October 10, 2024 - 11:00am
Comedy is in a strange place at the moment. This week, veteran BBC producer Jon Plowman — whose credits include Absolutely Fabulous, Bottom and The Thick Of It — made several good points about the state of British comedy. In an astute article for the Radio Times, he rightly points out that it’s increasingly difficult to establish a new comedy show in the atomised, niche world of streaming, and that comedies need time to grow and gather an audience.
But he is on sticky ground when he claims that political correctness is not a key reason for our lack of good humour. He writes that “there has been a discussion about whether political correctness is killing comedy. That argument is often made by comics who aren’t funny, blaming PC.”
His line of thinking is fair, mistaken though it is. TV people are always seeking reasons for why they don’t get a commission or why their show flops — I’ve done it myself. He is right to be suspicious of such excuses.
But this is a coping mechanism, and one I’ve seen many of the saner people left in the media making: “Ah, things aren’t so bad. It’s all still OK really.” But the truth is that the TV comedy industry, along with almost all of the arts, is in active terror of the small number of very vocal and disproportionately culturally powerful activists and fellow travellers of “intersectionality”. This fact is simultaneously too ludicrous and too awful to face, so we all lie to ourselves and pretend it’s not true.
Plowman uses the example of Derry Girls to demonstrate that scabrous, bold comedy is still being made. “Everyone was talking about it,” he says, an odd claim for a series that barely broke three million viewers. Although that counts as a smash hit nowadays, it’s certainly not “everyone”. Yet Derry Girls was given a pass because it was about young girls in one of Britain’s neglected regions. It satisfied diversity quotas in that it was about a minority of historically “oppressed” people. This is a point over and above however good the show is. Plowman thinks that people who say it would be impossible to make AbFab today — including Jennifer Saunders, who hardly needs to find excuses — are wrong.
Plowman’s opinions sometimes veer from the fair but mistaken to the patently ridiculous. He entertains the idea of comedy “punching up” and “punching down”, a naff cliché beloved of activists which I assumed was too well-worn to be mentioned by anybody reasonable after about 2019. This is the grotesque idea that comedy is about targets and power dynamics, to a scale set by activists, which is the death of hope. And humour.
If comedy was genuinely foregrounding “punching up”, then the last ten years would’ve been full of sitcoms taking aim at the awful privileged middle-class idiots who infest and control the institutions, public or corporate. But they have power, and everybody is terrified of them. How else could things as obviously ludicrous and ripe for mockery as genderism or the counterproductive ideology that calls itself “antiracism” get into the mainstream virtually unquestioned and unsatirised? Even going near these subjects in a mildly critical manner has been enough to render one an outcast.
We live in a world where the stage musical version of Father Ted, Channel 4’s most successful sitcom, has been cancelled because writer Graham Linehan objects to the patent nonsense of transgenderism. By contrast, comedian Eshaan Akbar is unlikely to receive any professional consequences for cracking jokes about the 7 October massacre at the Nova music festival. Akbar quipped: “A year ago today, something mad happened involving hummus and sausages at a music festival.”
I’m not saying people should be cancelled for bad jokes, merely that the comedy establishment is selective in its outrage and punishment. Regardless of “punching up” or “punching down”, almost all comedy takes a swing at someone, hence the name of the now-defunct satirical magazine Punch. It’s possible we’re just not comfortable with that in our #BeKind era.
Plowman must know all of this, but he has to survive in his milieu like we all do, so he’s told himself comforting lies. But terrified comedy, wearing the rictus grin of “this is all fine really”, is deathly. It is, ironically, humour in thrall to power.
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SubscribeIt’s such a shame because the contemporary middle class left and its bizarre preoccupations are inherently hilarious and would provide an inexhaustible fund of side-splitting jokes if any of our tame comedians were to grow the cojones necessary to lampoon them. Instead we get the endless sour dreariness of establishment groupies like Stewart Lee et al.
Are you suggesting Stewart Lee isn’t funny? He, along with David Lammy, absolutely crease me every time I see them.
Lammy is funny by accident, I agree.
But Stewart Lee is not funny on any level. He’s basically a bitter, mediocre, nobody who whose political views got him a job in comedy at the BBC despite his lack of comedic talent.
Didn’t Andrew Doyle not do that with his Titiana Mcgrath character? And don’t comedy unleashed continue in the same vein? Dominic Frisby went viral recently in the U.S. I mean the Simpsons started as a cartoon in a newspaper didn’t it? The dawn of meme comedy will continue to take off on platforms like twitter/X, youtube and filter out into live venues. Metropolitan liberal luvvies won’t thrive comedically – or maybe they will – but their place in the history of British comedy is fairly well secured to be fair.
