Essay: On the caustic humour of Succession
“I hate almost all rich people,” Dorothy Parker once remarked, “but I think I’d be darling at it”. This zinger from a grandmaster of the form encapsulates our own contradictory feelings while watching Succession: the resentment we feel for the squabbling Roy siblings vs the conviction that we would do better if we had their wealth and privileges. The thrill we get out of their ritual humiliation while claiming the moral high ground. Four seasons in, we still couldn’t get enough of the schadenfreude porn. No measure of pre-grieving could have prepared us for the end.
The Roys wear tailored suits, fly on private jets, holiday aboard luxury yachts, live in swank penthouses — yet their lives are empty and embittered by a lifetime of waiting for their father to hand over the reins of a billion-dollar media empire. Every boardroom negotiation, reluctant coalition and desperate power-grab proves futile in the end. The tragedy and comedy of it is Logan Roy (Brian Cox) was so intoxicated with his own importance that he failed to groom his children or his staff to take his place. A man so tyrannical he believed playing them against each other in a Darwinian contest would affirm who had the killer instinct to succeed him. What the void left by his sudden death ends up affirming however is his children are too maladjusted, too ill-prepared, too self-serving to inherit Waystar Royco.
For its entire run, an abiding pleasure of tuning into Succession was to watch a superb ensemble lob verbal grenades at each other without mercy in their jockeying for power. The extended Roy family sure cursed up a storm. Insults flew thick and fast with Tourettic rampancy. Jokes were whetted like scalpels aiming for surgical precision. Repartee danced to a rhythm of its own. Be it a well-timed one-liner that brought someone down a peg or a soul-puncturing barb that cut deeper than a knife, the writing was loaded with such evocative invective even its targets sometimes had no choice but to walk away, their anger modulating into envious admiration that they couldn’t have the final word. Over four foul-mouthed seasons, the team of writers led by its British creator Jesse Armstrong established themselves as a bastion of caustic wit, like a modern-day Algonquin Round Table. Armstrong improved upon his Peep Show and The Thick of It credentials by writing some of the most tart-tongued characters on TV, as his peer and old boss Armando Iannucci did on Veep. Together, the two prophets of the profane have ushered in a renaissance of creative swearing.
As the stakes got higher with each season of Succession, the irony got more corrosive. For this is a world where if you can’t say something nice, you spout the most venomous put-down. The dialogue on the show is designed to transport viewers to a battlefield where words are wielded as weapons and as armour. Insult is a means of offence and defence: to attack the target while cushioning yourself from the counterstrike. Who insults and who is insulted determined the weekly power rankings. Where physical conflict is substituted by verbal one-upmanship, the potency of an insult could rearrange the hierarchy. What makes an insult potent is not only the pathology, vulnerability or hang-up of the target being loaded into it but also the timing of it. A strong and well-timed one could empower a contender to pull ahead, build solidarity with an ally, and provide much-needed catharsis.
Abuse crosses generational lines in the Roy family and creates a hierarchy of its own. Given the history of narcissistic abuse suffered by Connor (Alan Ruck), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) at the hands of their father, insulting becomes a defence mechanism — a form of reactive abuse to reassert control. At Logan’s funeral in the penultimate episode, his heir apparent Kendall wonders if he has “that magnificent, awful force” of his father in him. The finale confirms he does: it is awful but not magnificent. When he violently hugs Roman, forcing the latter’s forehead stitches to reopen, and later physically attacks him in response to an insult, the cycle of abuse only continues.
In such a hyper-sweary show, it should come as no surprise that Logan hurls some of the most eviscerating putdowns, most of which are targeted at his own kids and the rest at anyone who has the misfortune of entering his orbit. A fulsome “FUCK OFF” is enough to send Kendall packing like a shell shocked puppy. The anger of betrayal brings out the more vicious threats: “I’m going to grind his fucking bones to make my bread”. The show’s Shakespearean echoes extend beyond the King Lear-like power struggle between a father and his children. We hear it in the well-crafted insults as well. Take for example when King Lear calls his eldest Goneril “an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood” — an insult no less graphic than bones being grinded for bread and one that wouldn’t have sounded incongruous had a classically trained stage actor like Cox said it. Or when First Lord Dumaine calls Parolles “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality” in All’s Well That Ends Well, the words could very well apply to Logan. The baroque art of insulting has a long and storied tradition that isn’t exclusive to English literature. Describing Andrey Semyonovich in Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “He attached himself to the cause of progress and our younger generation from enthusiasm. He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animate abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarise it”. How well does it also describe Kendall?
