In an era when geopolitics can feel overwhelming and remote, sometimes the best messengers are made of felt and foam. We’re talking, of course, about Puppet Regime, the satirical brainchild of GZERO Media that has been recasting the world’s most powerful leaders with eight fingers and no legs since 2017.
Longtime fans of the Regime will recall skits imagining everything from Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Narendra Modi being stuck in high school together, to Vladimir Putin accidentally inviting Volodymyr Zelensky to his holiday party. What began originally as a gag gift – a puppet of Ian Bremmer inspired by his lifelong love of The Muppet Show – has evolved into a sharp, comedic lens on a world order that can feel surreal and unmistakably theatrical.
Readers of The New York Times may have spotted Puppet Regime in a recent feature on how the series has taken shape on our PBS-affiliated show GZERO World as well as on Instagram and YouTube. In honor of that recognition, we’re giving GZERO Daily readers a behind-the-scenes look at who’s been pulling the strings since day one: Alex Kliment, the Regime’s master puppeteer. Kliment, who performs most voices himself – including Trump’s “jazz scat”-like cadence – explains that the magic of the regime lies in translating high geopolitics into the often petty, recognizable dramas of human relationships.
How did Puppet Regime begin?
Ian was a huge fan of The Muppet Show growing up. At some point, a friend of his learned about this and, as a gag, made a puppet of Ian and then gave it to him. It sat around the office for a couple of years, and no one really knew what to do with it. Then, in 2017, when we decided to start GZERO Media, the public-facing media company of Eurasia Group, Ian came to me and said, “Hey, I have this idea to try and do a puppet satire show.” He knew I had some experience with creative film and music-type things. I said, sure – why not?
It started as a lark of an idea that we would be part of the GZERO World with Ian Bremmer show we were pitching to a PBS-affiliate at the time. It grew out of the question: why isn’t there a good, imaginative satire series on global politics? Something that rises above the lowest common denominator, something smart and sharp, which you can learn from while you’re laughing and skewering all the world leaders who need skewering.
What were the biggest pieces of inspiration for the series when it began in 2017?
If you think we’re living in a time of tremendous upheaval and a reordering of how the world works, this is when that period started. 2016 was when Trump was elected, Brexit occurred, and a migration crisis was unfolding in Europe. That was the time when it felt most urgent and opportune to think of a way of both satirizing and explaining a world that suddenly felt like it had been totally turned on its head. [And as far as creative influences, I’d point to the classic American edutainment cartoon “Schoolhouse Rock,” the legendary British puppet satire show “Spitting Image,” and “Kukly,” a Russian puppet satire show so scathing that Vladimir Putin cancelled it during his second year in office – something we alluded to in a recent episode on censorship.
GZERO readers and viewers of Puppet Regime will be curious to learn how the sausage is made. How do you get ideas rolling?
There’s absolutely no shortage of material from the real world. In fact, the opposite is true. There’s too much material coming in. Part of that, admittedly, is Trump. He’s a character completely unlike any other in the world now, or really ever, in the sense of providing material for satire. Whether you love the guy or hate him, and there’s very little in between these days, the nature of his personality and his politics make him the ultimate irreverent disruptor.
But beyond Trump, I find that some of the best versions of what we do are when we take this kind of rarefied world of high geopolitics and intrigue and just make it the most mundane, catty BS, like text messages and phone calls that you could have amongst just regular people. People find geopolitics totally mystifying. But at the end of the day, it is about relationships between people and power dynamics. That’s the fodder for everything from a sitcom to a Greek tragedy.
One of the best bits we have is the “This Authoritarian Life” podcast. You have Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping conducting their affairs via a bro podcast, [in which Putin casts himself as a wellness expert] which is a trope that is well known to everybody now. There's something fun about injecting the global politics of the day into this totally mundane format. A lot of it is listening to the news and trying to think of ways to translate it into that way.
The best skits kind of write themselves. I write the skits myself, many with Riley Callanan, who is well known to GZERO readers as a writer for the newsletter. I find that if she and I need to sit there for like six or seven hours, really wrangling a script, they can still turn out great, but the purity of the concept is best when this skit just works and writes itself in 10 minutes. Either way, when it’s locked, I’ll record the voices kind of as a radio play and then we shoot the puppet characters individually against a green screen in a tiny studio in the back of our office, synching to that audio. Our super awesome video editor, Miguel Saenz-Flores, cuts it all together, puts magic on it, and it goes out into the world.
People who follow Puppet Regime on Instagram fall on a pretty wide ideological spectrum. Known followers include the massive fan club of leftwing Brazilian president Lula da Silva, at least one Trump White House official, and the official accounts of Emirati royal families. That said, who do you think Puppet Regime is for?
I think the reason that Puppet Regime works for such a wide range of people is that, whether you’re right or left, there’s something that feels sort of disconnected about the people who run the world right now. The best version of Puppet Regime is not necessarily satirizing one side or the other, but rather an entire system of governance that feels totally alienated from what actual people care about.
I think there’s also something magical about a puppet. It’s animated enough to be engaging, but it’s not a human being. Like when you see a Saturday Night Live skit, they’re brilliant, of course, but when you see a person impersonating a politician, your first thought is always what the person’s politics are. Whereas when you see a crazy caricature of a politician, it’s disarming in a way that lets you go further with the satire than you could with a human actor.
Puppet Regime is at its best when it is bringing a smart version of satire that you are laughing at but also learning from. That’s a key part of the GZERO approach, and it’s why it grew so naturally as a GZERO thing. It’s a piece of really smart entertainment and clarification about what’s going on. Satire is an incredibly powerful tool for that. I think there’s an important distinction between it and a work of analysis or journalism. But it’s still aiming at the same thing, which is to explain a confusing world to people in a way that they can understand and want to understand. And you know, having eight fingers and no legs is a great way to do that.
