I’m one of the judges for the New Acts of The Year and we’re about half way through the contest. One thing that I and other judges have noticed is the general lack of political and philosophical engagement with the world among novice comedians. There are also a worrying number of acts who either have no material or have nothing interesting to say. Some have even ventured into misogyny, homophobia and casual racism in a feeble attempt to get laughs. What we also tend to find is that, rather than present a quirky view of the world, some of these novice comedians are giving us a spoken version of their CV. Is this what people are being taught to do at the many stand-up comedy courses that have proliferated since the early 1990s? I think it is. Whatever the case, British stand-up comedy is on its sick bed.
For the last few days, many comedians have been talking about Andrew Lawrence’s alleged support for UKIP and his attack on immigrants. Even UKIP leader Nigel Farage has given Lawrence his support. A potential kiss of death? Possibly. Only time will tell. What has the world come to when today’s comedians are embracing anti-immigration rhetoric and railing against diversity? Are we really heading back in time to the immediate post-colonial period when comedians used trot out a stream of racist and sexist gags and used “it’s only a joke” as a defence? Sometimes it seems that way. In Lawrence’s case, it’s easy to suggest that he’s doing this to attract attention. On the other hand, perhaps he, like so many others, is suffering from cognitive dissonance or maybe he’s just a right-wing reactionary arsehole. At any rate, there is an absence of critical thinking to his rant and I would argue that this is indicative of a malaise that is currently affecting the entire country, especially in England, where this negative attitude towards difference seems rife. This malaise is particularly manifest in those people who believe UKIP is ‘anti-establishment’ or ‘anti-politics’. ‘Anti-politics’? Really? There is no such thing as ‘anti-politics’. Everything is political. UKIP is an anti-intellectual party that appeals to anti-intellectuals, who believe the country’s myriad problems can be solved by simply ‘pulling up the drawbridge’.
On Lawrence’s Facebook page, he attempts to “clarify” his earlier post but is actually reiterating what he said previously. In effect, he ends up digging himself an even bigger hole of gargantuan proportions:
A comedian from a minority background who uses their own ethnicity as a foundation for the whole of their act, rather than looking at wider aspects of society and exploring outside of their own personal experience.
And then says:
Quotas have been introduced, whereby every panel show must book a certain number of female and ethnic comedians, regardless of ability or merit.
Objectively then, there are comedians on panel shows who are there first and foremost because of their gender or ethnicity.
But it gets worse:
Because there is currently not a sufficiently large enough pool of female comedians with the requisite experience and ability to fill the quota, there are females who’ve been booked for these shows who are either poor comedians, not comedians at all, or aspiring female comedians that are still learning their craft, but have not yet reached a decent professional standard.
These females I have described as ‘women-posing-as-comedians’.
The upshot of all that is that there are still many women coming across incredibly badly on panel shows, which is helping to perpetuate the myth that women aren’t funny.
The hope is that women currently on panel shows, will further legitimise stand-up comedy as a career for women and encourage other women to take up comedy. Which is an admirable aim.
Unfortunately for every female who gets on a panel show, there are very many male comedians with more ability and experience who are not and will never get the opportunity to be on one. I think that’s a great shame for TV audiences.
And for his finale:
Oh, and I don’t have a problem with properly regulated immigration and I don’t have a problem with immigrants.
I do have a great deal of concern about the lack of border controls in this country and subsequent gross overpopulation as a result of EU legislation, which I believe adversely affects all our quality of life.
Here Lawrence uncritically accepts UKIP’s position on immigration and seeks to rationalize this position by summoning up the Malthusian claim of “overpopulation” to lend some kind of intellectual gravitas to his narrativization. This is exactly what Malthusian think-tank Migration Watch UK (and Bill Oddie) does all the time. But this claim that there is a “lack of proper border controls” is not only ludicrously melodramatic, it’s a complete myth. He claims that he isn’t a UKIP supporter but that claim is pretty meaningless, given the fact that he’s regurgitated the same myths as Kippers and the rest of the English Right. Lawrence, if anything, is a reactionary, though it’s not something that he would readily admit. Instead, he complains that comedians are making jokes about UKIP. Diddums.
Let’s return to Lawrence’s comment about “minority comedians”, who he claims use their ethnicity as the basis of their act. Here, he doesn’t even try to understand why this is the case. He’s a white male stand-up and looks more or less like every other white male stand-up. If you’re black or a woman (or both), you have certain visual signifiers that differentiate you from the rest of the pack and may make jokes about those things. That’s what happens. If you have red hair or you’re fat, you will also make jokes about those things. That’s what happens. Yet, for Lawrence, it’s as if over 200 years of colonialism and racism never happened and that things are all right now because this is the year 2014 and people have stopped being racist. Sure they have. Yet for all the white male faces on television, the numbers of black faces on panel shows is so small as to be non-existent. Can you think why that is? I can. It’s called institutionalized racism and it’s a product of the dominant class’s early socialization. The vast majority of producers and commissioning editors come from public school and Oxbridge backgrounds. In their schools, some of which are all boy schools, they never see any females apart from those who are employed to teach or make beds. Black pupils are just as much of a rarity, thus commissioning editors tend to employ those people who are most like them: white and male.
