Cody Dahler: ‘You can’t have the BBC calling Trump an arsehole. But that’s what people want’

Cody Dahler, 30, is a political satirist and comedian who has achieved huge success on social media with his Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb videos, in which he breaks down newsy issues of the day for over two million followers on Instagram and nearly a million on TikTok (well, you don’t want to “look like a Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb in front of all your mates”, do you?). Pacey, sweary and highly entertaining, his two- to three-minute explainers cover, say, the protests in Europe, the water scandal or Reform donations (there is other content including a very winning impression of an adviser to Nigel Farage). He is also the host of a podcast, The Truth (In My Opinion), that has around 100,000 subscribers.

Now he has written a book: a sharp and timely interrogation of politics in the UK that aims to explain our woefully broken political systems and how we arrived at them. The State of This! A Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb’s Guide to British Politics responds to questions put to him by his followers and it’s very funny as well as enlightening. The question most asked, he says, was “What is the House of Lords?” (and why, as he writes, is everyone in it an arsehole?), closely followed by “Why does the UK still have a royal family?”. See also: Why are rivers full of shit? Why did the Leave campaign actually win? How many flags do you have to shag to become English? You will smile, then, but the book is also a serious assessment of why we are so failed by politics and politicians and who gains from maintaining an unedifying status quo. 

Born in Switzerland, Dahler also spent some of his childhood in Kenya and Cyprus as well as the UK and now lives in Walthamstow, east London. He worked for the civil service until 2022 (in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport), which was such a dispiriting experience that it brought on a sort of “mental breakdown”. After leaving he did a comedy writing course and went on to become a writer for the BBC on shows such as Dead Ringers and The News Quiz and then decided to strike out on his own. Currently on a book tour, he spoke to us from Manchester.

Well, lots of people think I'm a funny journalist. A few people think I'm a funny activist. Whereas I [feel] I'm a comedian who uses the news. Comic characters are just people with flaws and politicians are the most flawed people. So in my mind, I'm a comedian trying to get laughs in the face of a kind of despair. People message me all the time “please cover this, cover that – the mainstream media aren't covering it” and so I’ve become [something] of an information outlet. But to my mind, I'm a comedian.

When I started doing the Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb updates [I realised] that people are actually incredibly interested and engaged: they just switch off because of the way that news and current affairs are communicated to them… Sometimes when I’m being harsh on myself, I'm like, the only reason I'm successful is because I stick a “fuck” in here or a “shit” there, or I call Donald Trump an arsehole. But I think people are angrier now and rightly so… You know, people always bash the BBC. I love the BBC and I get a lot of information from them. Where they struggle, it’s because – you know, you're not going to be able to have a BBC correspondent standing outside the White House calling Trump an arsehole. And that is actually what people want.

Because I genuinely believe, no matter how well-intentioned they are, they are entering a system of corporate interests who bankroll political parties and politicians to the point where they are reliant on that funding, especially as people have become more turned off from political parties so that no one's really a member any more. 

I think if you want to operate at the highest level of politics, you have to accept that this is what happens. You know, I think something like half of Keir Starmer's front bench have accepted money from Labour Friends of Israel. And that is not unconnected to the way that the party decided to deal with Gaza. It's just not. 

I write a script and do them in the churchyard at the end of my road. I started recording them in the church graveyard basically because it was quiet – I've got an elderly downstairs neighbour who used to get really pissed off at me.

I was doing a kind of fake rightwing bit recently and the husband of the priest came over and was like: “Excuse me, we've been seeing you using the churchyard a little bit… We've checked you out and we realise our kind of politics does align.” That was nice! Then a few months later I was recording and another priest not connected to that church was walking through and saw me. She was like: “Oh my God, you're the Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb guy. I am the priest for the church down the road. You must come and film in our graveyard.” 

She was such a caring and lovely person. She’s from Doncaster, probably an area you would describe as classically Reform. My grandad, who’s 86, still lives there and I’ve watched him get more and more extreme: he watches all this AI-generated rightwing bollocks that he doesn't realise is AI. But my grandma, who's from exactly the same area, would have found this stuff poisonous and is, to my mind, an antidote; proof that it's not a geographical thing, a background or an age thing. When she was alive, she was always “I don't know where he gets this stuff from, I don't know why he thinks this”, and I think there is this tendency, especially from younger people, to be like “well, it's the old bastards” and I’ve sometimes leaned into that, but political views are a choice. There is never any excuse to be hateful. There's never any excuse to vote Reform because you're from an area or you're of a generation. I think that's really lazy and it lets people off the hook.

My grandad loves them! This might be a mistake, but my mum downloaded TikTok for him so he could watch them. 

Do you know what I learned? That there really is a lot of nothing that happens in the civil service. And I'm always very reluctant to be like that, because there are lots of civil servants who are really brilliant, really smart and doing interesting things. But I cannot stress enough that for the four years I was there, I was basically achieving absolutely nothing. And this is kind of why I lost my mind. It's such an unwieldy machine; I mean, there are tens of thousands of people in the civil service and the priorities of a government change daily… You can work on something for months and then suddenly the government changes or the prime minister changes or the minister changes and they're not interested any more.

I would stop drilling in the fucking North Sea!

My comedy hero is Lee Evans. Because I grew up in Cyprus [where his parents still live], a lot of my comedy came from DVDs that I just managed to find. And I did a pantomime when I was, like, 11 and I was playing Buttons. And the guy playing the hairy fairy was a local Tommy Cooper impersonator and he told me that I looked like Lee Evans. And I was like, who's Lee Evans? And he gave me a DVD of him and he's been my comedy hero ever since. Charlie Brooker is also an inspiration.

Politically, there has been lots of positive change: Hungary booted out Viktor Orbán. Serbia booted out Vučić, Brazil booted out Flávio Bolsonaro. And even though there was looting, and people using them as an excuse to be violent, I feel kind of heartened by the protests [across Europe] because I hope that the people at the top are beginning to see that we can't take much more of it. 

You know, I went to see [the play] The Lives of Others with Keira Knightley. It’s about the Stasi and I thought it was amazing. And I was like, actually it's funny how different generations have different enemies. In 2026 [the enemy] is billionaires, tech oligarchs. Future historians will look back and say: that was the generation where these people had amassed the most insane wealth and they were using it to poison and ruin everything. So seeing people take to the streets makes me feel that at least we are doing something to let them know that we won't put up with it.

I had a rare sense of relief at seeing the Democrats do as well as expected. But, much like the last election here in the UK, there is definitely a sense that this result is a “people have had enough of Trump” rather than fallen in love with the Democrats. Having said that, the victory of Abdul El-Sayed [the leftwing Democrat who won in Michigan and will become the first Muslim senator in the US] makes me cautiously optimistic that the US may be capable of some radicalism. I wait with bated breath for what the crusty orange wotsit does with his remaining power abroad, though. I feel like his next foreign policy move will wipe the tentative smiles off our faces. 

I have a cat called Mush. She brings me joy.

My God, I don’t. It's a real problem, and this is gonna sound really problematic – the only place I can switch off is the pub. And that's not to say I'm an alcoholic, but it's the pub or a holiday. I live in a small flat in Walthamstow and work from home the whole time. It's got to the point where if I'm at home, my brain is just in work mode and I really struggle to switch off. I have to physically remove myself and put a pint in my hand.  

I think Nigel Fararsehole might be my favourite that I've come up with recently.

The State of This! A Thicky Thicky Dumb Dumb’s Guide to British Politics is published by Bonnier (RRP £16.99; buy it at a discount at the Nerve Bookshop)