Carnival weekend in Valletta, and Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, or at least his caricatured effigy, stands outside Café Premier holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a passport belonging to one Sai Mizzi Liang, apparently worth €13,000, in his other.

Elsewhere, Opposition leader Simon Busuttil, wearing a schoolboy’s uniform and driving a crane – or, more appropriately, gaffa – rides by atop a float, backed up by a heavily cracked Mater Dei Hospital.

It is the fourth year since political satire was reintroduced to the official Maltese carnival, following decades where everyone laboured under the misconception that it had been banned by law.

Enthusiasts have taken to their newfound freedoms with gusto, but the question remains whether carnival can do enough to help revive what is widely seen as a generally weak local culture of satire.

“It’s about time we had some form of satire in carnival, like they do abroad,” said Holger Camilleri, a member of the Cicco Carnival Company, the group behind one of this year’s two main satirical floats.

“I think we’re still at the stage of spoon-feeding it a little until we reach a certain level of quality, but eventually I imagine it will reach a point where there can be a competition especially for satire; then I think it will really take off.”

Audiences, Mr Camilleri said, had also lapped up the satire, and at no point did the group stop short of addressing any issues because of fear about public reaction.

Only in one area – which poses a particular challenge for float-makers – were there concerns: if the personalities being satirised are not immediately recognisable, the wisdom goes, people are not going to laugh.

Despite its long dormancy, satire had long been part of the Maltese carnival tradition. Recent editions, in fact, have included a revival of an old tradition known as the Qarċilla – a mock public marriage loudly and brashly satirising different aspects of Maltese culture.

“When power prohibited satire through censorship and legislation, it basically stripped carnival of its potential to resistance and tamed the whole affair,” Immanuel Mifsud, who wrote this year’s Qarċilla, said in a recent interview in this newspaper.

“Satire, when employed by the man in the street, takes the form of resistance against power. For a long period of time, those in power managed to suppress all this because it is a very well-known fact that satire is a political tool.”

For Vicki Ann Cremona, a theatre studies professor and carnival researcher, the return of such satirical traditions has been extremely positive not just for carnival itself, but for Maltese culture as a whole.

“Satire creates a more objective distance between people and politicians, which in Malta is difficult to establish in other parts of life because politicians are so readily accessible,” Prof. Cremona said.

“The act of objectifying something for humour means you can perceive it without feeling directly involved, as you might when you’re reading about different scandals.”

Despite the fact that satire’s resurgence in carnival is still only four years old, Prof. Cremona believes it has already come a long way, with floats taking on important topics in a way that brings the message across loud and clear while still making people laugh.

When power prohibited satire through censorship and legislation, it basically stripped carnival of its potential to resistance and tamed the whole affair

“This is the only way we’re ever going to nurture the ability to laugh at ourselves,” Prof. Cremona said.

The point is an important one because, generally speaking, satire in Malta has not won itself many plaudits. Across the world, satire on television, stage and page has always been an integral part of public and political discourse, prodding authorities and providing people with alternative views on key issues.

Locally, however, the feeling is that what satire exists – especially within the mainstream and on television – is often too sanitised to have an impact, even before questions of artistic quality are raised.

Blogger Wayne Flask, author of the satirical play Sibna ż-Żejt, and the mind behind the popular Facebook page Satiristan, believes the main problem is that, even as State censorship breathes its very last, gatekeepers still tend to be too fearful of offending people in power through satire.

“There’s a nicely decked out obstacle course on the way to seeing actual satire on TV,” he said. “There’s the permanent menace of libel suits and there’s the Broadcasting Authority and its fetish for impartiality, not to mention the fact that nobody will finance even a five-minute satirical show for fear of stepping onto the wrong toes.

“The only free space left for satire in Malta is social media. But from what I’ve seen so far, and that includes my brief experience with Satiristan, most of the social media-based satire is a short-lived insurrection which survives only until the next fad comes along.”

Mr Flask’s play Sibna ż-Żejt, which pulled no punches in showing a corrupt Joseph Muscat 25 years in the future, completely at the mercy of the fat cat developers he had elevated, packed houses at the Manoel Theatre last year – but was met with a mixed reaction from audiences.

Many commentators praised its unflinching and insightful look at contemporary Maltese society in all its guises, and Mr Flask said he also received plaudits from several MPs on both sides of the house, even those who were portrayed, warts-and-all, on stage.

There was also plenty of criticism. While issues were raised about the general quality of the play (issues which Mr Flask readily acknowledges), the main problems stemmed from audiences who were unhappy with the play’s harshness and profanity, as well as its depiction of people and issues which struck close to the bone.

On this point, Mr Flask is unrepentant: “Maltese audiences, generally, lack maturity,” he said. “I think we’re a nation of prude self-important brats in a constant search for the moral high ground. We’re all right with having a few laughs as long as it’s somebody else, some sort of enemy we’re laughing at, not ourselves.”

It is a frustration that has been echoed by many writers and actors who have made similar efforts in the past, and largely held to blame for the scarcity of such efforts. Nevertheless, it seems slightly at odds with the fact that, in some form or another, satire has actually been very popular with Maltese audiences for a long time.

