Satire: More Than Humor
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A couple months ago the Kettering Foundation (“all people belong and have the right to engage in and shape a democracy that serves them”) published an essay by Kenyan cartoonist Patrick Gathara (and journalist and editor): Why Words Matter.
For about seven years I have run a satirical series. In these articles, I write about events in the West but use language that is typically reserved for the so-called Third World. There is, I admit, some schadenfreude in calling the United States a “troubled, oil-rich, ethnically divided, nuclear-armed, banana-exporting republic.” Every word is accurate, yet such descriptions are almost never applied when writing about the country. However, no article on Venezuela or Iran fails to mention oil or its troubles. What interests me about this exercise is not the joke. It is why the joke works.
This month the Kettering organization invited Patrick Gathara to its Washington, D.C. headquarters to give a keynote address: “‘Stop Them Damn Pictures’: Why Satire Is Crucial to Democracy.”
The first three minutes of Gathara’s 19 minute address is a brutal, stinging description of the country he is visiting to deliver his speech – it is an honest apprisal of the current United States, both sad and funny.
During his keynote remarks titled, “‘Stop Them Damn Pictures’: Why Satire Is Crucial to Democracy,” Kettering Foundation Global Fellow Patrick Gathara opened by reading an article in a satirical alter ego. For about the past seven years, he has taken on the persona of a foreign correspondent and uses this perspective to critique what he sees happening in democracy around the world by using humor. Gathara described his travel to Washington, DC, using language that recalls his recent Resilience & Resistance blog post on the significance of word choice.
The Kettering Foundation earlier presented “The State of Democracy 2026, in Cartoons,” a gallery of 19 cartoons from cartoonists around the world.
In collaboration with Patrick Gathara, Tjeerd Royaards (cartoonist and editor-in-chief at Cartoon Movement), and Terry Anderson (executive director at Cartoonists Rights), we asked renowned cartoonists from 19 different countries to reflect on the state of democracy around the globe in 2026. The Charles F. Kettering Foundation is proud to share this collection.
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