Michael Thomas was full of glee. The 71-year-old builder had received an infuriating enforcement notice from the local council, telling him to stop converting an old pizza shop. But now he had his revenge - a gargoyle (or more accurately, a grotesqueA figure or face carved out of stone and fixed to the roof or walls of a building. They are similar to gargoyles, but gargoyles include a spout for water to drain through. ) of the council's leader, Stewart Palmen, sculpted by an artist friend and placed on his roof. It was the talk of the town!

Palmen put a brave face on the situation. "I think it's a good likeness of how I looked three years ago when I had a big bushy beard," he said. "I am a bit disturbed though, because I usually wear a fedora hat and that is missing."

Earlier this year Spain's ex-king Juan Carlos was the subject of a satirical statue in Madrid. In a comment on his love of hunting wild animals, sculptor Nicolas Miranda showed him pointing a rifle - and placed the sculpture next to a statue of the city's emblem, a bear.

In 2020, three living statues satirising Donald Trump appeared in Washington. One, referring to his insistence on children going to school in spite of the pandemic, showed him waving a golf club at a pupil.

Few public figures are good at taking a joke. But that has not has stopped artists and writers making fun of them across the centuries, often to devastating effect - and sometimes with dangerous consequences.

The Roman poet JuvenalDecimus Junius Juvenalis was a Roman satirical poet. became famous for his satires in the 1st Century. But he was sent into exile after insulting an actor who was popular with the emperor.  

Britain has a rich tradition of satire, including works such as John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Among the other classics of the genre are Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, targeting political corruption in Russia, and the Czech novelist Franz KafkaA 20th-Century novelist and short story writer, known for works including The Metamorphosis. 's chilling portrait of bureaucracy, The Trial.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Srdja Popovic and Mladen Joksic claim that satire is more important now than ever before: "Today's non-violent activists are inciting a global shift in protest tactics away from anger, resentment, and rage towards a new, more incisive form of activism rooted in fun: 'Laughtivism.'"

Examples include protesters during the Arab SpringA series of mass protests across the Arab World against dictatorships that had stood for decades. In Tunisia, the protesters succeeded in creating a democratic government, but many other countries collapsed into civil war or experienced new dictatorships. portraying Egypt's president Mohammed MorsiThe president of Egypt from 2012 to 2013, who was removed in a coup. as Super Mario. In Russia, since people could not demonstrate against President Putin without being arrested, they put out soft toys instead.

Satire is effective, say Popovic and Joksic, because it is cool and makes people want to join in with the fun. It also helps to "corrode the very mortar that keeps most dictators in place: fear".

In The Nation, Assa Samake-Roman agrees: "It has the power to unite. It forms a shared language, a common ground where we can all laugh at the absurdity and lament the challenges." 

But in an article for the Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown sounds a warning: "Laughing at politicians and deriding the political system may be creating apathyLack of interest or enthusiasm. , rage, disengagement and, worst of all, profound pessimism. Public pessimism is lethal in a working democracy."

Yes: Funny things tend to stick in people's minds more than serious ones. And it is very hard for someone who is satirised to hit back - if they get angry they only look more ridiculous.

No: It may be entertaining, but it does not achieve much, since it only highlights people's faults. Coming up with suggestions for how things could be done better is much more constructive.

Or... We live in such a ridiculous age that it is hard to satirise anything. No writer could invent a more ridiculous figure than Donald Trump so there is no point in even trying.