A couple of weeks ago, when I found myself being asked to give an interview to
a Norwegian newspaper on the subject of British comedy, it occurred to me
that this was becoming something of a regular event. Whenever I go abroad to
publicise my books, the same questions invariably come up: “Is there such a
thing as the ‘British sense of humour’? What is distinctive about it? Why
does it seem to be so important to your national character?”
Fascination with British comedians and TV shows seems to extend across Europe,
and convinces me that there must be something unique about British humour
and the role that it plays in our national life. Perhaps, then, a closer
examination of our comedy might tell us something about the patterns and
arcs of recent British history. The obvious place to start is with Beyond
the Fringe and the satire boom of the early 1960s, which also gave us Private
Eye, Peter Cook’s Establishment Club and That Was The Week That
Was. Although it has been endlessly discussed, it’s still hard to
over-emphasise the importance of this movement in shaking up not just the
British comedy scene, but the nation as a whole.
The Goon Show, of course, had already galvanised British humour in the 1950s:
its manic, shell-shocked surrealism and parade of lunatic authority figures
can clearly be seen as Spike Milligan’s response to the insanity he had
witnessed during the war. (This was Britain’s Catch-22, in an
odd sort of way.) But Beyond the Fringe, I think, was even more
revolutionary, because when that cast stepped on to the West End stage in
their sensible pullovers and grey worsted suits, audiences found themselves
being entertained, for the first time, not by the usual veterans of the
variety halls, but by four Oxbridge brainboxes who looked as though they
ought to be working for the Foreign Office. This made the quartet’s
satirical material all the more lethal, lending — in the words of Peter
Cook’s biographer, Harry Thompson — “a shocking authenticity to their
attacks on the society that had reared them: these would clearly not be
rebellious outsiders, but young men questioning a system they had been
trained to lead”.
Meanwhile, as Cook and his successors set about politely radicalising the
revue format and holding politicians up to the sort of ridicule they had
probably not had to endure since the 18th century, Ray Galton and Alan
Simpson were busy drawing up the template for the British sitcom, first for
Tony Hancock and then with Steptoe and Son. These were rueful
comedies of human failure, featuring characters trapped in existential
cul-de-sacs, but always clinging on to the glimmering hope that life might
have something better to offer. The gloomy protagonists of these sitcoms
might attempt various escape strategies: optimistic self-improvement schemes
(reading philosophy, starting a poetry society) in Hancock’s case, or more
drastically, for the hero of David Nobbs’s The Fall and Rise of
Reginald Perrin, a faked suicide and a series of new identities. It was
not until the 1980s, and the early years of Thatcherism, that Only Fools
and Horses took to the screens, and for the first time the central
characters of a major sitcom turned to entrepreneurship to leave behind the
confines of their existence.
The 1980s brought not just the ethos but also the aggressive tone of
Thatcherism to comedy. Just as a fragile consensus had permeated British
political life for more than 30 years after the war, so an uneasy truce had
existed, from the 1960s onwards, between old-school comedy and the newer
generation. In the 1970s The Two Ronnies could get away with seaside
postcard humour and anti-union jokes (“It has been announced that British
Leyland workers will no longer clock in every morning — they’ll sign the
visitors’ book instead”).
As Thatcherism put everybody in a more vicious mood, however, the gloves came
off: a younger generation of Oxbridge comics, the Not the Nine O’Clock
News team, poked ruthless fun at the Ronnies in their “Two Ninnies”
sketch, and a couple of years later The Young Ones declared all-out
war on the perceived cosiness of the British domestic sitcom.
From there it was a short step to the loud-mouthed materialism of Harry
Enfield’s Loadsamoney, the savage caricature of Spitting Image,
and the strident, hectoring (but often invigorating) stand-up of the
currently much-maligned Ben Elton.
In his glory days, Elton seemed to achieve the difficult feat of commanding a
national audience while still pushing a specific political point of view. Ideologically, however, the next significant wave of comedians — Chris
Morris, Armando Iannucci and their colleagues — are harder to pin down. On
the Hour and its television successor The Day Today were
brilliant deconstructions of broadcasting formats, born out of a scepticism
and a sense of the absurd that seemed too thorough-going to allow anything
as straightforward as a clearly held political position.