I’ll believe it when Leo Kearse gets a show on the BBC. I might even start paying the licence fee.
Long given up on UK and US comedy shows, which seem to strive to be not-funny, but revel in awkwardness.
Instagram and tiktok are much better sources for such content, both in quality and diversity of topics, with the comments section being an added bonus for laughs.
The problem is certainly not that the material isn’t there.
Of all the lies people tell, the worst ones are those they tell themselves. Like Jon Plowman is doing.
Well, you could always do a reboot of Father Ted.
Call it Fatherless They – a sitcom that follows the hijinks of a multiracial blue-haired transgender living on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, who spends their day sending angry messages on social media.
Hilarious, I tell you. Hilarious.
Hmmm, taking the same sort of idea as Citizen Smith or Rick from the Young Ones into the third decade of the 21st century then? Written well, that could be truly side splitting. Can someone suggest that to Graham Lin… er maybe they won’t.
Check out YouTube clips of the Goons, Spike Milligan & Peter Sellars, Benny Hill, Monty Python, Ab Fab, or Kenny Everett in drag- or BBC Radio’s ‘Round the Horne’ shows on a Sunday
Most of that stuff is LOL side-splittingly irreverently hilarious, no-one is spared, & nothing is too great too small too established or too sacred to take a pot at.
None of it ould or would be broadcast today- too offensive
We have a big humour deficit black hole in this country sucking in every molecule of life & laughter
Anyone for North Korea? I’ve got a few super cheap one-way tickets going spare
Last time I was in the UK, my friend introduced me to Peep Show, one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen. I was already familiar with the original, British Office. I used to wonder why we don’t simply import British comedies to the US as-is instead of remaking them for US audiences. On a basic level, there’s this assumption that Americans can’t grasp irony, which isn’t true. On a deeper level, I think the real problem is that British comedy tends to descend to levels of cruelty and degradation that Americans don’t find funny. British comedies often humiliate characters so completely that it’s asshole-clenchingly uncomfortable. I can think of moments like that in The Office, Peep Show, Afterlife, etc. I’m not sure what this desire to see people degraded says about the British psyche or if British comedy was always like this, but there you have it.
All TV comedy since BrassEye has been absolute rubbish.
Boring old people saying “it weren’t like that in my day” have always been with us. Give them a nice cup of tea and let them ramble on about the good old days.
Says the most boring old man on the forum.
Good idea! I’ll put on the kettle.
Comedy has suffered a long while now from political bias to the left. At least one can claim that it’s still funny for about half the potential audience. The more recent trend of censorship is both much more severe and is biased in favour of pleasing a minuscule proportion. Gone are the days when Brits were famous for laughing at ourselves.
I laugh at you constantly.
You’re such a prat.
How kind of you!
Wait, when did Brits start doing comedy?
Eshaan Akbar is punching himself in the head if he really said that.
Jimmy Carr’s rule of thumb isn’t bad: the audience is the comic genius. If it laughs something is funny, if it doesn’t it’s not. And all gradations in between. Comedians should stop agonising about this stuff and just try to make us laugh. Activists of whatever moral and political stripe can choose their poison/argue about it afterwards, if they must.
Along with sexual desire and anger, laughter is one of the few true human responses we still have left. The only people who can over-think that (too) to death are comedians themselves.
‘…….Yet Derry Girls was given a pass because it was about young girls in one of Britain’s neglected regions’
Just a note to point out that the city of Derry is most definitely not located in Britain. It is the second city of Ulster, one of the 4 historical provinces of the island of Ireland.
It may have been Jimmy Carr that made good point about the “punching up/down” cliche.
i.e. that promoting the concept of “punching down” means you view a certain group as somehow being below you.
Carr is possibly the funniest, sanest and most punchable comedian on the contemporary circuit. That third perhaps his greatest achievement, given the wealth of competition.
John Cleese made a similar observation when he appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher about ten years ago. Cleese says that he could make jokes about whatever groups of people but if he made a joke about, say, Mexicans, everyone would gasp and clam up. Apparently, Mexicans are so feeble, in Cleese’s words, that they can’t look after themselves. It’s a very condescending view. Anyway, here’s the clip if you want to watch.
https://youtu.be/qCj6YNIpqmA?si=hZF1mAszLrVUFQoV
The British are no different to the Persians on what is acceptable comedy. Just as Muhammed blessed be his whatever is not pc in Iran so the British Royal Family, a mob of discretely exquisite oddballs and nincompoops is protected from being the subject of a good series along the lines of The Office or Fleabag on the BBC.
British comedy is a platform for the Left, encompassing right-on multiculturalism and some increasingly dubious, pro-Islamic positions.
To expect candor from cowards is unfair.