A love letter to boredom

The experience of attending my very first pantomime was familiar enough. A packed house, the obligatory knowing looks exchanged between performers and audience when the ‘political’ section arrived. Everyone understood their role. Everyone laughed at the right moments. Nobody felt even mildly unsettled. And that, precisely, was the problem.

Out came the briefcase stuffed with fake money. In came the crane joke, obediently wheeled on like an old prop that smells faintly of mothballs. Someone delivered a line about ‘naqraw ktieb meta jinqata’ d-dawl’, and the audience responded on cue, clapping blandly, as they have done for the past two years when the joke was rolled out.

The laughter was dutiful, managerial, safe. Nobody risked anything, not the performers, not the audience, and certainly not the people being mocked, except perhaps Tommy Cash’s Espresso Macchiato, endlessly reheated across Malta’s pantomimes.

This was not incompetence. The actors were good, the timing professional, the script efficient. Predictably, the blame is often shifted onto the satirists themselves. We are told Maltese comedians lack courage or imagination. This is nonsense. Satire does not die from cowardice alone. It dies when there is nothing left worth biting into. You cannot distort what is already hollow, and Maltese politics has perfected the art of hollowness.

There was a time when this was not so. Dom Mintoff could be mocked because he was volcanic. Eddie Fenech Adami could be parodied because his solemnity bordered on the ecclesiastical. These men believed things, sometimes the wrong things, and they believed them loudly.

Satire thrives on that kind of certainty. It feeds on personalities that spill over their edges. Today we are left with silhouettes that are carefully lit, meticulously managed by PR departments of every party, and utterly empty. So, we laugh at the prime minister’s jaw, because there is little else to laugh at. We laugh that the Opposition leader is Gozitan, as though geography were a substitute for character.

Our politicians now speak in soundbites and specialise in the appearance of sincerity without any of its risks. Satire, faced with this, has nothing to hold on to.

This year’s pantomime fixation on Ricky Caruana made that painfully clear. Flamboyance, theatricality, attention-seeking; supposedly perfect targets. And yet the jokes hovered around the spectacle without ever landing on anything of consequence. Ego, when detached from thought or belief, produces no tension. The audience laughs, but with the vague discomfort of people who sense they are watching mockery rather than critique.

Underneath this failure lies something more troubling—a collective refusal to take public life seriously enough to make it worth mocking. Irony thrives in societies that can still feel embarrassment and instinctively recognise folly when confronted with it. Our culture has grown comfortable with mediocrity. We no longer gasp at the absurd; we scroll past it. If every scandal leads nowhere and every lie is met with indifference, what exactly is left for the satirist to expose?

So yes, Malta is full of performers, but devoid of protagonists. The old satirists had the luxury of figures who demanded ridicule. Mocking them was a moral pleasure because it restored proportion. Now, when everyone insists on seeming ordinary, on blending in, on avoiding the slightest display of conviction, satire has no foothold. You cannot lampoon the featureless. You can only mirror it, and mirrors become boring very quickly.

Social media plays its part in this. Every post is tone-policed into meaninglessness. But fear is only part of the story. More insidious is complacency. We have trained ourselves to accept triviality as the natural state of public life. We no longer demand intellect from broadcasters, depth from leaders or boldness from satirists. The result is a culture of inoffensive mimicry in which no one dares to be interesting, even as a joke.

It is tempting to believe this dullness is preferable to the excesses of the past. But dullness has its own pathology. As Hannah Arendt warned, the most dangerous thing in public life is not fanaticism but emptiness—the dull competence of people who do wrong because they no longer think.

Our national disease is not corruption alone, but boredom; the flattening of public life until nothing protrudes enough to offend or inspire. The failure is not one of humour but of spirit. Until our politics rediscovers belief, and the courage to risk being ridiculous, satire will remain what it has become—a sterile ritual performed out of habit.

Monty Python could afford to whistle Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life because it was sung from the gallows. And nothing, in the end, is harder to laugh at than that; the joke, as usual, is on us.