Here we go again. Only a year after the “Sachsgate” scandal fired a fevered
debate about about the limits of what is acceptable in comedy, the topic has
floated to the surface again, like a corpse not weighted down properly after
being dumped in a lake.
In the past week, two of our most successful bad-taste comedians have been
rounded upon for making jokes in bad taste. First up, Jimmy Carr, who told
this one to 2,500 punters at the Manchester Apollo: “Say what you like about
these servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re going to have
a f***ing good Paralympic team in 2012.” After a media furore, Carr
apologised and dropped the line, yet insisted that his only intention had
been to make people laugh.
Then, Frankie Boyle. Back in August, on the BBC Two topical comedy show Mock
the Week, Boyle made a gag at the expense of the British Olympic swimmer
Rebecca Adlington. “She has the face of someone who’s looking at themselves
in the back of a spoon,” he said, before going on to suggest that she must
be “very dirty” in order to hang on to her good-looking boyfriend. Boyle,
however, has declined to apologise, and has questioned the authority of the
BBC Trust, which chastised him for the gag.
If you hadn’t heard either of these lines before the complaints came in,
there’s every chance you had before we repeated them here. After all, that’s
the nature of controversy in comedy — the more outrage there is, the more
everyone gets to hear the joke in question. Indeed, when Adlington’s agent,
Rob Woodhouse, complained about the slap on the wrist that Boyle received
from the BBC Trust last week — it called his comments “offensive” and
“unfair” but took the matter no farther — he suggested that the remedy had
done more harm than had the disease. “All the BBC Trust has done is churn up
the comments he made on the show, which Rebecca hadn’t seen. It’s the
subsequent media attention that has been embarrassing.”
What can comedians get away with saying, on the BBC or elsewhere? And are we
so confused by defences of irony and knowingness that anything goes — until
someone kicks up a fuss, whereupon it’s retrospectively deemed to have been
unacceptable and a sign of deep flaws in the system? I don’t think Carr has
much to apologise for. His is a callous gag, but the callousness is the
point: nobody thinks that servicemen losing limbs is a good thing. No
Paralympics officials high-five each other when they hear about blasts going
off in Baghdad. It’s an absurdist response to a horrific truth. You may or
may not think it funny, but the disrespect it shows is so extreme as to
lampoon its own ludicrousness.
In fact, there are plenty of gags by Carr that I’ve found iffier, many of
which have traded on a rather rote obsession with anal sex. And, as Boyle
noted of his own gag, it’s pretty much the least offensive remark he’s ever
made on Mock the Week. It’s certainly an insensitive, boorish remark
to make about a 19-year-old who had just brought back two gold medals for
Britain. But has she even seen the show? Mock the Week isn’t there to
offer balanced comment. It’s there to be Have I Got News For You’s
snarlier younger brother, to cut through cant, even to make you gasp a bit
as it does so.
That doesn’t mean it’s always acceptable. Although I admire the people who
perform on it, the show strikes me as pretty unpleasant. The spectacle of
men and women competing so nakedly to provide the rudest put-downs is at
best flashy, at worst repulsive. It hums with testosterone, cheap cracks and
material parachuted in from the comedians’ live shows, and it reeks of the
desperation of those guests who can’t compete with its alpha comics, Boyle —
who has now left the show — Russell Howard, Hugh Dennis and Andy Parsons.
But is it the comedians’ fault for pushing their luck so far, when that’s what
they’re hired to do? Ever since Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross made their
ill-judged prank call to Andrew Sachs a year ago, weren’t comedians supposed
to be kept from overstepping the mark — to a fault — by incredibly tight BBC
guidelines?
Well, yes. But what that actually means is that producers of shows are tied
ever tighter to “compliance” — which is to say, itemising everything that’s
in a show, with particular emphasis on that which might cause offence. “By
signing it off,” says the Radio 4 comedy producer Ed Morrish, “I’m saying:
‘I believe this is fit for broadcast.’ Of course, being fit for broadcast
and not being offensive are two very different things: you know you’ll get
complaints if you take the p*** out of certain subjects. All that is weighed
up — and, now, written down — when editing the programme.”
So BBC programme-makers have to list whether there is any drinking or smoking;
“sexual comment, either descriptive or innuendo” and “potentially
contentious portrayal of disabled people, religious groups or minorities”.
