Exhibition: Rude Britannia, Tate Britain

You wonder if satire is a particularly British accommodation. This jaunty exhibition at Tate Britain is not only packed with Gillrays and Hogarths and Scarfes, the searing sexual satires of Sarah Lucas and the swivel-eyed Spitting Image Maggie but it's also crammed to the gills with so much anger. Shaking, brittle fury. A baton of finger-wagging opprobrium passed from one generation to the next.

And not the anger that has artists firing wildly at canvasses making a crude, splattered attempt at catharsis.

No, this anger - and this is what makes it British - this anger is hidden behind neat smiles and embarrassed British stiffness of lip finding voice in tight, toxic, scalpel sharp depictions of grotesquerie.

As if anger fully expurgated was unseemly, and it was better handled out of sight with a sense of decorum and dismissable silliness.

It was all very passive-aggressive and hoity-toity witty. So much anger, so much repression. It has to come out somewhere. Either in boils or pancreatic disruptions or, here, with four centuries of cartoons and satires and biting caricatures creating an army of the unpalatable and perverse.

That is not to denigrate the artform. Anyone who believes that cartoons are tomorrow's chip paper have never seen Hogarth in his finest form, fired up by fury but felled by despair.

Or George Cruickshank's Worship Of Bacchus with which he tried to capture alcohol's evil doing in an epic wall-sized work, deconstructed here by The Guardian's Steve Bell.

But - inevitably - there is fun to be had. The work is immediate. Form and message in sync. As pretension is the target of the satire, any pretension in the art would be breathtaking in its hypocrisy.

So the images and installations are robust, cheeky, devilish, frivolous, upsetting (in some cases) but never less than to the point.

As if that weren't enough wit, the guest curators add another layer. Viz's Roger Mellie curates one room.

Harry Hill's absurdist tendencies dominate another.

Gerald Scarfe updates some classic caricatures in woodcuts. Indeed, there is a re-creation of Scarfe's studio, showing how he prepares for his Sunday Times political cartoon.

In a stand-out show, Rude Britannia demonstrates that the strategies and techniques of the satirists may have changed but their targets - hierarchies, social pressures, self-delusion, sex, power and politics - have not budged an inch in 400 years.

We still need court jesters to give us a kick up the bum, a cake in the clock and a poke in the eye, all delivered to the shuddering fart sound of a deflating balloon.

Until September 5. Go to tate.org.uk

- Photograph: Courtesy Of Andrew Edmunds. Detail of Thomas Rowlandson's drawing of a French dentist's specimen.

– From June 2010