“It’s always been part of pantomime, for example, which is why panto is probably one of the most watched shows in Malta, along with Bla Kondixin [an annual satirical stage show],” said Wesley Ellul, producer of the Comedy Knights sketch shows. “Maybe satire isn’t the biggest part of Maltese culture, but it’s definitely growing.”

Comedy Knights, which started three years ago and has since become a major part of the Christmas theatre schedule, is built almost completely around political and social satire, although many feel it trades largely on the broadly similar views of its middle-class audience.

Mr Ellul, however, was also mixed when asked whether audiences were accepting of satire that tries to make people stop and think.

“They receive it well as long as it doesn’t hit their own beliefs too hard,” he said. “In this year’s show, for example, we had a sketch about Filipino workers, and a lot of people were telling us it was offensive; they didn’t realise that what we were satirising was the commercialisation of how we treat people.”

Mr Ellul noted that, in other local arts forms, satire was still alive and well: newspaper comics, he said, displayed great strength, and bands like Xtruppaw had been pushing the envelope for years, albeit somewhat outside the mainstream.

“Ultimately, different social groups see it differently. Most people seem to be more comfortable with satire of ‘the other’, not of themselves,” he added.

To come back at the last to carnival, the return of satire to one of Malta’s most established and accepted public cultural stages could prompt a slow shift in that resistance – but it could also be the case that carnival will eventually slip slowly back into the same mould, with safe jokes to shield us from more biting commentary.

Carnival and satire: a comedy of laws

In February 2012, then culture minister Mario de Marco announced that he wanted to reintroduce political satire into Malta’s almost 500-year carnival tradition by reviewing a law from the 1930s which effectively banned it.

The move was immediately welcomed by all corners, particularly in light of the anti-censorship sentiment sweeping the country at the time. What happened next, however, could have been a satire in itself: because the law the government hoped to repeal had simply never existed.

The Attorney General’s office, tasked with researching the law, traced the myth back to an obsolete police notice dated February 8, 1935. The notice had not been valid for years, and had never even applied to satires of local politics, but the regulation had somehow made its way into the collective consciousness – and the Arts Council’s carnival regulations.

The minister ‘lifted’ the ban that never was, and the way was clear for satire’s return to Malta’s carnival.

How satire is shaking the world

A line currently being shared unattributed around social media says: “We used tolaugh at comedians and listen to politicians; now we listen to comedians and laugh at politicians.”

Ironically, variants of the same joke have been doing the rounds since the early 20th century, but the sentiment feels more valid today than ever before.

A report published by the Pew Research Institute in the US found that people were marginally more likely to get news of the presidential election from late-night comedy shows than from local or national newspapers.

American comedy hosts such as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver have over the last few years taken the world by storm with their incisive humorous takes on the big issues of the day.

Oliver’s Last Week Tonight in particular has put ‘serious’ news organisations on their toes by blurring the lines between satire and journalism.

The show’s appeal seems to lie in simplifying extremely complex issues through irreverent humour – such as when he asked whistleblower Edward Snowden to explain his internet surveillance revelations in the context of how the government could access an individual’s sexually explicit selfies.

Blogger Wayne Flask is not at all surprised by the influence satirists have earned for themselves. “I think it’s almost unfair to call Last Week Tonight comedy,” he said.

“There’s more informative journalism and less comedy in John Oliver’s work. Thankfully, he exposes quite a few issues which mainstream media would normally ignore or refuse to tackle. You learn something new from ‘comedians’ every day.”

Carnival in Malta: a short history

Carnival rose to popularity in Malta during the early years of the rule of the Knights of St John, when the knights would hold official celebrations in Vittoriosa complete with games, pageants and tournaments.

Grand Master La Valette later gave the celebrations a boost by permitting the wearing of masks in public, which was forbidden throughout the rest of the year, while the ships of the Order’s fleet in the Grand Harbour were also decked out for the occasion.

Years later, Grand Master Giovanni Paolo Lascaris earned himself his immortal reputation by prohibiting women from wearing masks or participating in the balls held at the Knights’ auberges, on penalty of being publicly whipped, as well as banning any costumes representing the devil.

Despite attracting consistent attention from religious authorities, including the Roman Inquisition, and calls for its excesses to be curbed, carnival largely continued unaffected.

The parata tradition also traces itself back to the Knights’ era, with companies dressed as Christians and Turks performing mock fights representing the Great Siege. Meanwhile, the Sunday afternoon défilé would be led by the Grand Master’s carriage, followed by other decorated carriages and floats.

In more recent times, the parades of the British period, were particularly noted for their biting satire – and often suppressed for the same reason – with many of the intricate floats designed to poke fun at political figures and unpopular government decisions.

Nadur’s spontaneous carnival largely became the outpost of irreverent satire following the ‘ban’ at the official Malta carnival, but carnival researcher Vicki Ann Cremona is wary of mythologising its impact too far.

“We forget that even at Nadur people started representing politicians only very slowly, and definitely not from the very start,” Prof. Cremona said.

“Satire at Nadur was often in the political messages on placards or props, not in the costumes themselves.”