But this isn’t a system of three strikes and you’re out. The editorial
standards committee decides if comedies are “unduly intimidatory,
humiliating, intrusive, aggressive or derogatory”. But note the word
“unduly”: the final judgement remains deeply subjective. As it does at
Channel 4, despite its 111-page compliance manual. And though comedy venues
are broad-minded, there are limits — the Leicester Square Theatre has just
axed an upcoming gig by the French comedian Dieudonné, after he was ordered
to pay €20,000 (£18,000) by a Paris court for anti-Semitic comments.
Comedians tend to respond to the issue of contentiousness rather warily. Many
of them see this as a hazard of the job: an issue that will always be
debated and never be resolved. They’re all aware of how dependent on context
a joke is — how it can mean something different shorn of attitude, irony,
personality, timing.
Take the grandaddy of recent teacup storms: Billy Connolly’s gags about
Kenneth Bigley during his London run in 2004. “Don’t you just wish they
would just get on with it?” said the Big Yin of Bigley’s captors, as if
encouraging them to kill the British hostage. Horrible, right? But I went to
that show, and there was no booing the night I saw it. And although it was
only half-developed as an idea, his target was fairly obvious, I think: it
was a joke on us, as news junkies, craving fresh developments in a story,
the more tragic the better. Then some bright spark from a newspaper rang
Bigley’s distraught family to say that Connolly wanted him dead. So much
more offensive than anything Connolly did.
But are there things to worry about in comedy? Certainly. At Edinburgh this
year there were too many jokes about sex, about rape, that were offensive
not because of their extremeness but because of their casualness. Two out of
three comedians seemed to be doing jokes about oral sex and computer porn
because that was what was expected of them. And Ricky Gervais’s latest live
show shows the danger of plying too much ironic offensiveness without using
it to make a strong point.
So, there are problems. But we don’t need more and more rules, we need good
taste and a willingness to admit to mistakes, no more than that. And if
anyone thinks that we’re returning to some sort of comedy dark age, may I
recommend a trip to see Comedians, Trevor Griffiths’s classic 1975
play about six aspiring stand-ups, currently revived at the Lyric
Hammersmith? There, as some of the comics unspool gags in which misogyny and
racism comes as standard, you realise quite how far we have come. Political
correctness won the war, and bloody good thing too. Now we’re policing the
peace.
A laugh too far? Pushing the limits
Oct 2009 Jimmy Carr (right) apologised for making jokes about
war amputees, but Frankie Boyle (far right) refused to back down
after he made jibes at the Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington (far right)
on Mock the Week, saying she resembled “someone who’s looking at
themselves in the back of a spoon”.
Aug 2009 Stewart Lee controversially attacked the Top Gear
presenter Richard Hammond at the Edinburgh Fringe, saying he wished he had
been “decapitated” in his near-fatal car crash in 2006, and refused to
apologise.
May 2009 Jonathan Ross was in trouble again after listeners to his
Radio 2 programme accused him of making an anti-gay joke, when he said: “If
your son asks for a Hannah Montana MP3 player, you might want to put him
down for adoption before he brings his, erm, partner home.”
Mar 2009 A comedy about the media’s coverage of the Josef Fritzl story
opened in Vienna, with police guarding the theatre. Protesters vandalised
the theatre and sent death threats to the play’s director and star, Hubsi
Kramar.
Oct 2008 Ross was suspended for three months, Russell Brand resigned
and the BBC was fined £150,000 by Ofcom, after the pair left messages
described as “gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning” on Andrew
Sachs’s voicemail.
April 2008 Members of the Aslef trade union protested when Three and
Out, a comedy film about suicides on the Tube, had its premiere in
Leicester Square.
Jan 2007 Ricky Gervais provoked outrage when he joked about the five
murdered Ipswich prostitutes only five weeks after their deaths.
Aug 2006 The second series of Franz Kafka Big Band, a radio
comedy featuring a cow flying into the twin towers and cartoons of the
Prophet Muhammad, was banned by BBC executives. A heavily edited version
aired a year later.
Jan 2006 The BBC issued an apology for remarks by Jimmy Carr on Radio
4’s Loose Ends, suggesting that Gypsy women smelt.
Jan 2005 The BBC’s broadcast of Jerry Springer: the Opera
sparked 64,000 complaints.
Oct 2004 Billy Connolly was booed for making a joke about the Iraq
hostage Kenneth Bigley. He said: “Don’t you wish they would just get on with
it?”
Louise Cohen
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