ACFM - ACFM Trip 33: Comedy

Episode Date: May 14, 2023

What’s the point of comedy? Stand-ups were at the forefront of the cultural backlash against Thatcherism, but today’s meme-driven lols are rarely in the service of left-wing politics. Meanwhile, the world’s most powerful people seem intent on having a laugh, from podcasting politicians to presidential comedians. In this Trip, Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia Idle and Keir […]

Welcome to ACIFM. Welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm here today as usual with my friends Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And Kia Milburn. Hello. And today we are talking about comedy. So, guys, why are we talking about comedy today? I mean, it's an interesting topic in itself as a big part of life, and we like to talk about life. So, you know, it's a really interesting thing to get into. But, like, I'd make an argument that comedy's in a bit of a strange state at the moment. It's almost like it's not in a good place, if you know what I mean.

Nothing's funny in it. Nothing's funny anymore. And yet, and yet we're expected to be funny at all times, particularly on this podcast. That's what people tune in for. It is. Kears one-liners. I mean, that is the problem, isn't it? When you dissect comedy, it removes the humour from it.

This might be our least funny podcast so far. But anyway, look, look, what I'm trying to say is there's certain things going on with comedy, which make it an interesting thing to talk about. One of those is this question we're talking about now, which is, does political satire work anymore? I think it completely and utterly broke down during the Corbyn years. I don't think it's managed to resurrect itself,

but it's a political satire. It's almost like it's a defunct form or if it's not defunct, then it's moved into a different sphere, like the Indian and these sorts of things. The other thing you'd say is that comedy or stand-up comedy in particular, and probably particularly in the US,

it went through a sort of like Me Too moment a few years ago, and there's been a big backlash against that. And at the moment, it's sort of really dominated by not particularly interesting grandstanding around sort of free speech and these sorts of things, basically. And it's sort of interesting to think about why that is. At the same time, it sort of feeds into some other debates that we've had for a long time around things such as what was once called the alt-right, you know, this grab by the right to try to erect itself as though it's the counterculture in some sort of way to sort of like seize on transgression. And we're the ones who transgress. Transgression as humour, humor as transgressing and written lines in the sand, etc.

Is it like a key way, you know, there's an attempt to use humour perhaps as just as a sort of excuse, basically, for transgressing liberal norms, something like that. And that needs sort of thinking through as well, I think. In order to understand any of that, we'd have to work out what comedy and humor is and how it works and so forth. Yeah, and also who is funny and who is not and who's allowed to be funny and who's not. So listeners, listeners, just before we get into the meat of this episode, we'd like to remind you that we now have a newsletter. Yes, we have an ACFM newsletter, and you can subscribe by going to Navarra.com media forward slash ACFM newsletter. We've got some great content, including Keir's essay on the politics of wrestling and stuff like that. And also just a quick reminder,

because some of you might not know, that you can listen to all of the music mentioned on our show on our expanding playlist, which you can just search for ACFM on Spotify. And also for the full multimedia experience, please listen to ACFM on SoundCloud. And you can go to soundcloud.com forward slash Navaramedia. And last but not least, you can support us to continue this show by supporting our hosts, Navarra Media. So just go to navarra.media forward slash support. So without further ado, let's talk about comedy.

In terms of recent British comedy, actually Anglo-American comedy, there's a period of really high-profile political satire, especially those Eamando Yanucci shows, like the thick of it here and Veep in the States, which are mostly written by the same people. And it fits perfectly into the culture. culture of kind of the late period of third way politics. It's essentially Blairism, which the thick of it is making fun of. What exactly its relationship to it is, like emotionally and

politically, is always quite complicated because you're neutral and none of the people associated with that were fans of Corbyn at all. Although it was really funny, like the thick of it, I always said to people, you know, I have a friend who was a writer on the thick of it. And I used to say to him, It was actually, I don't think they even knew how accurate it was. My experience of sort of being around Westminster, especially during the Blair and Brown years, is you could have just literally filmed actual conversations. People were having them,

and if you just edited them in the right way, it just would have looked like an episode of the thick of it. That sort of political class, they are that venal and they are that ignorant of anything outside their own immediate interest in any given time. But the thing about satire, it's a question that's often been raised by cultural critics about the whole concept of satire,

is whether you can really make a sort of politically radical point ever using satire, or if satire only sort of works to the extent that it's always appealing to a set of norms, which are sort of inherently conservative. So arguably the limitations in some way of something like the thick of it is that, although it was really good at poking fun of the venality and self-importance of this professional political class, On the other hand, it was always doing so from a perspective that sort of implied that this wasn't structural to their position, that somehow it was just because they happened to be a bunch of self-important idiots that they were behaving this way. They're like, they could have been in the West Wing if only they'd been the characters from the West Wing. I mean, I don't know if I agree with this argument.

I'm not putting it forward, but it is an argument that's been made over the years. So that's how satire always works, that somehow you, it's always sort of conservative. I mean, it's partly goes back to the fact that the term satire. was first used, you know, to refer to the writings of the Roman writer juvenile, who is basically criticizing what he sees is the decadence of contemporary Roman society when he's writing from a very clearly conservative perspective. You know, he thinks Roman society has become degenerate, effeminate, overindulgent, over-sexualized, too multicultural. I mean, it's quite explicit about all this and harkens back to the days of the ethnic and moral purity

of the senatorial republic. And so there's a really interesting question. I don't know what I think about it really. I mean, is satire inherently conservative or can there be something else? Well, there's one point I want to make which is related to something that you raised there, Jeremy, which I think will be interesting as we go through

and talk about different kinds of comedy, which is, like, what is the effect and the outcome on the longer term that the different kinds of, you know, comedy or comedic culture produced. So talking about satire, for example, does it expend somebody's energy in terms of, you know, like watching something like the thick of it? Does it make people more cynical because they're laughing with the cultural production at that kind of archetype of person? Then does that relate in any way to an emancipatory potential in a sense? So are you looking at that and thinking, wow, these people are really shit, I want to do something about it? Or is the cultural

production in itself, and you can think about this in terms of other arenas of comedy, whether it's going to stand up, et cetera, like just allowing you to free yourself of some kind of frustration that you have towards certain realities in society or certain, like we said, archetypes, and therefore allows you to go home and not do anything about it. And I think that's one of the questions that I'm interested in as we talk about the different forms of comedy over history and like the function that it fulfills, in the sense, especially in groups. at certain points in time. It's a good way to put it, yeah.

