<i>The Death of Stalin</i> Is a Wicked Farce

How does one satirize a political moment that seems long ago to have transcended satire? This was the dilemma faced by Armando Iannucci, the creator of HBO’s Veep and, before it, his still-more-acidic portrayals of U.K. politics, The Thick of It and In the Loop. But those were all pre-Trump (Iannucci left Veep in 2015), before the membrane between political comedy and political reality had been ruptured so completely. How to keep up?

Iannucci’s solution was to abandon the (relative) decorum of the Anglo American experience altogether and instead scratch at one of the darkest moments of the 20th century: the aftermath of Stalin’s Great Purge and the power struggle that ensued following his death. The result is a comedy so black that it recalls.”