In the never-ending struggle against political aggression, oppression and exploitation, sometimes it's necessary to go for the jugular.

Some major-league malefactors, like last century's Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, can be defeated by nothing short of all-out war. And a great many lesser empires and dictatorships can be countered only by combinations of bloodshed, sanctions and international law.

But those of us who are too powerless, passive, pacifist or just plain petrified to fight outright, and too squeamish or sane to serve as assassins or suicide bombers, still have a potent part to play in defence of right against might.

There's not much point in our going for the jugular, however. Tyrants are too thick-skinned to be sensitive to straight-out criticism and accusations, and too well-protected by self-serving legislation, squads of sycophants and various species of police.

Thank goodness, then, that most potentates are fatally pompous, and thus vulnerable to our going for the jocular. Fighting their hauteur with humour, making farces of their shows of force, satirising their stupidity, making comedy out of their cupidity, deriding their derelictions and depradations and generally exposing them for the bunch of clowns so many of them actually are.

Though I grant you that some of our targets are so talented at making fools of themselves that it's hard for us to make them look even more ridiculous. Barisan Nasional MPs Mohd Said Yusof and Bung Mokhtar Radin of the bocor fame, for example. Or Tourism Minister Tengku Adnan Mansor with his classic "Out of 10,000 unemployed bloggers, 8,000 are women."

And of course Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin aka Zam on virtually any topic you can name, but especially on his core concerns, media freedom and the ethics and responsibilities of journalists.

Bush tops the list

But even these Malaysian masters of self-inflicted absurdity would find it difficult to surpass George W Bush, who, when addressing the recent Apec summit in Australia, at first got it totally confused with Opec and thought he was in Austria.

The best joke of all at Apec, however, was on John Howard's massive security effort and the police in particular: the penetration of not just one but two of Sydney's "ring of steel" checkpoints by a fake motorcade manned by members of the cast and management of the ABC TV programme The Chaser, whose star, Craig Reucassel, was disguised as Osama bin Laden.

Unsurprisingly, some officials failed to see the humour in this prank. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Police Assistant Commissioner Dave Owens commented that "While I enjoy like everyone else a good laugh, this isn't funny."

NSW Police Minister David Campbell tried putting a positive spin on this fiasco with the statement that "I think this reinforces that Apec security has been successful by the mere fact that 11 people have been arrested," but added that he also "did not see the funny side at all."

But Australia's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, of whom I have to confess I'm usually not an avid fan, did see the funny side, commenting that the culprits from The Chaser "were clearly not going to harm anybody in a physical way. They presumably were, as is the nature of their show, aiming to humiliate a lot of well-known people."

The international media including CNN, NBC, CBS, the BBC and Fox News apparently saw the funny side too, along with over 90 percent of the 28,451 people who voted in an smh.com.au poll on the question.

Some letters to the editor also spoke volumes in favour of the pranksters. Mike Fullerton of Croydon wrote, in part: "Satire and wit beat pomposity and paranoia. Congratulations to The Chaser team. Their little stunt pricked the Apec bubble more effectively than an army of protestors."

And Earl White of Oyster Bay wrote that "Large chunks of humanity lived under nasty, despotic leaders, both in the past and sadly even today. Imagine how short the regimes of the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and others would have been if the people had been able to have a good laugh about how ridiculous they really were. While we can laugh and thumb our noses at government we will always be free."

'21-bum salute'

I guess most of these people also heartily approved of another cheeky protest that drew its share of laughs from local and global audiences: a "21-bum salute" by a group baring their bottoms and bearing a banner reading "Australia welcomes war criminal Bush."

All of which goes to prove, as if more proof was needed, that it can often be far more effective to go for the jocular rather than the jugular. Much more fun as well, as you'll agree if you're as devoted a fan as I am of some leading Malaysian exponents of the art of creative ridicule. Like Zunar, not just the nation's one and only political cartoonist, as far as I'm aware, but also one of that rare breed in his profession who's as devastating verbally as he is visually.

Then there's the incomparable Raja Petra Kamarudin of Malaysia-today.net, who can be as hilarious as he's hard-hitting, and very often manages to be both at once.

And, though I'm not sure she'll thank me for this mention, as from the little I've seen of her in real life she seems a most modest and unassuming lady, there's the hilarious, faux-dizzy blonde Lulu of whatalulu.blogspot.com.

She's as simultaneously scatty and scathing a political commentator as any I'm aware of, and one of my all-time favourite practitioners of criticism in a jocular vein.