June 27, 2024 - 3:00pm

“Make America funny again” is the strapline for The New Norm, the “first animated sitcom on X” (formerly Twitter). The mini-pilot was posted online yesterday, featuring unshowy animation, well-designed characters and setting, and decent voice performances. Technically, it’s fine.

Unfortunately, the script is excruciating. The conceit of The New Norm is that it is a traditional American family sitcom, complete with the canned laughter of the Bewitched/That Girl! era. It features an old dad — Norm — bemused by the modern “woke” world, exemplified by his non-binary daughter and her new boyfriend.

There’s no reason why this show had to be terrible, and yet it is. In fact, it is not just terrible but flesh-creepingly awful. The jokes, such as they are, all crash like bags of tools being dropped down a lift shaft. An AI bleats robotically that what Norm says is “offensive!”. There are lines — supposedly funny lines — such as “Y’all influence my boy to cut off his junk but draw the line at beer?” The three-minute clip ends with a cringe-inducing genuflection to Elon Musk.

It’s rather like a progressive’s idea of what conservative humour might be: painful “the woke brigade, eh?” stuff. If someone had told me it was a progressive satire on conservatives I would have believed them. That would have made more sense — and been a whole lot funnier. The tweet launching the pilot has the temerity to quote someone (it’s not clear who) saying that it is “the South Park of X”. Alas no. South Park has intelligence, it has verbal and conceptual dexterity, and it is funny.

The first episode of South Park aired in 1997, a long time before the culture wars became mainstream news. The New Norm is leaden and strangely antiquated. It’s a show we might, at a stretch, have welcomed in 2016, when the “woke” world was still baffling us and all the obvious gags hadn’t been made.

The fundamental problem with ridiculing progressive identity politics is that this worldview is already ridiculous. It has, in a way, already made the joke and, if it isn’t blindingly obvious, sometimes all you need is someone to point it out. The entire purpose is to goad you into reacting, to make the “good” people nod along with crackpot ideas to demonstrate their fealty, and thus reveal those who do not, leaving them open to persecution. You have to work very hard to engage with that successfully in a humorous way.

Nearly all political humour that comes from a clear position is equally dreadful, but because we’re so used to seeing this from progressives such as Hannah Gadsby, Stewart Lee, Nish Kumar and Frankie Boyle, we often don’t really notice or remark on how bad it is. Replying in the same vein is disastrous, a mirror image of that flatness and lifelessness.

There is nothing more deadly to comedy than ideology. It siphons invention through a thought-funnel, kills original ideas, and is the enemy of surprise. The New Norm is as painful, and for exactly the same reasons, as Late Night Lycett or The Mash Report. Like them, it has a Soviet feel. Every joke is the first and most obvious one that anybody would think of.

It’s a cliché, because it’s true, that the best comedy laughs at everybody. Many comedians have made good jokes about the idiocies of 21st-century identity politics, but only by being its true opposite: open, free and inventive. The ability to laugh at your own “side”, something progressives generally cannot do, is essential. Even better is not having a side at all.

Comedy is a good barometer of both people and ideas. What The New Norm has inadvertently shown us is that we are now well past the stage where simply mocking the obvious fatuities of “woke” will do. Like the ideology it is crudely railing against, it needs to curl up and die.


Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.

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