Education Quote by Rory Bremner

Bremner skewers bureaucracy with the cleanest weapon a comedian has: a story that’s so plausible it barely needs exaggeration. The setup sounds like a mild policy concern - “duplication of effort” - the kind of managerial phrase that promises rational tidying. Then comes the punchline: the cure for duplication is… duplication. Two committees, each supposedly tasked with preventing waste, become a live demonstration of institutional waste, and the final twist (“neither knew what the other was up to”) lands like an audit report written as farce.

The intent isn’t just to get a laugh at government expense; it’s to puncture the self-serious language that protects inefficiency. “Department” and “ministry” evoke the sprawling machinery of the state, while “committee” signals process as performance: when organizations can’t solve a problem, they create a ritual around solving it. The subtext is that bureaucracy preserves itself by converting criticism into paperwork. Even the solution becomes a job-creation scheme for the system, not a fix for the public.

“Beyond parody” is doing extra work. It’s Bremner admitting a comic’s nightmare: reality has outpaced satire, leaving only the weary recognition that the joke is already baked into the structure. Coming from a British impressionist steeped in Whitehall foibles and ministerial incompetence, it taps a familiar cultural mood - the suspicion that governance has become procedural theatre, where accountability is endlessly deferred behind the next review.