There were no seats, so the audience had to stand or settle for the floor. Those of us on our feet had been warned not to bump into the giant camera around which we were huddled.

“You guys feel comfortable? No? Excellent!” shouted correspondent Naomi Karavani.

Then, the much-anticipated entrance: Our host, comedian Lee Camp, 36, with his asymmetric middle-part and Jesus beard, appeared abruptly through the door and traversed the small crowd. Raucous cheers and applause greeted him as he reached his desk and began to hover over his chair. While a production assistant hooked a cable up to his ear, Camp spread the lapels of his blazer and rotated his body, slowly, so all could see that his t-shirt bore a logo for Ingsoc, the ruling party from George Orwell’s “1984.”

It was nine days after the U.S. election, and we were in the Washington, D.C. studios of the Kremlin-funded TV network Russia Today, branded RT America in the U.S.