Maybe it’s just a publicity stunt to reawaken the Sanremo Festival oxidized by years of autotune, fake melodic and maranza music: enlist the comedian Andrea Pucci as co-host, make social media scream at him, push him to give up and then make him give up on giving up. So as to earn that X percent more listeners: we’ll find out soon. But the intervention of the entire army of the left and of the Democratic Party secretary Elly Schlein, against Pucci, and of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in favor, transform the matter into a comically serious, but not serious, issue. How can there be the right to satirize politics, the world, ourselves in a society that wants to be free. This is why we have opened a survey among readers: click below (web only).

Andrea Pucci excluded from Sanremo: what do you think? Vote and comment on our poll

In fact, the controversy shows us that breaking street lamps, to put it in Pucci’s words, would be tele-Schlein: so attentive to the supremacy of woke culture that, among the many potential comedies, it has even reduced the concept of free love (of anyone with anyone) to an unpronounceable similar genetic sequence: LGBTQIA+. Why then should we deny pleasure to those who want to laugh about it? Why shouldn’t we kid ourselves, when the new etiquette forces public inclusive language to the point of hypocrisy? “Welcome and welcome”, “workers and workers”, “architects and architects”, as if I were here claiming my right to indicate journalist as my profession on my identity card. I personally agree on the need for inclusive language today. But if someone can make us laugh, why not laugh at us?

This is how social media killed irony: long live satire

I don’t like the caricature of Andrea Pucci that he attributes to his wife and family in his monologues, in times in which wives, girlfriends and even 17-year-old girls are murdered daily. But he’s a comedian. I would be crazy if I associated Pucci with these violent tendencies. With his paradoxes, his theatrical moments, he does very well what the most popular comedians have stopped doing: making us reflect (even through a healthy laugh) on the ridiculous implications – precisely – of our life and our dominant culture. Whether right-wing or left-wing or, as for the majority of people, no affiliation at all.

How sad to have to remember this, in this social era that has killed irony and its beneficial effects. If Pucci doesn’t have to participate in Sanremo, think what a TV masterpiece like Renzo Arbore’s “Quelli della notte” would have been, under Elly Schlein’s government, a DIY program that kept us up late in 1985. Andy Luotto played the Arab Harmand. Maurizio Ferrini the communist from Romagna. Nino Frassica was Brother Antonio da Scasazza. Simona Marchini the switchboard operator. So a Muslim, a loser communist, a rude friar and a sour representation of the role of women who, in companies, would not go beyond the switchboards. But it was satire. And in fact only Muslim fundamentalists and Bettino Craxi’s touchy socialists protested.

When Erri De Luca invited people to sabotage the Tav

Precisely because in the past he has offended Elly Schlein (he dislikes her, yes, as does half of the Democratic Party), the secretary of the Democratic Party and his minions should not censor Andrea Pucci. It’s easy to be democratic with the lackeys of friendly laughter. But laughter does not belong to power: it is free. Ten years ago the poet, also a leftist, Erri De Luca, was acquitted in a trial for incitement to commit a crime. He said publicly, in a period of violent street clashes around the construction sites for the Italy-France high speed line, that the “TAV must be sabotaged”. Sabotaged, not boycotted, contested: sabotaged. The entire Italian left sided with him despite the fact that, from his role as a famous writer, he had invited thousands of young people to commit serious crimes. Which Pucci didn’t do. De Luca is a poet, the defenders said at the time, and poets are not put on trial. Just like comedians, or not?

I’m not a fan of Sanremo. But if Andrea Pucci, due to this sinister censorship he has suffered, does not participate, I know what I will do one of those evenings: I will go and look for his shows on YouTube. Political censorship and – even worse – popular censorship, of whatever color it may be, must be circumvented, ignored, opposed: in this case, just don’t turn on the TV.

If you want, whatever your opinion, vote in the poll below (web only).

Andrea Pucci excluded from Sanremo: what do you think? Vote and comment on our poll