From Aziz Nesin to Deniz Göktaş: The price of comedy in Turkey.

In Turkey, comedy has long done more than make people laugh — it has tested the country's limits of free expression. And that test plays out the same way, across every era, under every government.

Aziz Nesin is the towering figure of Turkish satirical tradition. In 1946, he co-founded the weekly satirical magazine Marko Paşa with Sabahattin Ali and Rıfat Ilgaz. His writing didn't just unsettle Ankara — it disturbed world leaders:

Queen Elizabeth, King Farouk of Egypt and the Shah of Iran all pressed criminal charges against him over his pieces. His book Azizname landed him on trial and four months in prison — he was ultimately acquitted. In 1993, he was targeted in the Sivas Massacre. He survived. He kept writing.

Cartoonist Musa Kart was taken to court for drawing then-Prime Minister Erdoğan. In 2005, Penguen magazine faced demands for millions in damages after depicting Erdoğan as various animals on its cover.

In 2011, cartoonist Bahadır Baruter was prosecuted for "publicly degrading religious values adopted by a section of the public." In 2016, LeManmagazine's special issue on the coup attempt was confiscated, protests were held outside its offices, and staff received threats.

In 2026, Deniz Göktaş was detained at the airport after a stand-up show watched 10 million times on YouTube. The charges: "degrading religious values" and "insulting the President."

The grounds shift — obscenity, insult, religious values, public order. The pattern doesn't.

Humour theorist Simon Critchley, in On Humour (2002), argues that comedy doesn't merely entertain — it functions as a structural tool for questioning the legitimacy of power. That is precisely why systems with authoritarian tendencies take comedy seriously. Because comedy deserves to be taken seriously.

In Turkey, the same question has been asked in every era: where does making people laugh end and where does crime begin? And in every era, the answer has been sought in courtrooms.

Aziz Nesin asked that question in 1946. Deniz Göktaş is asking it in 2026. The distance between them: eighty years, the same case.

Is a society's tolerance for political satire a measure of its democratic health?