When Gem said, is satire always conservative, I was going to say, we'd have to put something like Brass Eye up as the opposing argument, which I don't know if it actually achieves the opposition to that argument or just reinforces it. Who was Brassai, who presented Brassai,

wrote it, Chris Morris. Chris Morris, yeah, that's it. Yeah. So this is in the 90s, late 90s. You know, it's basically a spoof on the media, and it's like a spoof on these sort of, like, You know, the spectacle over news content sort of thing. But he also enrolled, he also did these, like, pranks where he enrolled politicians and celebrities to denounce this new drug, which can cause check neck, in which your neck swells up so much, it goes over your nose and people are dying, et cetera.

The drug was supposedly called cake. So he actually, he got various Tory MPs to go on camera denouncing the evil of cake. and then Channel 4 broadcast it. And then there was a notorious one around paedophilia where he invented a fake campaign group called Nonsense. A load of people who go on and say, and denounce pedophiles in ridiculous ways and say, I am talking, we are talking nonsense.

And it was funny. That's funnier than when I just said it then. And so, yeah, and that caused a huge scandal. That's prank. isn't it? That's pranking, which is also a different category. It is pranking, but it was pranking tied into satire, though, because

it was making a satire of the fact that these people would say anything. If it looked as though it was the right thing to say, and then you could gradually introduce more and more nonsense into it. Right, yeah. I mean, I think it did, I mean, sort of did have a radicalising effect for people to some extent Brass Eye, didn't it? I don't think,

I see, now, well, you're saying all that, I'm thinking I don't really agree with this thesis, that satire is necessarily conservative, and I'm going say, you know, as a good sociological cultural theorist, it's just silly to say that any particular form has an inherent meaning anyway. It's going to depend on the wider cultural ensemble into which it's inserted. And it's going to be different for different viewers. I mean, part of the point with any sort of artistic endeavour, you know, any kind of writing, for example, it's not just didatically academic or political, any kind of literary fiction.

and that would illiterate writing and that would include just comedy writing for TV or something. The whole point of it is it's actually going to mean slightly different things to different people. That's why it gets an audience. That's why it becomes something more than just one particular niche group talking to itself. So for some people,

the thick of it was clearly radicalising, especially at the moment of the beginning of Corbinism when all of these MP, Labour MPs, were revealing themselves to be just actually characters from the thick of it. It was like a reference point people could use and say, look, they really are like that. They've got to be got rid of. And for other people, it just provides this reassuring sense, you know, it was something for people to nod along to and say, yeah, it's inevitably like that. You can't change it and it's funny. It makes them

more cynical. And it makes the people more cynical. Yeah, that's the bit that I'm interested in. Like, you know, is it radicalising or does it make people cynical? So all this means we can't generalise about satire or comedy. So that's it for today. one. Goodbye, the shortest podcast ever. You've been listening to nonsense. No, I mean, that whole thing about, I think it gets through a really important point that, right?

Which is, especially when it goes into like the 2000s and you have like series after series of have I got news for you, what it creates is a general sense of like cynicism about politics and about the idea that politics could ever change anything, which is fine. If you're new labour, if you're starmer and your idea of politics does not involve mass engagement with politics, that's fine. If it's just administration, that's not a problem at all. Mass cynicism is what you basically want.

So, like, you know, being revealed as a cynical actor is no great loss, basically, because that's basically what you need out of the general public. I think the problem came in when there was this reemergence of mass engagement with politics and even enthusiasm for politics, you know, obviously we're not allowed to think about this now, but, you know, Jeremy Corbyn went round the country and had huge crowds went to see him, you know, people were singing in ooh, Jeremy Corbyn, you know, on the streets in nightclubs, etc., all around the country. That does not fit the script. And I think that's why the problem was during Corbinism was that all of the satire shows just basically carried on with this general

cynicism. That's a really good point. I think we've got to put that in a bigger historical context for people quickly. And this is something specifically, the experience of, say, people mine in Kier's age, the historic experience is this. When we were really young, when we were like first old enough to watch TV comedy and understand it, we were living through the early to mid-80s, the first great wave of so-called alternative comedy in Britain. It's led by people like Alexei Sale. And comedy was absolutely seen as in the forefront of a sort of cultural front against Thatcherism. That's how it was seen. And it was seen as like in as political and self-consciously politically radical. That was the generation of people who were kind of the generation above us,

really. That was like the late boomer comedians, actually, or maybe the youngest Gen X, I don't know. But then the people who were sort of our age, the kind of Gen X comedians, who had quite similar backgrounds or more privileged backgrounds compared to people like Alexis Seale, sort of quite traditional British comedy background, Oxbridge, you know, elite backgrounds. In the 90s, they developed this completely different repertoire, which in some ways was a self-conscious reaction, again, the perceived earnestness of that generation of alternative comedians. And instead, what they cultivated was the sensibility, this whole structure of feeling, which was just deeply anti-political, basically.

