U2 singer Bono appeared Tuesday before a Senate subcommittee hearing on “causes of violent extremism and the role of foreign assistance,” where he advocated a new Marshall Plan for the Middle East, Reuters reported. But besides encouraging foreign aid as a tool against terrorism, he also offered another approach, one that, perhaps by way of appealing to budget-conscious Republicans, would cost very little:
It’s funny, you’re going to … don’t laugh, but I think comedy should be deployed. Because if you look at National Socialism, and Daesh and ISIL, this is the same thing, we’ve seen this before, we’ve seen these people before. They’re very vain, they’ve got all the signs … it’s show business. And the first people that Adolf Hitler threw out of Germany were the Dadaists and the Surrealists. It’s like, you speak violence, you speak their language. But you laugh at them when they’re goose-stepping down the street and it takes away their power. So I’m suggesting that the Senate send in Amy Schumer and Chris Rock and Sacha Baron Cohen. Thank you.
Amy Schumer responded on Twitter, no doubt immediately before packing her bags to report for duty:
It would be easy to write off the idea of sending a comedy dream team to fight terrorists as, at best, a bad movie pitch. But Bono may be on to something here: Comedy has a power to deflate tyrants that should not be underestimated. As Peter Cook famously said, we should never forget “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.” Of course, those extraordinarily effective cabarets had musical acts, too. Bono?
