The satirical show "24 Minutes" with Zoran Kesić has been cancelled after 13 years. The television station's new owners explain it with expensive production and marginal commercial return. Two months before an election. The show that mocked those in power the loudest. And all that is left is an accounting argument.

"Is it not telling that two months before an election, one of the loudest critical voices is cancelled over supposed unprofitability?" Kesić asked in a television interview. It is hard to see how anyone would even attempt to argue the opposite.

He says the contract was signed this summer and that nobody mentioned profitability then. Nor, he claims, was he offered a lower price - and he explains why: "They did not offer a lower price so they would not risk us accepting it." Because if they had accepted, the show would have continued, and by his reading that was never part of the plan.

When people turn out for a TV show

A rally of support was held in Belgrade. Citizens came, journalists, actors. Olivera Kovačević, president of the executive board of Serbia's Journalists' Association, said the line people will remember: "Your laughter and satire were dangerous because laughter frees you from fear." And she added that a society like this raises propagandists, not journalists. After the speeches, the crowd set off towards the parliament building with banners.

Kesić himself admitted the whole situation feels schizophrenic. "The mission of our show was to point at the victims of this regime, and suddenly it turned out people want to help us," he said. About the moment he learned the show was being shut down, he did not pretend: "I felt awful. I felt a great injustice had been done to us. I was sad and furious. I wanted revenge and I still want revenge, I want to fight."

The revenge will be a new season. From 19 September the show moves to YouTube, to a channel with over 600,000 subscribers. "That will be our medium, our television," he says. And he points out something usually lost in this kind of story: with the cancellation, 13 or 14 families lost one of their sources of income.

What the cancellation tells everyone else

Kesić does not see this as only his problem. He sees it as a demonstration. "This is a message to all the other colleagues who do their job conscientiously that the same can happen to them, if this is how a watched and well-known show, a huge brand, ended up," he explained.

Will he be sharper online? No, he says - he has no intention of being vulgar or turning into something he essentially is not. "We will stay decent and dangerous. It seems I am one of the most dangerous people in our country, along with my team, and somehow I rather like that."

His reading is that these are the last twitches of a government on its way out that is afraid of laughter. "With our humour we cut much deeper than colleagues in the news programmes. We managed to make even the people the government counts on as safe votes laugh," he says.

If there is a lesson in it, it is as old as the Balkans. A news programme can be ignored, accused of bias, countered with another news programme. Mockery does not work that way. Laughter does not ask the viewer to pick a side - it just shows them how small the thing is that they stay silent about every day. Which is why it gets shut down first.