It was both deeply self-congratulatory on the part of the particular elite class fraction they belong to. Very smug and self-congratulatory, very much punching down other people as it developed into the early 2000s. People like Badil kind of made his reputation with that kind of comedy. And by the kind of early 2000, it got into a place where, indeed, the highest expression of its art was something like the thick of it, but it's more casual, you know, less, less artful, but more widely popular form was things like, indeed, things like that show, have I got news for you, which just actively promoted this deep, deep cynicism. And I remember, I wrote an article on an open democracy when Boris Johnson first became mayor of London. And I said, basically, people were vote. voting for Boris as just a vote against politics. At that time, it was just this kind of anti-political, this expression of a kind of anti-politics. And it was really that comedy culture did become really a kind of a central engine of the anti-politics. And that's why

when we get into the Corbyn years, it's sort of surprising and unsurprising to people that it's these comedians who, there's almost no other cultural sector, wherein there's almost such total like hostility to Corbinism than in sort of national in sort of TV comedy like there's almost no example of a prominent comedian who wasn't very viciously anti Corbyn apart from a few holdovers from who were really holdovers from the 80s from the alternative comedy yeah people like Alexis sale and you know Mark Steele people like that so also they're there lines of comedy

about Corbyn this I mean I think we're not we're not just say you know we're saying this was a certain levels of sophistication, not just because we supported Corbyn at the time. But like, the comedy was also just really cheap. Like, it wasn't very sophisticated at all. Had no lines. No, they, yeah, they had no, they had no position from which to respond to it. And also, I just one thing on that. I think, I think it was interesting you mentioning, you know, Kier, all of the hordes of people are coming up to see Jeremy Corbyn and the people singing, oh, Jeremy Corbyn and the clubs, etc. And I think what's interesting,

there is it's not because, you know, Corbyn was a particularly, like, you know, charismatic orator anything. It was like, it was about what the comedy that came up from the movement, which, you know, would be something that we would say, but it was true. It was like there was so much, like, hilarious and really, really enjoyable cultural production at the time. I mean, even if you go back in the history of this show, you know, like all of the, the songs that we, you know, sang at the time of the election stuff. Like, it was hilarious and really joyful. I think what's going on there is the reason 90s comedians were,

and they're all sort of like 90s hangovers or basically, you know. You guys just really hate the 90s. There are some good 90s comedians. I don't talk about that later. You guys hate the 90s and love the 80s. Okay, good to hear that. Let's just get into like a little bit of comedy theory of the moment. The structure, I've said this on the show before,

but the structure of irony, it creates two. audiences, right? One of which is like the naive audience who doesn't get the double meaning of irony. And the other one is the knowing audience who recognizes the double meaning and there's the humor comes from the complicity between the knowing audience and the comedian or the teller, right? The other part to think about is that like comedy sort of relies on shared premises, you know, shared presuppositions. You know what I mean? You've got to have a shared understanding of how the world works. To some extent, even if you're going to defy those those lines about what what the shared understanding is, you know,

and the shared understanding during that whole period of the 90s and into the 2000s was a mass cynicism against politicians. But there wasn't any shared consensus about cynicism towards this wave of people who were getting political enthusiasm. That hadn't been established, you know what I mean? That's why the comedy was so bad, the anti-corbyn comedy was so bad. And like what was going on during that whole Corbyn period or the euphoro Corbyn period was there was a battle up to construct who exactly the naive audience was.

So that all of that comedy was about people who, you know, were enthusiastic about Corbyn, they're naive because they don't understand how the world really works. And because basically capitalism was in, or UK capitalism in such a bad fucking state, that just did not fly, basically, that actually it's the Blairites, who are the wise ones. That's just fucking not going to fly. Do you know what I mean? And so the Corbynac comedy was the flip of that and said, and we participated in this in our anti-90s things.

All of these hacks, they're the naive audience. They cannot get out of this tiny little parochial 90s worldview that they're in to understand what's going on at the moment. Do you know what I mean? It was like there was a twisting battle about who could define the naive audience. Ultimately, the Corbynice won, but then lost in a much more important part of politics, which is control over the state and the political party. So it didn't matter that we won.

Well, it did matter that we won because there's still this more general sense of dissatisfaction, I think, and dissatisfaction about. And I'm feeling that, you know, that mainstream politics is cynical and also naive about, like, you know, the real state of the world.

So it's not all a waste of time. Just trying to talk myself around again. No, no, no. No, but also there's like the, you know, there's this idea of like the, the comedic crowd maybe I should call it, or like the crowd that produces, you know, comedy for itself as, you know, some sort of like vanguard or with revolutionary potential, which I think we all kind of felt at the time, all sharing in this kind of sense of humour, but also like taking the mission of what we were trying to do quite seriously. You know, it was fun times. The 2017 election where of all of the memes coming out, the memes and like the videos, etc. Really, really, really quick, much, much funnier and wittier.

and like basically Twitter is a horrible place and it's obviously dying but it is quite good at generating that sort of witticism that sort of live witticism that builds on it on each other which is why you spend 20 hours on it well I mean luckily my friend Elon Musk is trying to force me off force me to spend less time there by making it awful so it might be a problem that solves itself anyway I'm just reminiscing basically about a time of history

which has been completely utterly excised from the official story about the last 10 years. That's been happening for 150 years every time the left loses a battle. So, you know, here's the historical record. This is the point, isn't it? Well, we've situated at the present moment quite well, I think. I suppose it's important to qualify some of these generalisations and point out. Well, there have been a fair few left-wing comedians still active, especially in the Broadcut,

sphere over the past few years, people like Mark Steele, Mark Thomas, Jeremy Hardy, God rest his soul. And to some extent, these sort of centrist comedians have really attracted attention. It's not so much even

because they really are representative of comedy as a form in Britain today. I don't think it's true really, honestly. It's partly because they seem to crystallise a particular set of attitude so perfectly. Like no one represents the culture and the limitations of the worldview

