Here in England it’s pantomime season, that high-camp remnant of medieval festivity, where once a year the world is turned upside down. Liberty trumps propriety: men get to play women, women get to play men, audiences mess with the actors, actors mess with the play, and misrule briefly blows a raspberry at authority.
Enter Armando Iannucci, the swami of contemporary British satire, whose lampoon Pandemonium turns pantomime’s holiday humor into a gleeful pimp-slapping of the Tory Cabinet. (Especially its former buffoon-in-chief, Boris Johnson.) In Iannucci’s rambunctious cartoon, which began as a mock epic poem during the unbearable holiday of the coronavirus, the motley crew who gave us the mess of Brexit and the mayhem of lockdown are conjured up as a confederacy of infighting dunces suffering mightily under delusions of adequacy.
