Italian comedy star’s joke on Sadiq Khan leads to crisis

Italy’s acerbic Beppe Grillo may have hung up his political gloves to return to the comedy circuit, but backlash over a bomb joke targeting London’s new mayor has aggravated an identity crisis within his populist Five Star movement.

Outspoken Grillo took a swipe at Mr Sadiq Khan in a Saturday night stand-up show, saying London’s first Muslim mayor — whom he erroneously called “Bangladeshi” — would “blow himself up in front of Westminster”.

The bushy-haired 67-year-old comic, famed for his outbursts against the political system and co-founding Five Star, drew cross-party condemnation in Italy, with critics accusing him of fuelling xenophobic stereotypes and boosting the extreme right-wing. Grillo’s heir apparent Luigi Di Maio, 29, said the joke had been made on stage and should not be given a political twist, while another Five Star member Manilo Di Stefano told journalists the comic was actually mocking Italian racists. “Beppe has always brought the news into his stand-ups. And seeing as in Italy there’s rhetoric about Muslims blowing themselves up, he cracked the joke,” he said, adding that the movement’s guru was relishing now being “free to say whatever comes into his head”.

But political rivals and commentators asked whether the populist movement can effectively claim to be Grillo-free.

The Five Star has been rocked in recent weeks by scandals in two cities under its governance and Mr Di Maio was forced to admit Monday that the movement’s founder was the only one with power to suspend or expel party members. “One day Grillo is the guarantor of the Five Stars, the next he is simply a comic who makes racist jokes. The M5S is in chaos and this is the proof,” Mr Claudio Martini, a senator with the centre-left Democratic Party said. Fellow PD Senator Pina Maturani quipped “congratulations on the confusion and ‘democracy’, and goodbye at the polls”.