of the centre is that, like, better than David Bediel. Like, no one. Like, he just, he's, he's unreflexively, unashamedly. You know, this guy just standing there, like celebrating his own privilege every time he opens his mouth and, like, seemingly not aware that that's what he's doing. So I think it's partly why they've attracted so much attention, isn't it? But I think we've given a good analysis of the way in which

their particular mode of comedy just exhausted even its own claims to humorously. legitimacy. Now it does just look like, you know, increasingly grumpy old men, you know, being angry that anybody is questioning them about anything. In the 1980s in particular, there was a whole series, a real massive wave of like novelty songs and comedy songs, basically. So that was at the high point of single sales, etc. So these things would be on top of the pops and would become real part of. of public discourse, in a way that isn't so true now, I think. There's all sorts of things you could point at for that. One of the more famous early examples was by Benny Hill, Ernie the fastest

milkman in the West. You could hear the offbeat's pound as they raced across the ground and the clatter of the wheels as they spun round and round, and he galloped into Market Street, he's badger upon his chest, his name was Ernie, and he drove the fastest milk cart in the west. There were Ernie loved a widow, a lady known as Sue. She lived all alone in Lily Lane at number 22. They said she was too good for him. She was awed, proud and chic. But Ernie got his cocoa there three times every week.

There was this comedy group, The Wurzels, who were sort of like they portrayed sort of country bumpkin sort of stylings. Perhaps their most famous song was like, I am a cider drinker. I've always liked, I've got a brand new conference. Combine Harvester, because it was a take on that I've got a brand new pair of roller skates. I don't know what that says about me. The last one I'd mention in that sort of comedy novelty songs to illustrate the sort of how widespread they were.

There was a song in 1984 by the commentators called 19 Not Out, so it was a Rory Bremener song. And it was a response song to a song called 19 by Paul Hardcastle. Paul Hardcastle song 19 was like, it was a very early use of sort of like sampling, etc. and the point was that the average age of a soldier in Vietnam was 19 and the commentators one was about cricket and it was like about the English cricket team that year the average score of a batsman was no-a-n-n-n-n-n-a-nin-19. I suppose the point is that in 1984 to get a number one record

meant you had sold so many records that even if it was the only record you were ever going to have any success with, it was something everybody was conscious of for that year. I put that in for Matt, actually, producer Matt loves a bit of cricket. he'll definitely keep that one in. In 1984, the test series against the West Indies seemed like just another rubber, but it wasn't. It was different in many ways,

and so were those who did the betting. In 1933, the England captain's average was 35. In 1984, it was 19. No, no, no, no, 19. 19. 19. 19. Should we pull back to the general and dissect comedy and what's funny for a bit and maybe think about things like

what happens to comedy over time and space? Do things stop being funny over time? Like we talked about that a little bit and this idea that if you're in a different era with a different, you know, with a different, you know, zeitgeist and mood than things that used to be funny are not funny anymore

or different, certain kinds of comedy, don't travel over time. Secret of good comedy, isn't it? Timing. Timing. The secret of good comedy. The way you say that joke is, the secret of good comedy is timing. See, Kears just suggested this so he can just make as many jokes as possible. I've got a whole list of one line.

Oh, God. Crow barring to the show. I have an action, right? He has, he has. Yeah, just as idea, do we want to talk about that a little bit more, like comedy over time? Well, we should also, let's widen it out to also over geography as well, like how culturally specific is comedy, is it culturally specifically in terms of time, or is it country specific in terms of the cultural forms that you're embedded in,

so often in this thing as national, etc. Yeah, I mean, I'm really interested if there are some things that are universally funny. Like, are other people's misfortune, like somebody tripping. over, you know, the classic, like, tripping over a bananas thing, like, is that universally funny? I don't know what the answer to that is. There might be, you know, it might be so culturally set that that is like such a tragic thing to happen, that people don't react in that same way over, over, in different countries. I think, like, physical comedy is the thing that, that, that, like, lasts and also spreads. That and, like, fart jokes as well, I think it's like,

probably universal. And then, but, like, obviously that the, jokes that rely on cultural presuppositions or even wordplay, etc. Obviously, they don't travel so much, yeah. Yeah, no, definitely. Because I was trying to think about, like, what travels over between English and Arabic. And I felt like there are some things that do. And this idea of having, like, linguistic technologies, just the concept of wordplay, Like that definitely exists in Arabic, definitely in Egyptian comedy, and definitely in English comedy.

And I was wondering whether, you know, I was thinking about the contrast between like different kinds of comedy over the Arab world, which is, which, you know, differs hugely over countries. And the same in English, like thinking about English as a language, situating itself in different cultures, like, you know, whether it's America or the UK. And obviously, you know, in English-speaking countries, there's these whole contrasts of, you know, there's a lot of American comedy which I listen to and I just think it's really boring and flat. And there's a lot of stuff that Americans laugh at, which I just think is ridiculous. Like, that's not even funny. And then there's much, I think British humor is a lot more complex, for example. So I was thinking about that sort of stuff and thinking like, what are the different cultural points that produce that with this whole, you know, stereotype that, you know, stereotype that you. Americans can't do irony, for example.

Or that the Germans aren't funny. It's the great stereotypes. I sort of feel like we can't really answer this. Like we should have gone and found, I'm sure people have written books, people who are like comparative linguists and stuff, who've got the real intellectual resources to try and comment on this.

We haven't really done the research on it. So I feel like I don't really know. I mean, my big cross-country experience is coming from a sort of transatlantic family. and I would have to say pretty much there isn't like some identifiable cultural difference in American and British humour

it's much more to do with specific demographic groups basically people from the same kind of social class and class fraction in the States will laugh at exactly the same stuff as people from the same kind of class fraction in Britain and you think really? Yeah okay I don't yeah well all the shows like my favorite shows you know my favorite comedy shows

in Britain, apart from, the two shows that have made me laugh, the two British comedy shows that made me laugh the most the past 20 years with a thick of it in peep show. And they're huge in the States. They're huge with like other kind of lefties of, you know, slightly intellectually oriented bohemians. My favourite American shows are like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Simpsons. And I don't know anyone. I hardly know anyone in Britain who doesn't like those shows. So, and then Benny Hill, Benny Hill was like a huge institution. It's an absolute institution in the States, but it's an institution with like, you know, as a much more sort of working class demographic, like just like it was here.

