Three years later, in 1987, the innovation came that wiped out the last of any rebellion.
It was called the Two Minutes’ Mockery. Not only did it replace the Two Minutes’ Hate, but it took a dozen other timeslots as well, sometimes more, per day. It could come at any time, on any telescreen, and the populace relished it, proles and Party alike.
It was a paradigm shift, this new footage of of Big Brother. Gone were all the flattering angles and reverential lighting effects. Now, the videos captured him in hilarious missteps: tripping over his briefcase, going to work with articles of clothing missing or backward… the most popular segments, of course, being the ones where he announced in some oblivious, rambling too-public speech that he’d done something utterly scandalous, something so far against Party doctrine that he could not possibly get away with it.
The laughter of the Two Minutes’ Mockery would crest to deafening levels, in those moments, at the very thought of how he could ever have been so ridiculously stupid to think his idea of the day would work.
It released tension so much better than the Hate. Afterwards, the complacency of the people was a wonder to behold.
They would go on as productive, obedient citizens… a smile on their lips… a sparkle in their eyes… and underneath it, not even a gleam of awareness of how all the cartoonish blunders never came with any consequence except the political lubricant of laughter.
Their ancestors had loved the characters portrayed in comedies and minstrel shows… in The Comedy of Errors, in Punch and Judy, in Tom and Jerry. From the nineteen-twenties they had loved Charlie Chaplin, from the nineteen-fifties they had loved Benny Hill….. and now, in nineteen-eighty-seven, in the same old and yet new way, they loved Big Brother.
….hate what this has done to my vocabulary.