What Europe needs now is the Terry Pratchett treatment

WELL, there goes the neighbourhood. The lunatics took over the asylum years ago, but now the clowns have taken over the circus: Biffo Merkel, Boffo Sarkozy, Bunga-Bunga Berlusconi and Pongo Papandreou, the poodle who bit back. It's not just Evangelos "Gummo" Venizelos, the Greek finance minister, who's doubled over with a hurty tummy. Right now, it's all of us. (And don't forget the Junckers who started threatening Pongo. Actually it was just Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the Eurozone finance ministers. But one Juncker is enough.)

When times are tough and unpredictable and the people in "charge" are getting more slapstick by the minute then hitting back by laughing at them is the only way out of the general gloom.

But how do you laugh at a situation when Greece (definitely), the Euro (almost certainly), the EU (probably) and the global economy (quite possibly) are, right this very second, circling the drain?

For that, we have to turn to the great comedic writers.

Alan Coren could have done it justice. He's the man who managed to turn that monstrous homicidal booby with the fridge full of severed heads, Idi Amin, into a global figure of mockery.

Douglas Adams could probably have done it, too, though whether he would have done is a different story. He'd have planned it out, written synopses and proposals, and agonised over the title, but written it? I don't know.

The problem facing any writer is that the euro-clowns are doing for real what a satirist would have them doing as a parody.

Sarkozy really is a smirking twazzock. Merkel really is a stern ball-breaker who's worked her way up from the bleakness of the East – which may be why she is so insouciant about inflicting austerity on Greece; when she was a kid, it wasn't called "austerity" but "life" – but still looks alarmingly like Les Dawson.

And the rest of the pack, too, are living cartoons. What's a humorist (dreadful word) to do?

What you do if you're Terry Pratchett is you go elsewhere altogether.

You duck out of this entire physical system of how-things-are, and you create a totally different one. You start with a giant turtle, then four slightly less giant elephants atop each other, and on them, a 10,000-mile wide, flat disc. And onto that Discworld, you place people who are recognisable from this one.

Pratchett's Chair of Indeterminate Studies would be quite at home in Cambridge; the Asperger-ish Stanley, who was brought up by peas and invented stamp-collecting, is familiar to anyone who's ever dealt with the IT department. The ex-alcoholic, working-class copper Sam Vimes, and his idle, dim sergeant, would be at home in any TV cop show.

I used to dismiss Pratchett as suitable only for geeks and spods, the sort of stuff read by people who weren't quite socialised enough to join the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy Fan Club. Then I got involved in a film adaptation of one of his books, at which point I realised Pratchett was a genius and, more importantly, like all great comic writers, a fundamentally serious man.

Pratchett's - I should say, Sir Terry's – latest book, Snuff, is his fiftieth novel. It's a fine satire on police procedurals, gritty crime novels, Wodehousean rustic fantasies of country-house life, Dickens, and those awful girls you get in Jane Austen novels.

On the way it takes on the county set, the marginalised, the problems and idiocies of multiculturalism and the inevitable corruption and decadence of entrenched power. And it's funny - there's a children's author who has made a great hit with The Wee-Wee Man and various poo- and bogey-based stories – but in the sense that everyone is revealed but few are irrecoverably diminished.

To be properly funny is to be serious.

Our situation in Europe right now is serious, but not funny.

We need Sir Terry. We need him to bring Biff, Boff, Bunga-Bunga Berlusconi and all their associates to Discworld and show them what's what. Just as long as he does it while any of us still have the money to buy a copy.

• Snuff by Terry Pratchett, Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-38-561926-4

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