So I think there's this kind of process whereby people who are not reflexive at all about their own, frankly, social specificity within their own country, then encounter like another country on much more general terms. And they see people who come from completely demographics to them responding to things and then say, oh, that's what like American people are like or French people are like. and it's to do with us I don't think it's I don't see any evidence for it really

I think though I think the evidence would not be found in the comedy shows so much as like I'm not really sure whoever it's true but the impression is that like Britain is a lot more sort of piss takey and bantery

than the US basically no it just depends where you are like if you're in you're talking to people in you think people in New York I mean the cliche about New Yorkers is they sort of take they sort of take the piss all the time it's just

I don't think it's true. It's just, you know, these are big places. You know, there's a big difference. I'm just trying to trap you into admitting that Liverpool and scoutsers aren't any funnier than a... Well, this isn't... Well... Okay, okay, but there's several levels here, right?

So it's not... We can't generalise to any one of these points, but definitely, you know, like, even though I have spent 20 years in the UK, there's still... There's stuff culturally that goes over my head, right? But more or less, there are, you know, I tend to like British humour, I mean, as a very general point. And so when we're talking about comedy and talking about it over space, what's interesting for me is talking about my own experience here

because it's quite different to you guys, because I have an entire different language of which I engage with comedy in. And I tend to think that I'm hilarious in Arabic. Well, I tend to think I am. I think you are too. I think you're hilarious. I'm hilarious in Arabic. We need some way to fucking prove this.

I'm not that, but I'm not, I'm not that funny, but I'm not that funny. I just, despite being related to a Python, I don't think I'm that funny in English. I can't let that go. Just explain your relation to a Python. Eric Idol is my dad's cousin. Oh, really? There's very few idols amongst the EA. Did you not know this?

No, no, and I'd never made the connection in my head with the surnames, I know. Well, all the idols I know were very, very, very few, all make-up spoof songs on guitar, including me. So I tend to, I think we've got that in common. But I love to make people laugh, but I don't think I'm that funny in English. And I think part of the reason why I'm not that funny in English is because I've got like various different cultures sitting inside me. So I'm not fully able to engage. I'm not fully in the comedic kind of canon of like one country and not the other. Having said all of that, I think like, for example, like Egyptians are really quite pompous about this. Like we think we're funny and think none of the other.

Arab countries are funny. And if I watch Arabic humour from other countries, I just think it's really flat. I was going to say, could you work out what the difference between English and Arabic humour is? But like I couldn't really, I find it hard to characterise English humour, so that's quite a hard question. There's a lot of wordplay in Egyptian humour, whereas if I said, so like there's a very common joke that people would say like in school or whatever, there's a syntax the jokes that will go something along the lines of the ones were two bald guys fighting over a comb, right? That's not funny in English. It's absolutely hilarious. It's absolutely hilarious in Egyptian Arabic. This is a sort of the sort of like cracking wise

constantly, like you can make anything funny in Egyptian Arabic is my experience. And I miss that. So this is something where if I don't get to speak to Egyptians, I don't tend to engage with that certain bit of humour. And I also miss that if I'm around people who are not British or don't understand British humour for some time. So I think that's an interesting thing for me about like how comedy sits in identity. And I think it's like a massive thing. I mean, obviously I find bald jokes offensive. That's a, that's a crack. They're offensive to the bald community. Yeah, who are very put upon it. Obviously, this joke doesn't work on radio because you can't see that I'm bald, but believe me, I am.

It is interesting to reflect on these ideas of what that does then in terms of translating a way of seeing the world, like across space. If we're interested in space and time, which, you know, I definitely am, and I think we are, is what do we then take with us or not take with us when we're trying to engage internationalism, internationally with politics, you know, or just we're engaging with other people. And that whole thing, going back to, like, the famous example that Keir brought up of, like, Germans being funny or not being funny. Like, does that, does that precede, like, the war? Like, where does this come from? Like, you know what I mean? And what function does it

fulfill in society? And definitely the joke about Germans not being funny, you know, has, you know, has nationalist roots, I would think, is that not right? Yeah, but I think Germans also have that sort of idea that they're not as funny. There's this German comedian Herringvei, who, like, he's on the English circuit, and that's his whole thing. He's actually really, really funny, but his whole schick is Germans aren't funny, sort of thing. I think we should definitely play Gin by the Tiger Lillies. Finally, I get to play one of my macabre cabaret songs.

And it's funny, it's a song that's funny on several levels, because one, the lead singer has this comic falsetto. but also they dress up as kind of scary clowns in this kind of dark cabaret way. But also the whole content of the songs about making fun of others and our own misfortune and downfall when we're drunk effectively or addicted to drinking gin in this case. But also it's kind of a pistake of the colonial era and pastiche and quite farcical as well.

So quite a complex set of comedic values in one song. Because he did succorough. Come to gym. Gym. I guess one of the things. June. I guess one of the things we keep circling around is this sense that comedy is all, is for it to work. has to involve some shared frame of reference. But of course, everyone at any one moment in time

is inhabiting many different temporal, geographic, cultural, experiential frames of reference. And I think part of the phenomenon I was sort of getting out is partly to do with the fact, especially in the age of the internet, but really since the beginning of globalised media, I mean, British and American people are not occupying completely segregated, discursive universities anyway, a lot of the time. The extent to which, the languages have affected each other is something I've really noticed, really been the age of the internet. You know, you get British colloquialisms creeping into American vocabulary in a way that never used to happen at all in a way that I still find quite sort of shocking when I

encounter it, because I grew up being used to the idea that Americans wouldn't understand any sort of British colloquialism at all would never have encountered it, whereas British people would encounter them all from American TV and films. But that's also true at all kind of scales. I mean, we think of sort of body humour as being in some sense universal and a historical because, well, yeah, it's true, everybody farts, you know, all humans always have done. So you can always make a joke about it. And then, you know, there are lots of different scales at which experience can be shared or not shared by different groups and different people.