Morris has since gone on to play the role of increasingly slippery provocateur
(his feature-length comedy about suicide bombers is apparently in
postproduction), while Iannucci has enjoyed success with The Thick of It
and In the Loop, two fine comedies of political vanity and
incompetence. Again, though, Iannucci’s take on Westminster power games
seems to express not so much an indignation born out of specific
convictions, but simply the public’s cynical disgust with the moral
bankruptcy of the political class as a whole.
With In the Loop, all the same, in its bracing contempt for the
behaviour of politicians across the political spectrum, the viewer is still
aware that a judgment is being passed: the satire depends for its power,
after all, on a memory of what decent political behaviour looks like. With
some of today’s British comedy, it’s hard to locate even that kind of basic
moral anchor. Few people took much notice of one particular Channel 4 comedy
show when it aired back in the late 1990s, but The 11 O’Clock Show
turned out to have a huge influence. Most notably, it launched the TV
careers of Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais, both of whom have gone on to
achieve the kind of global profile that most British comics, from an earlier
era, would never have presumed to dream about. Even their most devoted fans,
however, would be hard-pushed to identify the beliefs of either of these
figures after watching their comedy. Are Borat and Brüno
trying to satirise various forms of prejudice, or simply revelling in them?
And do the ironic quotation marks hanging around Gervais’ faux-racist and
faux-homophobic gags amount to anything more than the laziest kind of
get-out clause, masking the kind of attitudes that got Jim Davidson and
Bernard Manning hounded off television a few years ago?
It seems that what characterises much of the most successful British comedy at
the moment is not so much moral ambiguity as the abrogation of any kind of
moral engagement. Again, is this just an accident of history or, more
disturbingly, a true reflection of the times we live in?
Perhaps one final comparison across the years might be appropriate. On That
Was the Week That Was, more than four decades ago, the disparate writing
and performing talents used the week’s events to fashion a coherent
satirical statement. In contrast, Mock the Week, the BBC’s current
flagship satirical show, often feels like a bear-pit in which comics compete
for attention by throwing around random jokes, which might be old-school
“observational” comedy or, all too rarely, biting one-liners.
Of course, TW3 was patrician, stuffy and middle-class, whereas Mock
the Week is — or tries to be — cool, classless and inclusive. So I
suppose we have made some progress. But the nagging suspicion remains that
something has been lost along the way. Jonathan Miller’s famous challenge to
the editors of Private Eye, issued in the early 1960s — “When are you
going to get a point of view?” — has an even more urgent ring to
it in today’s comedy climate.
Perhaps one thing we can say for certain about that elusive British sense of
humour is that, under the influence of the great 18th-century humorists such
as Swift, Gay and Fielding, it has tended to have a corrective impulse. It
might be inevitable, then, that as our sense of collective morality
continues to fragment and splinter into shards of relativism, our sense of
humour should seem to be going the same way.
FUNNY BUSINESS OVER THE YEARS
The President was kind enough to show me actual photographs of the nuclear
missile. A handsome weapon — we shall be proud to have them. The
photographs, that is. We don’t get the missile until 1970. In the meantime,
we shall just have to keep our fingers crossed, sit very quietly, and try
not to alienate anyone.
Peter Cook as Harold Macmillan, Beyond the Fringe (1961)
Reggie: You realise who you’re going to draw to your secret army? Thugs, bully
boys, psychopaths, sacked policemen, security guards, sacked security
guards, National Front, National Back, National Back-to-Front, rear
admirals, queer admirals, fascists, neo-fascists, loonies, neo-loonies . . .
Jimmy: Do you really think so? I thought support might be difficult.
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1977)
Waitress (to Mrs Thatcher, dining out with her Cabinet): Are you ready to
order, Madam?
Thatcher: Steak, please.
Waitress: And what about the vegetables?
Thatcher: Oh, they’ll have the same as me.
Spitting Image (1989)
Bryan Ferry Bathmat Dangerous Say Scientists;
Headmaster Suspended for Using Big-Faced Boy as Satellite Dish.
Headlines from The Day Today (1994)
Giving bankers bonuses after what they’ve done to the economy is like giving
bin Laden air miles after 9/11.
Russell Howard on Mock the Week (2009)
Jonathan Coe discusses British comedy with Armando Iannucci, David Nobbs
and John O’Farrell, Everyman, Oct 18, noon. 0844 576 7979; cheltenhamfestivals.com
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