One way to gauge the intentions of would-be authoritarians is to see how far they tolerate the jesters. An early sign of Vladimir Putin’s quest to bring Russian media to heel was the 2001 axing of Kukly (Puppets), a TV show that often satirised the thin-skinned president. There were Putinesque echoes in last week’s suspension in the US of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show by Disney-owned ABC — two months after his fellow comic Stephen Colbert, to whom President Donald Trump has a similar aversion, was taken off air. Kimmel’s return this week after a noisy