So, but I'm not sure, is that, I'm not sure if this is anything but a really trite observation because it's not just comedy. I mean, any form of communication requires a shared frame of reference. But I think comedy is different, though, because I think, think it's not just, yeah, because it's not, because basically comedy relies on, on that shared frame of reference being presupposed and then tested. And so it's like the testing of the boundaries is part of what creates the weed. Do you know what I mean? So comedy, particularly when it's, you know, in a comedy club or whatever, you're trying to create or create or

define or delineate the shared frame of reference. Yes, yeah, for sure. I mean, that's, I mean, that's we're getting into sort of theories of comedy there now but that and that is one of the most persuasive ones that comedy is a way of constantly it is both reproducing and testing shared frames of reference and it's also demonstrating a certain facility with with creatively manipulating the norms of any given frame of reference i mean i did grow up in that sort of broadly you know liverpoolian sort of northwest culture of just constant just constant wisecracking and piss-taking, like all the time, being the sort of medium of everyday interaction a lot of the time. And that is very much, I mean, that is a process by which people test other people.

They test their capacity for a certain creative, discursive ingenuity, but also a certain sort of resilience, a certain lack of earnest emotional investment and their membership of a certain linguistic community. And that is sort of being tested all the time in that way. be like really appealing and engaging and make life really funny and it and it can be also sort of really exhausting sort of can't say anything you can't you know you can't say anything earnest yeah this is making me think that there's kind of two modes of comedy there's kind of the comedy of the event and there's the comedy of the every day as you were talking jeremy i was trying to think about like how egyptian humor maps over there and whether there's any

relationship to the kind of Liverpoolian way of speaking and this constant jokes. But then I was also thinking about going back to what we were saying about the Corbin moment, about and I forgot about this, and I think it's worth a mention, just the importance

of comedy at the time of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. It was so, so central people taking the piss out of the regime was so central to like how the cultural production was manifested and found itself being made in the square. And it was, you know, the legacy of that, I think, is probably really important and it's something that, you know, the state is wanting to override. So I think there is something

there about like the power that comedy has in being able to amplify events and to hold people together. I think, yeah, I think that's really interesting that because there's sort of model of how communities work and communication works that's implied in that model of comedy that we were just elaborating before you said that is that to some extent social norms they don't just exist they're not just static they have to be constantly reiterated and they're sort of always changing as well and they change largely through the ways in which every time they get reiterated they get changed a tiny bit and a tiny bit and they move in different directions and and so that that's a model of kind of general social life in which the everyday itself is always

a process which is made up of lots of tiny micro events in some sense. The everyday isn't just like an endless ongoing static norm. It is itself, this endless process of micro events. And comedy works at the space, always at the space between those sort of micro event to the points where norms are being tested, norms might be changing, norms might be changeable, the contingency of those norms is becoming visible to people. I mean, that's the whole theory of irony that by being ironic, you make, you make visible, make obvious to your audience the extent to which you're conscious that norms are socially contingent in some way. So I think that is a really useful way thinking about it, like event and the every day, but I think it also

would focus attention on the fact that, well, the everyday itself is always made up for these little micro-events. And in some sense, history is all comedy like laughter is always this sort of exposure of the eventful nature of even the most sort of apparent seemingly everyday interaction. So I think that is really, I think that's a really useful way of thinking about it. We can't have a show about comedy and play music about comedy without mentioning the greatest mockumentary, rock mockumentary in history, which is Spinal Tap. This is Spinal Tap, which is a spoof film from 1984, of the heavy metal band, or the pretend heavy metal band Spinal Tap, which puts so many things into public parlance,

such as turning the amps up to 11, etc. But one of the things about the Spinal Tap was the songs are actually all right, they're not bad, and they're just sort of like basically that excessive. stuff again, just exaggerating like the general norms of heavy metal. So one song we could play would be Big Bottom. The opening lyrics are, the bigger the cushion,

the sweet of the pushing, that's what I said, the loose of the waistband, the deeper the quicksand, also I've read. I won't go on, actually. It gets worse and worse. Be-ho, Big Bottom, big bottom. Talk about bum cakes, my girls

got them. Big Bottom, drive me out of my How could I leave this behind? People have put forward this idea that there's been a comedification of everyday life, i.e., there's much more than in the past, there's been, there's an expectation that you should be, either be funny or open to humor, basically, you should be a good sport, you know, at work, whatever, and it's that spread of like banter. You might think of it as

the scouserisation of society or something. So Lauren Berlant puts for this idea that there's been this sort of spread of comedy so that it is, or at least a certain form of humour is like the dominant way in which people are trained to

encounter the world. I think that is something that leads on into sort of this idea of a general cynicism. You know, it's sort of cynical irony. Jeje might put it, which is a really big problem. And you sort of mentioned it in terms of, you know, the being worn down or the difficulty of putting forth

an earnest or sincere statement. And of course, like for politics, you need to be able to put forward sincere statements, basically. And the risk of putting forward a sincere statement is always that you will be cast as naive. Do you know what I mean? You don't understand how the world works because, you know, we all know that everybody's out for themselves,

et cetera, and everybody who's involved in politics, they're just self-seeking, et cetera, and all these sorts of things, which is why the revelation of corruption and these sorts of stuff doesn't really have any effect. It just reinforces people's idea of cynicism, that politics and, you know, sincerity is not the, or sincere politics is not the way which you can deal with your life's problems. I feel like this is one of those things that claims is very difficult to test

