Catch Navalny on YouTube — before Putin tries to kill him again

Dr Evil : Scott, I want you to meet daddy’s nemesis, Austin Powers
Scott : What, are you feeding him? Why don’t you just kill him?
Dr Evil : No Scott, I have a better idea. I’m going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

If you are finding the TV schedules for this dreadful Christmas a bit short of fresh comedy and satire, I have the best solution for you. Simply subscribe to Alexei Navalny’s YouTube channel, if you haven’t already. 

I find the solemn descriptions in the British and foreign press of the Russian opposition firebrand’s exploits and his astonishing brush with death at the hands of the FSB rather lacking. They are good at explaining how he was poisoned with Novichok while touring Siberia last summer, then almost murdered in a Russian hospital before being brought to the Charité in Berlin, where he eventually recovered after weeks in an induced coma. He is now living in German exile, presumably closely guarded. 

Very rarely do the Western media give any idea of how sharp, funny and entertaining his YouTube programmes are, or of Navalny’s comic timing. “And we are going to hear how President Putin thinks a lot about my underpants,” he says in the intro to his latest, explosive programme, with deadpan delivery worthy of our own Ronnie Barker or John Cleese. But with the extra bite that he is introducing a recorded phone call he has made with a Kremlin goon who tried to kill him. 

Damn it, the man is funny enough to be almost British. 

I never expect to laugh much at Russian humour. During the Cold War, the most heart-sinking words to hear from an Eastern Bloc politician, whether from the government or a dissident, had to be: “In my country, we express this with a joke…” There would follow a laboured shaggy-dog story, at the end of which one would try to squeeze out a wry smile. 

But satire, as every tyrant knows, is the ideal tool for bringing down the powerful because it combines ridicule with the ability to hold the attention of the young. No wonder the Czechs elected a satirical playwright and Ukrainians elected a comedian as their presidents. And no wonder the Kremlin fears Navalny.

The process of cutting Putin down to the size of Austin Powers’ nemesis, Dr Evil, can’t be achieved by mere playground name-calling. The brilliance of Navalny’s satire lies in the thorough, detailed research coupled with fun YouTube techniques, which keep his channel fascinating as well as hilarious. 

In one episode – the most important of the episodes have English subtitles — his tech team planted him apparently sitting beside Putin in a propaganda shot of the President-for-life driving a military truck over the Crimean Bridge. “This is a very solemn moment, he has even put on his safety belt – though I had to remind him several times…why is he so obsessed with this bridge? Nothing has been built in Russia for 20 years.”

In a video published in May of this year, Navalny comprehensively took apart Russia’s favourite TV doctor, Elena Malysheva: a kindly-looking, bespectacled woman who has played a major role in downplaying the risk of coronavirus earlier this year. She has also mysteriously acquired large mansions in Russia and the US. 

The detail of the investigation into Malysheva is laid out meticulously. Her statements, such as that “common flu is a more serious infection” or “coronavirus is only present in China”, delivered with the gentle bedside manner of everyone’s favourite family doctor, are introduced with shots of her fabulously vulgar and expensive homes and interlaced with priceless extracts from her TV health programme, in which dancers dress up as various vital organs to sing cheerful songs educating the public about their bodily functions, culminating in a performance by two men dressed as a pair of testicles. The English subtitle for that bit reads: “I refuse to translate this.”

This light touch gives Navalny a swashbuckling, Errol Flynn-esque air which Putin can only dream of. Christmas viewing? Search YouTube for Алексей Навальный. 

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