Brian Smedley: This week I got in trouble for “satire”

But the real message was apparently that the Nazis were bad.

And I say “were” ironically, because of course they have not disappeared, and we must not allow them to return out of ignorance.

This week I got in trouble for “satire.” And the problem with satire is that not everyone understands it these days. And that's why it doesn't always work.

There was a famous film by socialist comedy legend Charlie Chaplin: “The Great Dictator” (1940).

In the role of Adenoid Hynkel, Chaplin parodies Hitler in a hilariously satirical way, forever undermining the popularity of the little under-nose mustache that both loved so much.

“Probably the worst thing he ever did,” said Somerset comedian Richard Herring satirically.

Good movie… until the last scene where he gives a heartbreaking speech on camera about how much everyone should love one another.

Yet within five years Germany had lost the war, and another anti-fascist satirist, Groucho Marx, visited Berlin and literally danced on Hitler's grave.

Peter Cook, perhaps the father of modern British satire, also once said that we should pay tribute to “all those German political satirists of the Berlin cabaret circuit who did so much to stop fascism in the 1930s”. They didn't, was his point.

Jewish filmmaker and comedy writer Mel Brooks made what is probably the funniest anti-Nazi film of all time: “The Producers” (1967).

The premise was to make the most horrific, offensive show ever made so that the producers would make more money than they needed and thus end up pocketing a fortune on the first night.

The twist in the plot is that the result – a group of dancing Nazis in uniform singing “Springtime for Hitler and Germany” – became a satire and people loved it. Could “The Producers” still be made today?

The spirit of satire is best conveyed by the modern, ironic comedian Stewart Lee, who constantly breaks out of character and tells the audience, “I don't mean that. What I mean is the opposite of what I'm saying. I say that for ironic, comic effect.”

He may not have the biggest audience, but he did have a TV show. Once.

And if we look at the state of the far right in modern Britain, people should listen to his brilliant routine on historical migration, be it the Poles “coming here and putting things right”, the Huguenots (French Protestants fleeing persecution – odd that Farage's ancestors came here this way), or even the first fish to develop legs and crawl out of the sea, only to be told to “go back where they came from”.

So I think satire is very valuable and a powerful force for political change…or is it?