the claim that somehow everyday life has become more comedic, or everyday interaction and discourse has become more comedic because we are very, very weak evidence for making any sort of judgment about before the existence of recording media, like film and sound recording. We don't really, you know, there weren't people going around transcribing

like everyday ordinary conversations between people in everyday life. Like people just weren't doing this. It wasn't, so we just don't have records. We don't really know. I mean, yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure about it at all. sort of like, this is put forward by Burland and a few people like that. I'm not exactly sure, but I think, yeah, I sort of see the argument around how the workplace

has been de-formalized in some ways, you know, the introduction of like play into the workplace and these sorts of things, the gamification of work on all these, as some sort of trends which could fit with this idea that, you know, the workplace has to be more informal. Of course, like the office is the TV show you'd go. to think about that. You think of the importance of wise cracking and movies in the 40s and 50s. I get the point about the de-formalisation of work,

but I'm not convinced people weren't kind of, you know, cracking jokes all the time even in these relatively formal contexts. We should play Callow White, never do shit at work, which is a song from earlier this year, which is just a song about people goofing off at work, basically, saying, I never do shit at work,

just ride up and down the aisles, and smoking and drinking and like slacking off. It's like basically it's the contemporary version of take this job and shove it, which is a big hit for Johnny Paycheck back in the 70s again, I think. I don't never do shit at work. I don't never do shit at work. But ride up and down need goddamn owls.

But ride up and down he got them out. I don't ever do shit at work. I don't never do shit at work. I'm in here just till in company time. I'm in here just till in company time I don't never do shit at work I don't never do shit at work But ride up and down

he's got them owls But ride up and down He's got damn hours I don't never do shit at work I don't never do shit at work I'm in here just till in company time Do we want to talk about that Christopher Hitchin's article

Why Women Aren't funny It sort of fits in this idea of like Is it is comedy culturally specific Is it a male affect or a male disposition, what do you think, Nadia? I like the argument that one of the reasons why this thing, my existing culture, that women are not funny, is that I like this idea that being funny is close to being clever, and that cleverness can be seen as a threat.

And so therefore, there's a function saying that women can't possibly be as funny, as men. So that I find as like quite an appealing argument or also answer to the question. It's difficult from my vantage point because I find men funny and women funny, you know, and I'm not a man in the world, so I can't view it from that perspective. But as an argument like that, that appeals to me about why women might not be allowed to be funny. Yeah, to me, I always associate that idea that women aren't supposed to be funny just with the fact that women, you know, in certain cultural historical contexts are not supposed to make public displays of their cleverness. I mean, something we talked about in the show is when we were preparing for the show, it's this idea that there

are quite a lot of cultural and social contexts in which humor is basically the only socially acceptable form of cleverness. And this, I would say, like, this is not at all, I'm not at all talking about a sort of northern working class context here actually. This is more something I think comes from British elite culture than it's deep anti-intellectualism and Philistinism. One of the things I very much agree with this sort of account, the classic account of Harry Anderson and Tom Nairn on, this idea that there's something about English culture specifically,

actually not British culture, something about English culture, which goes back several hundred years, which is deeply anti-intellectual, like compared to other sort of elite cultures globally. And it has to do the specific history of English capitalism really and the fact that it you know in really crude terms it has to do with the fact that the English ruling class basically invented modern capitalism and they just sort of invented it by accident they didn't really have to think about what they were doing and it was better not to so there's this sort of anti-intellectualism builds into English elite culture

this Philistinism and within and it sets a set of cultural norms according to which cleverness generally is suspect it's associated with foreigners or intellectuals who are kind of dangerous or subversives among the lower orders. You know, you don't want the lower orders to be too clever because they might get ideas above their station, which is partly why, you know, intense humorousness becomes associated with sections of the, you know, the British working class, especially the English working class, which are historically also quite, you know, restive politically, you know, quite antagonistic to the ruling class and less deferential. I mean, that's also, it's important to say, that's a part of your sort of late 20th century scouse identities that, you know,

into, you know, you, you know, being funny is part of being clever and being clever is part of your resistance to, you know, Thatcherism really. So, I mean, it's quite a, it's a very late invention. It's a whole other show. So I know somebody at Liverpool University has got a book coming out just this year about the, the sort of invention of scouse identity and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the scouse political identity and the fact that it's all, the whole idea of the scouser is this kind of radical figure, is a complete invention of the 60s. Before that, it was a Tory city and a, you know, you know, slave city going back far enough. But it's a really important part of it. But anyway, and within this

context in which these elite Philistine anti-intellectual norms are being observed, cleverness becomes like the only way you can acceptively demonstrate cleverness. And of course, you know, within cultural context in which women are not supposed to display their cleverness, then they're not supposed to be funny. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think there's also something about like what gender norms do to like, as a general thing, women are expecting. to edit themselves, you know, and kind of like manage their image. And I think one of the reasons, you know, and what they say and how it affects men and, you know, potentially it affects themselves.

And I think, like, one of the reasons why Miriam Margulis is hilarious is, you know, like she's funny, but I think one of the reasons why she's particularly funny is she basically just acts like a person rather than, like, a funny person rather than, projecting, you know, woman as is in the Simone de Beauvoir sense, you know, because she, you know, she's constantly talking about like pissing and farting and shitting and stuff. And you don't expect a woman, a woman to. That's not the sort of stuff that women are supposed to make jokes about women are supposed to make jokes about periods. That's where we're supposed to make jokes. And then you lose all of the men to that sense of humour. But because Miriam Margulis is kind of engaging with, like,

and stuff, rather than just like women's stuff, it kind of, there's a space between that in which I think makes it extra funny. I mean, with Miriam Margulets as well, particularly in more recent times, she sort of developed this, she sort of developed a persona based on like the older woman who is basically invisible and nobody cares about

and like it's not meant to be attractive to men, so she doesn't give a fuck, basically. And she can say whatever she likes, basically, and she doesn't give a fuck about what, you know, it's not that I don't give a fact if I upset somebody or not, it's that I don't give a fact if I smash through social norms and say the things that you're not supposed to say. Do you know what I mean?