That almost every character on Succession is gifted in the fine art of insulting doesn’t mean they all sound the same or their jokes are interchangeable. Each has their own cadence and style when it comes to weaponizing words. Logan keeps his insults incisive (“Karl, if your hands are clean it’s only because your whorehouse also does manicures”). Roman is prone to snide trolling (“Nice vest, Wambsgans. It’s so puffy. What’s it stuffed with, your hopes and dreams?”). Kendall enjoys rhyming catchphrases (“Let’s bleed the Swede”; “We go reverse Viking, we pillage their village”) and the odd truth bomb (“You couldn’t get a job in a burger joint let alone a Fortune 500 without some nepotism”). Shiv is adept at throwing razor-edged putdowns (“Oh, a chapel. Do you think dad will be able to cross the threshold, or will he spontaneously combust?”). Her husband Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) resorts to snippy taunts (“You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Greggs”, “The man dying of thirst is suddenly a mineral water critic?”, “Benign fungus? Great title for your memoir”) to hide his own insecurities. His whipping boy Greg (Nicholas Braun) tends to trip awkwardly over serpentine sentences (“Yes, if it is to be said, so it be, so it is”, “He occasionally has expressed a distaste in the past for my particular flavour of me”).
Name-calling comes in all shapes, styles and sizes: literal and figurative, pithy and rambling, armed with precision targeting and broadside cannoning. The siblings give as good as they get. Kendall dismisses Connor as “irrelevant”. But being overlooked and not needing love is Connor’s “superpower”, as he suggests, as opposed to the “needy love sponges” that are his siblings. Shiv likes to think she is smarter and morally superior — only for her schemes to blow back in her face and reveal her true nature. Whatever liberal values she pretends to share are readily and repeatedly compromised to look after number one. The relationship she shares with Tom is a co-dependent one to benefit each other’s careers: she wants a “meat-puppet” who will do her bidding; his love for her is tied somewhat, if not entirely, to her proximity to Logan.
A recurring subject on the show’s roasts was Roman’s sexual perversions and mommy issues. When Shiv jokes if the new cologne he is wearing is “Date Rape by Calvin Klein”, his response “You wish” speaks to his dysfunction. So does the accidental sending of a dick pic to his dad, instead of Gerri — with whom he engages in a humiliation kink. Roman is turned on when insulted by his surrogate mommy (“You disgusting little pig. You’re pathetic. You’re a revolting little worm, aren’t you? You little slime puppy”) as childhood trauma has stuck him in a state of arrested development. Perhaps it is not by coincidence that Roman is often called Romulus, like the first king of Rome who was raised not by his mother but by a wolf and is known to have backstabbed his brother.
Characters on the sidelines aren’t denied the odd joke. Logan’s estranged brother Ewan takes a solid dig at the non-existent standards of journalism in a world where Waystar and its flagship network ATN call the shots: “The Logan Roy School of Journalism. What’s next, the Jack the Ripper Women’s Health Clinic?” Kendall, who loves sloganeering and pretending like he is a good guy, winds up as the bullseye for a series of withering putdowns — “Oedipussy, Wokestar Royco, Paranoid Kendroid, Benedickhead Arnold, Snitchie Rich, a jar of mayonnaise in a Prada suit” — from late-night comedian Sophie Iwobi (Ziwe).
For a show that holds up a warped mirror to American dynastic capitalism at its ugliest, Succession’s satire is “very English,” as Hannah Mackay explained in an article for Sight & Sound: “US networks have traditionally depicted power in its most potent, aphrodisiacal form – and the people who have it as all-seeing Machiavels. The Roys are not Machiavels but, for the most part, hopeless incompetents. This is a very English view of power – that the people who hold it are not, fundamentally, to be taken seriously”. Few eat-the-rich satires of today came with such a cutting edge. Fewer still swore with such prodigious imagination and spectacular eloquence. To quote Parker again, “There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words”. Succession had a wealth of wit and wisecracks — and covered the distance between.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.
