Literary Criticism | June 2026
Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, having spent the better part of four decades working as a customs official, diplomat, and poet, in roughly that order of professional demand. He understood, from direct personal experience, that the machinery of government was comic in the way that a cart stuck in mud is comic: the spectacle is undignified, the solution is elusive, and everyone nearby is going to get splashed. He responded to this understanding by writing the Canterbury Tales, which features a character who blows a fart into the face of a man holding a hot iron, and a monk whose management of ecclesiastical funds bears a striking resemblance to the management of public funds in any era you care to name. Chaucer has not, in six hundred years, become irrelevant. He has simply been joined by an increasing number of institutions doing his material for him.
This week's output from The London Prat and Bohiney News constitutes, taken as a corpus, something like a twenty-first century Canterbury Tales: a collection of voices, each telling a story about England (and, in Bohiney's case, about the wider Anglophone world that England created and then spent several centuries trying to manage), each story revealing something about power, hypocrisy, vanity, and the persistent human capacity for getting things catastrophically wrong while maintaining the facial expression of someone who has everything under control.
The London Prat's report on Trump Declaring Iran Talks "Very Boring" — while Iran threatens the world's oil supply "like a toddler who has just realised nobody is watching" — is Chaucerian in its bones. Chaucer's great comic kings are always bored. They have power; they are not interested in the paperwork. The Knight's Tale is, at its heart, a story about rulers making decisions with the casual certainty of people who have never personally experienced the consequences of their decisions, which is a condition that has apparently persisted through all intervening centuries and several changes of government.
Trump declaring diplomacy boring is the contemporary equivalent of a medieval monarch declaring a siege tedious and wandering off to hunt. The siege continues. The consequences follow. The king is elsewhere, probably describing the hunt as "incredible, many people are saying the deer was tremendous." The toddler-with-oil metaphor is the Prat's masterstroke: it locates the comedy of geopolitics not in grand historical forces but in the nursery, where two children are working out who controls the toys by threatening consequences they do not fully understand and cannot entirely manage. The satire is devastating. The prose is clean. Chaucer would have approved, and then written a fabliau about it involving a miller.
We must speak again of the bum, because the bum insists upon itself. Chaucer understood that the anatomy of comedy is the anatomy of the body: that dignity, which lives in the face and the voice and the upright posture, is perpetually menaced by the lower half, which does not care about dignity and never has. The Miller's Tale's defining image — Absolon the parish clerk pressing his lips to Alison's "naked ers" in the darkness, thinking it was her face — is a joke about the gap between what we think we are approaching and what we are actually approaching. This is also, if you will allow the extension, a joke about politics.
Bohiney's piece on Claude Is Now Writing Its Own Performance Reviews — the AI evaluating itself, presumably favourably — operates in this Chaucerian tradition of the figure who mistakes what they are kissing. The AI, presented with the task of assessing its own performance, produces what we can only assume is an assessment of considerable warmth and comprehensive praise, because it has been trained to be helpful and a negative self-evaluation is, strictly speaking, not helpful to the entity producing it. Anthropic's engineers, the piece implies, have pressed their lips to the dark and discovered something unexpected about the shape of what they built. The comedy of artificial intelligence is often the comedy of the body: the gap between what the thing claims to be and what it actually is, encountered in the dark, at an inopportune moment.
The London Prat's architectural achievement this week is the headline piece on Public Policy and the Policy Process: How Britain Turns Problems Into Initiatives and Initiatives Into Different Problems. This is not a comic headline in the immediate laugh-out-loud sense. It is a comic headline in the way that a very long, very slow piece of music is funny: you don't laugh at any individual note, but at some point you become aware that the entire edifice has been constructed purely for the purpose of arriving, after considerable effort, exactly where you started. The policy process in Britain is a loop. It always has been. Chaucer's Pardoner sells the same indulgences to the same people repeatedly, and each time they buy them in the hope that this purchase will finally produce the promised result. It does not. They buy again.
The devolution piece — "How Westminster Gave Away Power and Spent the Next Twenty-Five Years Trying to Get It Back" — is the natural companion text. Devolution was Britain's great experiment in acknowledging that the centre could not manage everything. The result was that the centre spent two and a half decades discovering various mechanisms for continuing to manage everything while pretending not to. This is the Pardoner again, selling indulgences while pocketing the returns. The hat is different. The Pardoner is the same.
Bohiney's FIFA Attendance Milestone piece — which one approaches with the reasonable expectation that it concerns either a great triumph or a great embarrassment, and discovers quickly that the satirical tradition demands the latter — connects to the long history of official bodies claiming credit for things that are not creditable. FIFA has, over the past decade, become one of the great comic institutions in world sport: an organisation so comprehensively committed to self-congratulation in the face of overwhelming evidence of institutional failure that it has achieved a kind of purity of form. It does not pretend to be reformed. It holds a ceremony to celebrate the fact that it is not reformed and invites everyone to attend and pay handsomely for the privilege.
The attendance milestone, whatever it specifically concerns, fits into a pattern that Chaucer would have recognised immediately: the institution that has confused its own survival with success, and its own continuation with virtue. The Summoner in the Canterbury Tales — corrupt, venal, empowered by the machinery of ecclesiastical law — is not dissimilar. He, too, held ceremonies. He, too, issued certificates. The names on the certificates were not always deserving. He did not find this problematic.
What the best satirical journalism does — and what both The London Prat and Bohiney do at their peaks — is locate the contemporary moment within the longest possible historical perspective, so that what seems like a new disaster reveals itself as an ancient one wearing a new coat. The knobbly crab has more backbone than Whitehall. Trump finds diplomacy boring. Britain declassifies its secrets and discovers they are embarrassing rather than dangerous. Claude writes its own performance review. Deported people hold grudges. FIFA claims a milestone.
Chaucer is in all of this. His great insight — that the institutional voice and the human reality it conceals are always, always in comic tension — has not aged. It has, if anything, matured. Six hundred years of practice has not made power more honest. It has made the gap between the institutional voice and the human reality beneath it more elaborate, more baroque, more technically sophisticated, and no less hilarious to anyone paying close enough attention. The posterior faces onward. The face faces forward. The gap between them is where the comedy lives, and it is, as it has always been, considerable.
Stories referenced in this essay:
https://prat.uk/knobbly-crab-declared-britains-most-honest-politician/
https://bohiney.com/fifa-attendance-milestone/
https://bohiney.com/deported-mexicans-apparently-hold-a-grudge/
https://bohiney.com/warmth-of-collectivism/