If you don't like what I'm saying, Good!

All entertainment, be it poetry, dance, cinema, novels, pop music, storytelling or stand-up comedy, has a duty to challenge the audience. Even the escapist genres of "sci-fi" and "fantasy" should not take the easy route and pander to the reader's flabby prejudices and bigotries, but should assault their consumers by shoving these repugnant bigotries back in their faces like a regurgitated meal. They should hold up a distorting fairground mirror and show the audience a grossly exaggerated version of themselves that will make them shudder, even as it makes them laugh, and that will impede their enjoyment of the show by making them think.

And some viewers will come out of the show laughing and say, "I don't really look like that, so it means nothing. I have to change nothing in my life."

But others will walk out having been made to think. They will say to themselves, "I know that was a hideous exaggeration, and I'm not really like that, but it was only when I saw myself looking grotesquely distorted in that mirror that I noticed I am a bit flabby at the edges, so maybe I need to get myself in shape."

And still others will come out of the fairground shaking their heads and saying, "You know, even that outrageously stretched and unbelievable exaggeration of myself, which broke my suspension of disbelief because it was so shocking—well there are fat fucks out there who are even more morbidly obese than that. Maybe there is social problem that we must stop ignoring."

Let's not take this metaphor any further because fat is not a moral phenomenon and in extreme cases may be a disability (and the very concept is often an opportunity for misogyny and discrimination). No, the phenomena I'm really proposing we distort and exaggerate to the point of discomfort in our art are political and moral grotesquenesses like racism, religious fundamentalism, homophobia, discrimination, ableism and normative triumphalism, social imperialism, moral inflexibility, prejudice and sexual repression.

Because however much we may laugh at the exaggerated representations of these evils in satirical art, we must recognise that there are trace elements of all of them in ourselves. We have all judged people because of the colour of their skin or the shape of their eyes. We have all seen news from a third-world country and thought, "If only they were more like us." We have all told (or been tempted to tell) a sick person to "pull themself together". We have all grumbled at the inconvenience of having to negotiate an access ramp when stairs would be easier. We have all seen somebody who acts or dresses outrageously being victimised and thought, "They're really bringing it on themselves."

And we have all made statements like those in the preceding paragraph, and thought ourselves clever and good and liberal for doing so, while ignoring the fact that some people have not done all of these things, because they are the victims in these cases. Shove your smug inclusiveness back in your face.

So, artists, when you present the archetypal villains of your piece as vicious Nazis, why not remind your audience that they picked on the Jehovah's Witness kid in high school? When your evil horde are bearded, be-turbaned devils enslaving their own women, don't forgive your readers who campaigned against women's right to choose their own reproductive destinies and control their own bodies. If your fantasy includes monsters who traumatize or devour children, don't let people dissociate that from the monster who sits on his privileged arse in Rome covering up and protecting those who despicably abuse children, to protect the good name of his organization. If your bad guys or the subjects of your lampoon hold ridiculous and moronic views about race or gender or science, make sure your viewers know that it's their and their neighbours' opinions on poverty and social education, healthcare and glass ceilings, natural evolution and anthropogenic climate change that you are mocking.

There is no excuse for laziness, for prejudice, for retrograde and reactionary thinking, for smugness. We're all guilty of these flaws sometimes, but as an artist it is your fucking job to overcome the weak and the obvious in your public work. If you can't rise to this, go shoot yourself in the shit-eating face and leave the stage to those of us who are not afraid to alienate our audience.

(For someone else's thoughts that helped inspire this rant, read British comic Stuart Lee's autobiography, How I Escaped my Certain Fate.)