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“I hate almost all rich people,” Dorothy Parker once remarked, “but I think I’d be darling at it”. This zinger from a grandmaster of the form encapsulates our own contradictory feelings while watching Succession: the resentment we feel for the squabbling Roy siblings vs the conviction that we would do better if we had their wealth and privileges. The thrill we get out of their ritual humiliation while claiming the moral high ground. Four seasons in, we still couldn’t get enough of the schadenfreude porn. No measure of pre-grieving could have prepared us for the end.
The Roys wear tailored suits, fly on private jets, holiday aboard luxury yachts, live in swank penthouses — yet their lives are empty and embittered by a lifetime of waiting for their father to hand over the reins of a billion-dollar media empire. Every boardroom negotiation, reluctant coalition and desperate power-grab proves futile in the end. The tragedy and comedy of it is Logan Roy (Brian Cox) was so intoxicated with his own importance that he failed to groom his children or his staff to take his place. A man so tyrannical he believed playing them against each other in a Darwinian contest would affirm who had the killer instinct to succeed him. What the void left by his sudden death ends up affirming however is his children are too maladjusted, too ill-prepared, too self-serving to inherit Waystar Royco.
For its entire run, an abiding pleasure of tuning into Succession was to watch a superb ensemble lob verbal grenades at each other without mercy in their jockeying for power. The extended Roy family sure cursed up a storm. Insults flew thick and fast with Tourettic rampancy. Jokes were whetted like scalpels aiming for surgical precision. Repartee danced to a rhythm of its own. Be it a well-timed one-liner that brought someone down a peg or a soul-puncturing barb that cut deeper than a knife, the writing was loaded with such evocative invective even its targets sometimes had no choice but to walk away, their anger modulating into envious admiration that they couldn’t have the final word. Over four foul-mouthed seasons, the team of writers led by its British creator Jesse Armstrong established themselves as a bastion of caustic wit, like a modern-day Algonquin Round Table. Armstrong improved upon his Peep Show and The Thick of It credentials by writing some of the most tart-tongued characters on TV, as his peer and old boss Armando Iannucci did on Veep. Together, the two prophets of the profane have ushered in a renaissance of creative swearing.
As the stakes got higher with each season of Succession, the irony got more corrosive. For this is a world where if you can’t say something nice, you spout the most venomous put-down. The dialogue on the show is designed to transport viewers to a battlefield where words are wielded as weapons and as armour. Insult is a means of offence and defence: to attack the target while cushioning yourself from the counterstrike. Who insults and who is insulted determined the weekly power rankings. Where physical conflict is substituted by verbal one-upmanship, the potency of an insult could rearrange the hierarchy. What makes an insult potent is not only the pathology, vulnerability or hang-up of the target being loaded into it but also the timing of it. A strong and well-timed one could empower a contender to pull ahead, build solidarity with an ally, and provide much-needed catharsis.
Abuse crosses generational lines in the Roy family and creates a hierarchy of its own. Given the history of narcissistic abuse suffered by Connor (Alan Ruck), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) at the hands of their father, insulting becomes a defence mechanism — a form of reactive abuse to reassert control. At Logan’s funeral in the penultimate episode, his heir apparent Kendall wonders if he has “that magnificent, awful force” of his father in him. The finale confirms he does: it is awful but not magnificent. When he violently hugs Roman, forcing the latter’s forehead stitches to reopen, and later physically attacks him in response to an insult, the cycle of abuse only continues.
In such a hyper-sweary show, it should come as no surprise that Logan hurls some of the most eviscerating putdowns, most of which are targeted at his own kids and the rest at anyone who has the misfortune of entering his orbit. A fulsome “FUCK OFF” is enough to send Kendall packing like a shell shocked puppy. The anger of betrayal brings out the more vicious threats: “I’m going to grind his fucking bones to make my bread”. The show’s Shakespearean echoes extend beyond the King Lear-like power struggle between a father and his children. We hear it in the well-crafted insults as well. Take for example when King Lear calls his eldest Goneril “an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood” — an insult no less graphic than bones being grinded for bread and one that wouldn’t have sounded incongruous had a classically trained stage actor like Cox said it. Or when First Lord Dumaine calls Parolles “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality” in All’s Well That Ends Well, the words could very well apply to Logan. The baroque art of insulting has a long and storied tradition that isn’t exclusive to English literature. Describing Andrey Semyonovich in Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “He attached himself to the cause of progress and our younger generation from enthusiasm. He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animate abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarise it”. How well does it also describe Kendall?
