I was watching a docu-drama about the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. A nice middle-class family, teachers I think, were being put through a struggle session by young fanatics, in front of a bewildered, joyless crowd. And I thought to myself, this is just like watching the BBC’s ‘comedy’ show Live at the Apollo.1
How did British comedy come to this? Or rather, why were middle-class pseudo intellectuals allowed to do this to us?
The middle classes can be funny. Jane Austen had an eye for the quirks of human nature and a nice turn of phrase. If a joke still lands two centuries after it was written, that’s a pretty good joke.
Wisely, Jane Austen displayed her wit on the page, not the stage. If she had tried out for the ‘open mike’ night down at Ye Olde Dog and Trumpet, coming on between the bare knuckle fighters and a Jack Russell on a uni-cycle, she would have bombed, and she knew it. Jane Austen was a middle-class genius, not a mid-witted pseudo-intellectual. See also Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
The Pythons, private school and Oxbridge, were my childhood heroes, but that was absurdist sketch based humour, not stand-up.2 There are Python sketches that make a point of not having a punch-line; that’s not going to work out too well at the end of the pier show in Great Yarmouth. Python avoided disaster, by staying in their it’s all getting rather silly lane.
Things really changed in the 1980s, when comedy became fashionable. To my peer group, it rivalled music in cultural importance; not knowing the best lines from last night’s episode of The Young Ones was a more egregious offence than liking Wham’s latest hit single.
The new comedians tried stand-up, tending towards character acting and slap-stick and often were very funny. They were pushing back against something they didn’t like, but they weren’t trying to cancel anybody, they were trying to be funnier.
With a few exceptions, Dave Allen springs to mind, the old guard weren’t too impressed and they, perhaps justly, bemoaned the youngsters lack of stage-craft. Playing a few college gigs and a revue at the Edinburgh Fringe isn’t quite the same challenge as playing to a hen night in Glasgow on a Friday night.
At the time, the criticism just sounded like jealousy. The old comedians, in their dinner jackets and bow-ties, reeked off naffness and ashtrays. I’m hardly ‘woke’, but their attitudes towards ethnic minorities, women, Irish, anyone who wasn’t a right wing fat-bloke; already looked crass and dated to me.
Being asked to watch an episode of ITV’s ‘The Comedians’ now, would be akin to your strange uncle Len asking you to have a look at the suppurations around his hernia scar. There will be some laughs, sure, but the experience will linger in all of the wrong ways.
As with all revolutions, the fervour is spent wiping out the old regime. What follows is an unseemly power grab, bitter in-fighting, denunciations, famine and a bloodbath.
Once the dictator or ruling junta are gone, all you are left with are draconian nonentities clinging on desperately to their office and salary. The peasantry, battered by years of indoctrination, have an instilled fear of individual excellence and no idea what freedom looks like.
I watched a Youtube clip of young, aspiring comedians watching a clip of Bill Hicks talking about the war in Iraq. The young comedians seemed a little sad that Bill’s otherwise left-leaning jokes, were ‘punching-down’, because Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard were the butt of some of the gags. Oh, dear.
Of course, I could be wrong. As a cultural experiment, the next time a teenager is referred to Prevent for Far Right sympathies, make him watch Mel Brook’s The Producers with electrodes attached to his head. Map his brain activity as he watches ‘Spring Time for Hitler’ and compare that with the effects of a patronising lecture at the Apollo. Then we’ll know for sure.
It’s not just the BBC. Yes, Netflix has some provocateurs, but it also has Hannah Gadsby.
It wasn’t quite as ground breaking as some would have you believe. They were following on from Spike Milligan, the son of a sergeant-major…and Terry Gilliam is… yes, American, I know.
Good observation. Most of this lies at the feet of the BBC. One day, Thomas, one day...
Who cannot like a good penile erectile dysfunction driven joke about one’s mother-in-law, or once the beauty of youth has gone, one’s wife.
I wouldn’t say my mother-in-law is big, but she kick-starts the jumbos at Heathrow.
Mother-in-law was at the door. I answered. “Mother-in-law! Don’t just stand there in the pouring rain,” I said, “go home.”
Mother-in-law commented that my new car had only one air-bag on the driver’s side. I said, jump in the passenger seat then.