Some words have been robbed of all meaning. They've been used, abused, mangled, contorted,

weaponised and stripped of context. If we can't agree on what words mean, then we can't agree on much.

This is origin story. In each episode, we take a key term from the political or cultural discourse

and tell the story of where it came from, what happened to it, and what it means today.

By exploring the history of the ideas, we'll try to get a clearer understanding of where we are now.

My name's Dorian Linsky, author of 33 Revolutions per Minute, and the Ministry of Truth.

And my name is Ian Dant. I'm a columnist with the Iron newspaper and I'm the author of How to Be a Liberal.

So, Ian, this week we are ostensibly talking about satire.

But I think we're also talking about the relationship between comedy and politics in general.

I think maybe it's a little bit more like, obviously, with a superhero episode,

we're talking about sort of politics and comic books.

It's not cheap. We're talking about sort of politics and comic books. This should be a new tradition for us.

Every season we have one cheat episode.

People don't, I mean, I guess, I mean, the definition of satire is really contested,

but not like on Twitter.

People aren't kind of having massive rouse about, you're not a real satirist. But we do have a lot of arguments

about the role of politics and comedy and, you know, comedians who become political

YouTubers and people who get into trouble over jokes and, you know, and then get cancelled

and so on and so forth. So we're going to talk about some of that, but we're going to hinge it around satire,

which turns out to be, right, like a really, I didn't expect this.

No.

I mean, I'm a little tired of starting the research these things and looking at all these

...