What's going on? It seems like every time I switch on my TV, so-called comedians and panel show celebrities are telling racist and other offensive jokes.
Only the other day, Jimmy Carr was on a quiz panel spouting a tirade of racist jokes about Travellers and their protest at Dale Farm. Two days later Jeremy Clarkson was on the BBC's One Show saying that strikers should be shot in front of their families.
His excuse? It was only a joke. I don't recall the same leniency being applied to the two young men who jokingly called on people to riot on facebook over the summer.
There has been a trend going toward obscene, shock-jock comedy. You might call it “taboo-busting” but since when has respect for minorities, sometimes vulnerable minorities, been some kind of ghastly hypocritical sham? And it isn’t enough to say its ironic humour. A situational irony is action which achieves the opposite of the intentions behind the action. This is important for stand up comedy.
Humour is very specific, especially when it comes to live performance. All the great comedians (great by consensus, I would say – your Hicks, your Pryors, your Bruces) took care to cultivate their audience, so their comedy would be understood on stage. It’s a common observation that if a routine goes down well 9 times out of 10 the 10th time, where it is poorly received, is that particular audience’s fault – they just didn’t get it.
It is well and good to say:
Comedy should be about challenging authority and convention, not laughing at the most oppressed and exploited in society. The fact is we don't live in an equal world.
I suppose it should but, if we’re being picky, the first thing comedy should be about is making people laugh. Comedy can challenge authority and convention, it can also point out the ironies of the mundane, it can take you on flights of fantasy; it can even lift the lid on the darker areas of humanity – giving you a sense of relief that you’re not the only one to think that (even if you know it's wrong). Bill Hicks was brilliant at ‘dark poetry’, Frankie Boyle, I think, has his moments too.
Popular comedy started to move away from the Alternative Ideal when it became truly popular. In 1993 Newman and Baddiel played Wembley Arena and Comedy was the New Rock and Roll. Rock and Roll is a broad, cool medium. Stand up comedy is very specifically intense, hot.
How do you make 12,000 people simultaneously laugh? You can’t lose any part of the room when you’re playing to that number (as the top comedians do quite frequently now). This is where the cutting edge is blunted. It leads back into the point about irony. It is, or should be, a subtle rhetorical tool, what are the prospects for successful irony at a stadium gig? Everyone knows the example of Al Murray, a character comedian who started off satirising Little Englanders but ended up going native. Given the history of comedy more generally, you have to wonder what future there is in ironic satire. Racists loved Alf Garnett, Yuppies took Loadsamoney to their bosom and today Hipsters adore the Dickhead Song.
Though there’s clearly a lot more to establish, we need to understand how stand up comedy went from cutting edge to middle of the road to lowest common denominator. Otherwise you might fairly conclude that, in the 1980s, people were right-on, whereas these days they’re giggling reactionary scum.