ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Before he peacefully helped throw off the yoke of Soviet control over Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel's plays needled the Socialist authorities' dreary conformity to Marxist-Leninist ideology. The Garden Party, a 1963 play by Havel uses the absurd experience of a young Czech, Hugo Pludek, to ridicule the empty facade of the drones employed by the Soviet bureaucracy in Hugo's encounters with members of the government's Liquidation Office. 

Hugo's journey through the Liquidation Office's garden party serves as a lesson on bureaucracies' mind-numbing stifling of an individual's true character. The empty-headed opinions, one-liners, and observations made by the party-goers expose the audience to the depths of self-delusion that members of the bureaucracy will display to square the circle of their world. In Hugo's case, the bureaucrats reflected the very conformity expressed by Czechoslovak citizens under Soviet rule. The Garden Party was not an in-your-face, slapstick indictment of the regime. It was a dry, ironic, and subtle impersonation of the soulless Czechs who played their parts like puppets in the Communist government's theater.  [...]

 The bureaucrats in The Garden Party could easily be replaced by the mob that practices the heckler's veto today, as the same empty platitudes expressed by students on college campuses or administrators in positions of power are the same as Soviet bureaucrats. Sloganeering is a stand-in for solutions, the collective muzzles the individual into the system. The Garden Party might serve as a reminder for comics to continue to step outside the boundaries of acceptable language, tone, and styles. That way the cheap conformity that The Garden Party derides is a little weaker throughout America's comedy scene.   

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