Can Fascism Be Funny?

That's the question the Daily Beast asks after Nancy Mitford's long out-of-print novel, Wigs on the Green, is reissued.

From the piece...

The question is usually answered by reference to PG Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters where Bertie briefly faces down Sir Roderick Spode, head of the Black Shorts movement. That passage is generally referred to as satire. But it is not quite. Roderick Spode may be based on the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley (Spode’s policies include the dividing up of English counties for the cultivation of specific types of vegetable). But Spode is a character from pure planet Wodehouse—just as much as Aunt Agatha or Gussy Fink-Nottle.

And it is just as well. For the closer fascism gets to real satire, let alone real life, the closer you are to things which do not assist humour. The principle interest in Nancy Mitford’s finally republished novel is seeing this at work—watching where the satire works and where it falls more than flat.

Of course, for Mitford, Wigs on the Green was not simply a satire of the wretched British fascist movement: it was also family biography. By the time she came to write the novel, two of her five sisters had fallen for fascism (and for fascists) while another, Jessica, had fallen for Communism.

Her satirical range does not (and cannot) extend to encompass the horrors which her sisters were, by the time of writing, not just flirting with, but sleeping with.