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And here is the noose

In the US, it's often savage. In the UK, it's frequently surreal. And here, well, it's been spotty. Patrick Freyne examines television satire across three nations

From left: the presenters of '10 O'Clock Live', David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker, Lauren Laverne and Jimmy Carr

Jon Stewart fronts 'The Daily Show'

Chris Morris's 'The Day Today'

'The Thick of It' spin-off 'In the Loop'

The 'Après Match' lads

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This week Channel 4 launched 10 O'Clock Live, a new comedy and current affairs show featuring learned and likeable actor/comedian/ columnist David Mitchell, quick-witted shock-comedian Jimmy Carr, witty and wise television presenter Lauren Laverne, and acerbic and grumpy writer Charlie Brooker. The same team presented Channel 4's Alternative Election Night last year. They're funny, impeccably well-dressed and unafraid of political sophistication. "The tagline is 'unashamedly intelligent', but I'm seeing it as funny, but also a bit thinky," says Lauren Laverne.

Clearly 10 O'Clock Live aspires to become the British Daily Show. And that would be hard to achieve, even if, as people keep commenting, recessions are a good time for satirists. Since its launch as a "fake news" programme on a fringe cable network Comedy Central in 1996, The Daily Show has emerged to become a genuine force in American politics. Mocking the news wasn't new in America. Saturday Night Live
has had regular news parodies over the years and even today The Onion News Network does an amazing job parodying 24-hour rolling news, but nothing else has come close to the influence of Jon Stewart and his team.

The Daily Show, like spin-off The Colbert Report (in which Stephen Colbert parodies the style and content of Fox News ideologues like Bill O'Reilly) has become a trusted news sources in its own right for a generation of people disenchanted with mainstream politics and reportage. In a post-Bush world, Stewart may lack a comedy villain (Armando Iannucci recently said that because Obama was "tragic not comic" he wasn't a great subject for satire), but his viewing figures have held up and he recently led a "March for Sanity" in Washington, a mass rally in response to the right-wing Tea Party movement, and an event which many left-wing activists may have taken a bit more seriously than he did.

For satire to thrive like this, you need a sense of crisis, and the US, thanks to its ever-hysterical news networks, feels like it's in a permanent crisis. Over the same period the UK has felt like a more complacent and benign place, and much of the skill of observational comedians and impressionists in boom-time was focused, not on politics, but on pop culture and celebrity.

Righteous indignation is at the core of the best satire, but for a while the anger of ordinary people couldn't really be counted on, so the standout British satire in recent times has been dependent on the personal ire of two idiosyncratic individuals – Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci. In the mid '90s, this duo shepherded the absurdist fake news show The Day Today from radio to television (bringing Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge character to public attention in the process), and both men spent the next decade responding to public complacency with a very un-Stewart-like and very British extremism.

Iannucci's The Thick of It, an evisceration of the media-obsessed Blair government, depended for effect on the baroque and foul-mouthed tirades of an Alistair Campbell-esque spin doctor called Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi). Morris, on the other hand, took the format of The Day Today and turned it into Brasseye, a more extreme programme in which he fooled celebrities into making announcements about non-existent charities, created Escher-like news graphics (which now seem to be copied by real news outlets), and focused in on issues (race, crime and paedophilia to take just three) that were bound to make people uncomfortable and would inflame the shock-hungry tabloids.

Unlike Jon Stewart, whose incisive critiques of media culture tapped into the zeitgeist and provided something over which the disenfranchised could gather and bond, the satirists of the UK were raging in the face of political apathy. The success of Brasseye (which can be measured in the levels of tabloid outrage it generated) said more about Morris's strength of personality than the British appetite for satire (it's unsurprising that he spent most of the last decade engaged in more obscure projects until last year's Four Lions), while Iannucci's plaudits had to wait until the public's own annoyance with the discourse had grown to match his own in time for the Thick of It spin-off movie In the Loop.

When it comes to television, Ireland has a spottier satirical tradition. Hall's Pictorial Weekly, in which Eamon Morrissey's depiction of Liam Cosgrave as the Minister for Hardship was said to have helped bring down the government in 1977. Since then, as in Britain, the satirical zeal has been diluted by self-satisfied wealth.

We've had the good-natured ribbing of The Panel, the nihilistic celebrity obsession of Podge and Rodge and the affectionate portraiture of Bull Island. In more recent years, as the economic tide was turning, there were a couple of noble failures. This is Nightlive, a spoof news programme starring former publisher John Ryan, was launched in early 2009, when, as Ryan says, "everyone was still quite in denial about what was happening". It was sometimes very funny but the targets weren't defined enough (it seemed more focused on the boom than the bust) and it seemed out of step with the general public. ("It felt like we'd just farted in the lift," says Ryan.) In contrast, by the time Arthur Matthews and Paul Woodful produced Val Falvey a year later, the satirists weren't angry enough for the viewers; small-time TD Falvey (Ardal O'Hanlon) seemed like a ludicrous buffoon, while in the public imagination politicians had morphed into something much more sinister.

So while it's a truism that hard times lead to good satire, it's easier said than done. In the US The Daily Show still holds sway, and in the UK the success of The Alternative Election Night and the launch of 10 O'Clock Live suggests that there's an appetite for satirical analysis. In Ireland, to be fair, there are reasons to be hopeful. Après Match's recent incursion on The Late Late Show (where they spoofed Brian Lenihan and Fintan O'Toole) was hilariously pointed about the Irish people's complicity in their own downfall, and David McSavage's faux-documentary The Savage Eye, though not satire per se, has an undercurrent of anger that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

John Ryan is less optimistic. He worries that the Irish zeitgeist is more inclined to fuzzy nostalgia than biting satire. "You can see it in The All Ireland Talent Show," he says. "Right now we're all about step dancing, the GAA, communities and a sort of humourless reaching back into the past. I mean, Mrs Brown's Boys got an audience of about 800,000 last week, while The Savage Eye got something like 130,000. I'm not sure people want television satire in Ireland. We don't get angry, we get nostalgic." Maybe someone should satirise that.

'10 O'Clock Live' airs on Channel 4 on Thursday. John Ryan's current satirical output can be found, not on the television, but at broadsheet.ie

Funny girls: satire's leading ladies

Having proved her sharp wit on shows like Mock the Week and Never Mind the Buzzcocks and demonstrated her cultural nous with her regular slot on BBC arts programme The Culture show, Lauren Laverne is clearly no token female addition to the 10 O'Clock Live team. However, when lining up their 'supergroup' of talent, the programme makers cannot be unaware of the debate that raged last year when feminist blog Jezebel described The Daily Show as a boys' club where women's contributions were often ignored and dismissed. This prompted a refutation from the female employees of that show, but nonetheless, it's a fact that women, as per in other spheres of comedy, are underrepresented when it comes to satire. Notable exceptions include reporters Samantha Bee and Kristen Schaal on The Daily Show, Rebecca Front who appears in The Thick of It; impressionists like Dead Ringers' Jan Ravens and Ronni Ancona and worthy of an honourable mention is US comedian Sarah Haskins, who comments on products and advertising aimed at women. (Check out the Target Women segments on YouTube.) One of Laverne's regular slots will be revealing bizarre but true scientific facts; it remains to be seen whether the programme's makers will make sufficient use of her not inconsiderable skills.