Labour has outlawed banter Black comedy has become taboo

Have you heard the one about the Labour WhatsApp chat that got leaked? It was called “Trigger Me Timbers” and specialised in offensive banter. Health Minister Andrew Gwynne was the first and most high-profile group member to lose his job this week, before a second MP was reprimanded by the whips. Eleven local council members were also suspended for their contributions, reportedly including Gwynne’s wife. When I read about it, I laughed. Not at the sickening depravity of these people, you should understand, but at some of their material.

In particular, the puerility of Gwynne’s imaginary letter to a constituent raised a chuckle: “Dear resident, fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.” And I also enjoyed the Alan Partridge-like specificity of his death wish towards Nick the irritating cyclist: “I had positive visions of him getting mown down by an Elsa Waste HGV while he’s cycling to the Fallowfield Loop. We couldn’t be that lucky!” Most of the other stuff wasn’t up to much, though there was a passable riff on Black History Month involving Justin Trudeau.

As others in the press queue up to pass pained judgement on all the racism, sexism, homophobia, and ageism, I find myself at a loss. It seems a kind of amnesia has collectively infected nearly everybody, and I am one of the few remaining people with immunity. For I still remember the existence of a human activity called “joking”, and a particularly mordant variety of it called “black comedy”. As I recall, it used to be quite popular in the olden days, but has since gone the way of VHS and spangles. Quite possibly, everybody now thinks the name is racist.

Even weirder, the same affliction also seems to have obliterated a meaningful difference between “public” and “private”. Reading the press coverage with half an eye, you’d be forgiven for thinking Gwynne had hired Stockport Town Hall to try out a bold new stand-up routine. “Public” has now become synonymous with “potentially leakable” — which in practice means anything written down at all. You can question participants’ wisdom in committing their gags to a group chat — and, even more so, placing trust in whichever snake in their midst eventually grassed them up — but clearly they never intended the bantz to go mainstream.

An essential element of black or dark humour is the breaking of taboos. There are flagrant transgressions of morality codes; incongruent switches between earnest and bawdy registers; knowing double meanings, referring to things that can’t otherwise easily be said. Jonathan Swift did a lot of the latter — see a poem of his called “Oyster” (“No Colchester oyster/ Is sweeter and moister/ Your stomach they settle/ And rouse up your mettle.”) In the 20th century, this style of humour became especially literary: think of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert calling the teenage Lolita, perfectly accurately, his “ageing mistress”; or Evelyn Waugh’s Basil Seal inadvertently eating his lover Prudence in a cannibal feast in the appropriately named Black Mischief.

But black comedy was in the street, playground, and pub first. In the 17th century, there were hundreds of iterations of a song called “The Black Joke”, where “joke” also stood for what one contemporary explainer called “the monosyllable” or “a woman’s commodity”. Under communism, Poles would tell gags about starvation and Jews would jokingly remember Auschwitz with fondness. Eighties America had Challenger disaster jokes, while Eastern Europeans found comedy in the aftermath of Chernobyl.

In the Nineties, the UK had the Diana version (sample: “Why is Di like a mobile phone? They both die in tunnels.”) These lines were barely about Diana the woman at all — or, indeed, about poor mobile phone reception — and much more to do with the public mood at the time. They were the privately anarchic counterpoint to the oppressively monolithic tide of grief washing over the nation, the equivalent to getting a fit of the giggles at a funeral. The more unseemly it was, the funnier it became.

Since social media is the new street corner, it’s only fitting that the fun would have migrated there. Giving a group chat a silly title is the new version of naming your pub quiz team “Gossip Girls” or “Breaking Bald”. And since moral codes are everywhere these days, the world should — in theory, anyway — be our oyster, as it were. Surrounded as we so often are by the earnest, the pinch-lipped, the fanatical and the hypocritical, verbal transgressions beckon temptingly from every angle. Yet most feel constrained from taking them up.

Part of the problem is that our age is simultaneously blighted with tedious people who want to make the whole practice of joking a taboo as well. Academics — not a demographic well-known for their airy badinage — have been doing their best on this front for ages. A joke, we are told with a stern face, creates an ingroup and an outgroup. Now, you might have thought this was superfluous information, since quite obviously it does. The outgroup is the person looking puzzled and saying “I don’t get it”, while the ingroup laughs uproariously at your lines. On the other hand, if the joke is poor, the outgroup is the odd person smirking, and the ingroup are the silent and bemused ones. That is part of the glorious jeopardy of joke-telling — will you bring these people into your world for a shared moment of laughter, or place yourself on the other side of theirs?

But it’s commonly supposed to be much worse than this. Many jokes don’t so much create outgroups as bully existing ones; they “dehumanise” and are part of “delegitimisation strategies”. They trade in racist, sexist and homophobic stereotypes; they mask aggression and contempt; they “punch down”. In vain might you point to distinguished satirical forebears. For now Swift is a misogynist, Waugh is a racist, and Nabokov is either a paedophile apologist or a kink-shamer, depending on who you are talking to.

In fact, two different things are going on here. Forty years ago, as I remember things anyway, there was no particular taboo about making jokes based on racist, sexist, or homophobic stereotypes. In my Scottish school playground, your currency as a funnyman was cemented by the number of terrible anti-Irish or anti-English jokes you could tell. Saturday-night TV lived for jokes about the ditziness of blondes, the bossiness of mothers-in-law, and the campness of gay men. Equally, though, as no taboos were being broken, these jokes didn’t count as especially “black”. Some of them were blue, but that’s different.

Yet now in the overreaching present, whole swathes of discourse have become effectively off-limits. These include not just unambiguously bigoted jokes, but any joke at all that vaguely references an ethnic minority or a woman or a gay person. If you want to be funny, you are best sticking to anodyne puns or Christmas cracker fodder, and even then the whole process can feel dangerously freighted with risk. To some, it is a time for repressing any intrusive comic thought at all for fear of what comes next. But for other more anarchic souls, it’s exactly the right time to start a WhatsApp group called “Trigger Me Timbers”.

That’s because making jokes the target of modern morality codes has enabled a whole new variety of black humour, where it didn’t previously exist. Now you can deliberately transgress those codes for shock value and the amusement of your mates. The more ponderously sanctimonious, humourless, and offence-seeking your conspecifics become, the greater the urge to puncture the mood by making a joke about some sacred totem of theirs: pensioners, say, or gay men, or Diane Abbott. And that was what Gwynne and co. were clearly doing in their group chat, at least partly. They were in the Labour Party, for God’s sake.

When the context is Stalinist Russia, black jokes against the regime, muttered on street corners to trusted confidantes, are viewed as a noble assertion of the indomitability of the human spirit. When you are in a Labour group chat slagging off Angela Rayner, it seems they most definitely are not. Gwynne’s edgelord schtick may not be to your personal taste, and you may be enjoying his demise for political reasons. Still, I suggest you don’t get too relaxed with the heavy-handed presence of the public censor. For all you know, it could be Breaking Bald next.

---