With regards to women comedians, Lawrence has painted himself into a corner by claiming on the one hand that there aren’t a large number of women comics and on the other, this small number of women comics is responsible for inferior female talent because male numbers are superior. Confused? Don’t be. It’s the anti-intellectual tripe of a knee-jerk reactionary. Like so many white [right-wing] males, Lawrence is playing the victim and it’s as if to say “It’s all the fault of those horrible wimmin with their feminism. They’re oppressing me”. Lawrence is offering nothing new and is merely repeating the worn-out fallacy that women aren’t funny. Let me tell you something, Andrew, a lot of women are funnier than men, they just don’t get the same opportunities as white males who constantly refer to their genitalia and their apparent sexual inadequacies/perversions. Boring, huh?
The current malaise in British stand-up comedy is an indication of an overall malaise that hangs over this country like miasma. We have now entered a time when the very idea of tolerance is being pissed on, not only by right-wing politicians, but also by selfish misogynistic comics for cheap laughs, who believe they’re ‘pushing the boundaries’. The dominant discourses in this country have been orientated to the right for the last 35 years. People walk around talking in market-speak without realizing it. Other people repeat phrases like “Benefit claimants are addicted to the state” and “We need to have cuts” without thinking about them. Some, like Toby Young, believe that free speech means you can say anything you like without being criticized or being called an ‘idiot’ for it. However, if you’re tolerant and see immigration as a benefit to the nation, you’re shouted down, while those who oppose immigration complain that their voices “aren’t heard” even though the newspapers are full of articles complaining about immigration, and which rely on the usual myths, tropes and hyperbolic flights of fancy like “the country is crowded” to make their spurious points.
If comedy acts as a barometer for the political and social health of a nation, then Britain or, at least, England is a very sick patient indeed. It is obsessed with nostalgia and ready to blame its condition on everything but the system that produces inequalities and untold miseries. Instead, women, ethnic minorities and immigrants are scapegoated for a system that has comprehensively failed to deliver. Those in power in Westminster are happy to allow this continue and comedians like Andrew Lawrence are more than happy to act on their behalf. Sometimes I think the battles that we fought in the 1980s were for nothing.
Guy Debord's Cat 
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Very interesting critique of the current situation in stand-up comedy in Britain by the Cat, who has a long history in theatre and comedy. It certainly gives the lie to the complaint made over the years by the old-style comedians with extremely racist material, like the late Bernard Manning, that comedy now is ‘too politically correct’. You can hear the same specious criticism from tabloids like the Mail, and other comedians of a certain vintage like Mike Yarwood. When Yarwood appeared on Have I Got News For You a few years ago, he made the oft-repeated complaint about ‘left-wing luvvies’, and that they were somehow unfairly criticising the Tories.
My guess is that this is just the latest, terminal phase of a very long process that began in the 1980s with Maggie Thatcher. I remember attending a meeting of the local Fabian Society in Bristol. The speaker, a member of the NUJ, believed that the Tories were deliberately fostering political apathy amongst the young through the development of a media that was saturated with corporate interest and merchandising. This proves that she wasn’t wrong.
I do wonder what has happened in the past few years to make British comedy either anodyne, or reactionary. There are comedians out there, who still can and do make political points from a left-wing perspective. Remember Stand Up For Libraries a few years ago, when stand up comedians did a series of gigs protesting against library closures? The roots of this malaise clearly goes quite deep, and it can’t all be blamed on Michael Mackintyre.
Hello Cat. You are entirely right about the spread of market-speak. A case in point.
I recently bumped into a friend who’s a storyteller by trade. She is, like most people, writing a book. And, like most people who are writing a book, she talks more about ‘blocks’ than plots.
Blocks don’t interest me, so I asked about the story. But the language that she used in describing what was supposed to be the first chapter of a children’s book actually explained the block quite clearly. It was an inability to step outside the market-speak that drives job applications, benefit forms, arts funding applications, credit check forms etc that occupy much of her time.
She described, for example a child ‘accessing’ nature. And the ‘skills’ of some of the spirits that child met whilst ‘accessing’ nature.
Laughing uproariously was probably not a tactful reaction to this – and for a few moments caused genuine upset. Here’s where it connects with comedy, and UKIP and all those wankers.
Because these words aren’t ones people use out of free choice. Not articulate people, anyway. They are words that signify a fear of speaking straightforwardly, even among friends, in a world where for the poor there’s no choice between conformity and starvation. In a slave society it is safer to be second-rate, sexist, racist and stupid than to risk laughing at the masters. The informants are everywhere. Whereas the masters (and their lackeys) in all times and all places, believe that what is funny is picking on the little man – and especially on the little woman.