Jane Perrone and Mark Oliver on Political Satire on the Web

Democrat presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once observed of the Republican party symbol that "the elephant has a thick skin".

George Bush junior's hide is being tested to its limits by satirists' barbs during the current election campaign, although monkeys, not elephants, dominate the caricatures.

The satirists' art is to unearth a candidate's unflattering characteristic and worry away at it like a loose tooth, however harsh or broad-brushed the caricature may be. Or, as Barry Burden, assistant professor of government at Harvard University, puts it, satire is "a powerful medium for making a simple point about some absurdity or contraction in public life".

For instance bushorchimp.com carefully aligns pictures of America's commander in chief with monkeys bearing not dissimilar expressions. There's even more monkey fun at stepahsmith.com

Satire matters in US politics, both on the late night chat and politics television shows and on the internet. The talk shows, dominated by the figures of David Letterman, Jay Leno and Jon Stewart, have traditionally been the natural outlet of such comedy.

But the internet has provided another platform, without the boundaries of taste and fairness imposed on national TV. The net is humming with political satire: Bush gets a kicking in a lot of it, and to a lesser extent, so does his presidential challenger, the Democrats' Senator John Kerry.

Yet as Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, a comedian who is also writing a PhD on comedy and the 2004 campaign, wrote on the net magazine Gadflyer, so far, no one has identified a killer Kerry characteristic to lampoon: "Kerry's got it easy. His dominant caricatures? Botox, a giant head, and a rich wife. Not really the stuff of biting satire."

(The Democrats no doubt thank god that Howard Dean - and his infamous scream - didn't get anywhere in his bid for the party's nomination.)

Some of the funniest and arguably most piercing stuff is that which is closest to the edge of bad taste, or, to be honest, right bang over the top.

You might find, for example, a facetious, fictitious account of Kerry castigating these 'kids today' in the armed forces who got caught torturing Iraqis. In the Vietnam veterans day, they were much more discreet, the skit goes on.

In a spoof news report on the same issue, which has been topping the US political agenda, you have the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, admitting he is only condemning the abuse after the pictures emerged. "We all know what crybabies detained terrorists are," he says.

You can write your own Bush speeches at Albinoblacksheep.com, choosing from a selection of words and phrases, including "Afghanistan and beyond", "deceitful dictators" and "broken treaties". It will come as no surprise that this is the work of the Stop the War Coalition

Perhaps the best sounding URL among the satire sites is johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com. The rubric behind the site is that while John Kerry might not be a knight in shining armour, he is better than Bush.

However pointlessly rude it may seem, Burden believes satire can touch the voters who put themselves out of reach of the mainstays of political campaigns: the attack advertisements, the TV debates, the baby-kissing and glad-handing.

"It takes time and effort to read the newspapers and make political judgements," Burden says. "A single editorial cartoon or comedian's joke can convey as much information as a long conversation or television program. But satire does it much more efficiently. A surprising number of people are getting most of their news filtered through satire."

Can jokes influence the way voters act at the ballot box, though? Goldthwaite Young's research into comedy and the 2000 election suggests that uninformed late-night TV viewers are more likely to be influenced by political jokes than political junkies, who will have already formed an opinion of the president.

"[political junkies] have so much other information about Bush that this one joke (or even a whole lot of them) probably won't carry much weight in the end," she writes.

Such stereotypes are not simply the domain of the satirists: Republican supporters can see Bush dressed up as a superhero, plus a selection of Kerry-bashing cartoons on the Republican national committee website.

Sometimes, though content that resembles satire at first glance tends to be anything but: take the Moms for Kerry site, which includes a campaign to support troops in Iraq called "Operation Mommy Hugs". Over at McSweeneys.net they have a Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush which sounds like it might be funny but each day actually has a serious charge against his administration. Day 33 includes the sobering line: "For his first two years in office, the president's staff spent only 30 to 45 minutes a week discussing policy with him. Clinton spent the same amount of time per day on the subject."