EP56. SpoOoky Halloween Special: Comedy, Cannibalism & the Horror of Satire

Smith & Waugh Talk About Satire

Jo and Adam dish up a meaty treat for you to get your teeth into this spoOoky season, with a bumper Halloween investigation into satire's long-standing fascination with cannibalism. From Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal of 1729 (that the best way to solve the Irish famine would be for absent English landlords to eat the babies of their beleaguered tenants), to Chelsea G Summers' 2020 novel, A Certain Hunger, which features a nymphomaniac cannibal food critic, through to Gregg Wallace's even more recent documentary, Miracle Meat, which proposes solving the cost of living crisis by harvesting cheap meat from human stem cells, cannibal satire is a trope with a rich and tasty history. Adam and Jo also serve up some meditations on the close kinship between horror and comedy more generally, and take a look at the political horror of Channel 4's Partygate docudrama.