Politics & Power Quote by Alan Coren

Switzerland gets skewered here with the kind of politely dressed malice Alan Coren loved: a postcard nation reduced to two commodities that literally can not hold their shape. Snow and chocolate melt, so the joke goes, and a country that trades on image has to manufacture permanence somewhere else. Enter the cuckoo clock, a piece of kitsch engineered less as craft than as mnemonic device: not timekeeping, but souvenir-making.

Coren's intent is to puncture the romance of national branding. He takes the tourist brochure - alpine purity, artisanal sweetness - and points out its vulnerability: the signature experiences are consumable and vanishing. The cuckoo clock, absurdly overdetermined as "solid", becomes a satire of how nations curate themselves for outsiders. It's not that Switzerland lacks substance; it's that what outsiders buy from it is designed to be carried home, displayed, and retold. The punchline lands because it weaponizes a mundane physical fact (melting) into a cultural diagnosis (identity as export).

Subtext: tourism prefers objects to realities. You can not bring home weather or taste without turning it into a trinket, and the trinket quickly starts to stand in for the place itself. Coren also slips in a sly accusation about authenticity: the cuckoo clock feels quintessentially Swiss in tourist mythology, even though it's more associated with Germany's Black Forest. That mismatch sharpens the gag. The "solid" memory is literally a constructed one, a mechanical bird chirping on cue whenever commerce demands nostalgia.