality of a good joke is that those laughing see the truth behind it. In a world where truth is spun by political figures and re-written by anti-democratic states, comedy is not just important – it’s vital.
Comedy engages and unites a disillusioned and divided world
Humour has the unique power to bridge a gap between widening political extremes in a chuckling acknowledgement of the truth: whether the comedy is left or right wing, it speaks a language that everyone can understand.
Oscar Wilde once said, ‘If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.’
In other words: comedy is a great mediator in the culture wars, which are only getting hotter, from angry social media mobs and rage-baiting to increasingly extreme political camps, with the rise of the far-right in the UK.
Comedy is an accessible gateway to talk about tricky or jargon-filled political concepts, inviting the politically disengaged – that’s 44% of UK adults, who in an ONS survey reported little or no confidence in their ability to participate in politics – back into the conversation in an entertaining way.
A national, reactive TV comedy scene is important – but arguably dwindling in the UK. While comedy panel shows like 8 Out of 10 Cats, Mock The Week and Have I Got News For You dominated in the early 2000s, only the latter remains on a primetime slot.
My take: Comedy should not be censored… but we need to keep punching up, not down
The protection of freedom of speech is a vital component for any functioning democracy. In the comedy world, this is no different.
Jimmy Kimmel should have never been silenced for criticising the government, no matter the quality of his joke. Punching up, however badly done, should never be a cancellable offence.
But every time a comedian decides to punch down, all they’re doing is diverting ears, eyes and their own often brilliant minds onto relatively powerless people and communities who don’t warrant scrutiny.
That’s a shameful waste of energy and time, when they could be changing the world for the better.
Meanwhile Mock The Week is being relaunched… on TLC, which will hardly cut through to the national conversation like it would on the BBC or Channel 4.
While these panel shows had their problems (seven white blokes telling jokes, for the most part), their form – as a national laugh at authority – was important.
Social media has stepped up in some way to plug this gap, with comedy skits and takes from individual comedians and commentators gaining huge traction online.
Just look at Liz Truss, who became the biggest butt of the joke in 2022, when a lettuce went viral for lasting longer in office than she did. It was undeniably silly, but hugely valuable as a moment of country-wide acknowledgement of the ridiculous state of politics in the UK at the time.
However, unless on a grand national scale, comedy voices can be lost online, with algorithms set up to validate – not challenge – existing views in users, creating unhelpful political comedy echo-chambers when we really need a huge national belly laugh.
That means our brightest political comedy voices must boom as loud as possible in 2026 if they want to be heard and understood.
Comedy is safe from AI because it’s too human
Scared AI is going to take over the world? Open Chat GPT and ask it to make three jokes that are actually good. The response:
- I started journaling for my mental health. Every entry just says: “Still thinking about that one weird thing I said in 2014.”
- My phone now tells me my screen time, sleep quality, heart rate and stress levels. It’s basically a very expensive way of saying, “Have you considered lying down and changing nothing?”
- I don’t trust anyone who says they “love admin”. That’s not a personality trait – that’s a cry for help written in Excel.
Tumbleweed.
Comedy is safe for now, folks. Thank goodness. But we need some sharp human voices if we’ve got any chance of finding reason in the madness that is likely to be 2026.
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