That almost every character on Succession is gifted in the fine art of insulting doesn’t mean they all sound the same or their jokes are interchangeable. Each has their own cadence and style when it comes to weaponizing words. Logan keeps his insults incisive (“Karl, if your hands are clean it’s only because your whorehouse also does manicures”). Roman is prone to snide trolling (“Nice vest, Wambsgans. It’s so puffy. What’s it stuffed with, your hopes and dreams?”). Kendall enjoys rhyming catchphrases (“Let’s bleed the Swede”; “We go reverse Viking, we pillage their village”) and the odd truth bomb (“You couldn’t get a job in a burger joint let alone a Fortune 500 without some nepotism”). Shiv is adept at throwing razor-edged putdowns (“Oh, a chapel. Do you think dad will be able to cross the threshold, or will he spontaneously combust?”). Her husband Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) resorts to snippy taunts (“You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Greggs”, “The man dying of thirst is suddenly a mineral water critic?”, “Benign fungus? Great title for your memoir”) to hide his own insecurities. His whipping boy Greg (Nicholas Braun) tends to trip awkwardly over serpentine sentences (“Yes, if it is to be said, so it be, so it is”, “He occasionally has expressed a distaste in the past for my particular flavour of me”).
Name-calling comes in all shapes, styles and sizes: literal and figurative, pithy and rambling, armed with precision targeting and broadside cannoning. The siblings give as good as they get. Kendall dismisses Connor as “irrelevant”. But being overlooked and not needing love is Connor’s “superpower”, as he suggests, as opposed to the “needy love sponges” that are his siblings. Shiv likes to think she is smarter and morally superior — only for her schemes to blow back in her face and reveal her true nature. Whatever liberal values she pretends to share are readily and repeatedly compromised to look after number one. The relationship she shares with Tom is a co-dependent one to benefit each other’s careers: she wants a “meat-puppet” who will do her bidding; his love for her is tied somewhat, if not entirely, to her proximity to Logan.
A recurring subject on the show’s roasts was Roman’s sexual perversions and mommy issues. When Shiv jokes if the new cologne he is wearing is “Date Rape by Calvin Klein”, his response “You wish” speaks to his dysfunction. So does the accidental sending of a dick pic to his dad, instead of Gerri — with whom he engages in a humiliation kink. Roman is turned on when insulted by his surrogate mommy (“You disgusting little pig. You’re pathetic. You’re a revolting little worm, aren’t you? You little slime puppy”) as childhood trauma has stuck him in a state of arrested development. Perhaps it is not by coincidence that Roman is often called Romulus, like the first king of Rome who was raised not by his mother but by a wolf and is known to have backstabbed his brother.
Characters on the sidelines aren’t denied the odd joke. Logan’s estranged brother Ewan takes a solid dig at the non-existent standards of journalism in a world where Waystar and its flagship network ATN call the shots: “The Logan Roy School of Journalism. What’s next, the Jack the Ripper Women’s Health Clinic?” Kendall, who loves sloganeering and pretending like he is a good guy, winds up as the bullseye for a series of withering putdowns — “Oedipussy, Wokestar Royco, Paranoid Kendroid, Benedickhead Arnold, Snitchie Rich, a jar of mayonnaise in a Prada suit” — from late-night comedian Sophie Iwobi (Ziwe).
For a show that holds up a warped mirror to American dynastic capitalism at its ugliest, Succession’s satire is “very English,” as Hannah Mackay explained in an article for Sight & Sound: “US networks have traditionally depicted power in its most potent, aphrodisiacal form – and the people who have it as all-seeing Machiavels. The Roys are not Machiavels but, for the most part, hopeless incompetents. This is a very English view of power – that the people who hold it are not, fundamentally, to be taken seriously”. Few eat-the-rich satires of today came with such a cutting edge. Fewer still swore with such prodigious imagination and spectacular eloquence. To quote Parker again, “There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words”. Succession had a wealth of wit and wisecracks — and covered the distance between.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.
Enjoy unlimited digital access with HT Premium
Subscribe Now to continue reading
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