That's her public persona in some sorts of ways. Yeah, and there's more and more theory that's coming out about, you know, all of that stuff and like, you know, post-menstruating women, like menopausal women and like how that's situated in culture and with comedy as well. There's lots of interesting stuff going up and that. The other thing I would say about comedy is professional, comedy is one of those things which was quite resistant to female participation, perhaps

in the States, perhaps more than the UK, because alternative comedy took a very different form in the UK. So quite a lot of female comedians came through. If you've ever seen the show 30 Rock, which is written by Tina Faye, that's based on, which is hilarious, it's a great show. That's based on her Tina Faye's experience becoming a head writer for Saturday Night Live in 1999. So Saturday Night Live is a huge comedy. show in the US, you never guess when it goes out Saturday night. And she became the first ever head writer, you know, and it was 1999 before, the first ever head writer, female headwriter on Saturday Night Live and hired loads of women to write for it. And that was one of those

big key moments which cracked open comedy, the US comedy circuit. Yeah. I feel like this is one of those issues. Like I'm old enough to remember, like I guess back to the in the early 90s, time when there were so few women, really visible in comedy, that even like feminist, self-consciously feminist women would sometimes, would sometimes say, well, maybe it's true. Maybe it's true. Women just aren't as funny. And it's just, it's been completely disproved and like a really basic liberal feminist argument that women were systematically excluded. And once they stopped being systematically excluded, it turned out they were just as good at it as men. It's just been totally proven over the past 30 years. Like, it's sort of boring to say.

but it's one of those areas in which I can remember a time when people were sort of, there seemed to be so few women involved that people were wondering, is this something that builds into patriarchal culture? And it's, you know, it only, it's turned out, it only is at the level of people just being excluded. There was this, it was idiotic stuff like, you couldn't be, there was this like people thought you, even when they were like female comedians, like they couldn't be good looking. There was this idea, like, somehow you couldn't, you couldn't be like, can physically attractive woman and be funny.

This is what I'm talking about. This is relating back to my point about Miriam Margulis, you know, is that there becomes this obsession about like what the woman represents. So it's not, you can't just like, you can't just make comedy as a person. It's like you have to then have a different, you have to fulfill a different set of criteria, be it, you know, one way or the other, which is like the typical way in which like women are critiqued, you know, wearing too much, not enough, pretty. not pretty,

et cetera, rather than, like, is this stuff funny? Yes, yeah, I think that's right. Like in the US,

one of the first big female comedians is Phyllis Diller. She goes back to the 60s and perhaps even before that. But her whole schick was, you know, about she had this big wild hair, basically,

and it was all about how she wasn't attractive, basically. She was sort of like, you know, a man hunter, but she wasn't attractive. If you read how she describes it,

she says, you know, that was the persona, the persona I had to adopt. in order to basically be acceptable in the comedy circuit. I mean, this is all open to really classical feminist theory indeed, like De Beauvoir, Joan Rivier's famous psychoanalytic essay about her femininity is a sort of masquerade,

the Laura Mulvey stuff about how the woman is supposed to be looked at, she's not supposed to be an active subject. So these women who have to, you want to adopt the role of active subjects, they have to sort of performatively exit their status as objects of desire and object, just objects of viewing and contemplation. Also, we have to laugh at the men. Like, this is very important.

Men get very upset when women don't laugh at their jokes. Like, in general, like in the world, you know. And definitely, like, I've been, you know, I've been socialized into laughing at men's jokes that I don't find funny. Like, it's taken me, like, 35 years to catch myself. It's a very, very strong socialisation point to, like, you know, laugh and giggle at stuff you don't find funny, but you only realise afterwards, you just know that that's what you're supposed to do. It's like really intense. Yeah, I can see that. The feminist killjoy is like, you know, that's the accusation, isn't it basically?

Exactly. Exactly. And it's feminazzi is worse. You know, like that is so strong that stuff because it's both ways, you know, like as you're articulating. It's like women are not supposed to be funny, but then they have. have to laugh at the men if the men are making a joke. Well, they have to laugh for the men, don't they? They're not supposed to laugh at them. Oh, yeah, sorry, sorry. I mean, at their jokes, at their jokes, yeah. I mean, that's another cliche of life in patriarchal culture that the thing men fear most from women is being laughed at, the thing women most fear from men is being murdered.

Murdered. Murdered. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, there's also that, I mean, of course, that's, I mean, that's something anthropologists will say, isn't it? You know better than me, Nardia that, you know, female solidarity partly predicated on being able to laugh at men is something you find in a lot of cultures. It's become a standing joke on this show that we always play a Chambal Womba song. It's a Chamba Womba song for every occasion. So we could play Big Mouth Strikes again because it contains a recitation of a very famous Lenny Bruce song to come as a preposition.

Bigmo, Big Mouse strikes again. Bigmo, Bigmo, Big Mo, Big Bo, Big Bo, Big Mouse strikes again. Okay, you too, what? Can't Crucified thing? Lenny Bruce is dead. This is a song. from Bob Dylan's 1981 album, Shot of Love, which was one of Dylan's evangelical Christian albums. So Dylan, who had been seen as this iconic space person for the counterculture in the 70s

begins his journey to becoming, you know, I think what we would more accurately say today, I mean a fairly conservative, if not reactionary, cultural figure from the mid-70s onwards. And yet he still creates this song in 1981, which is an elegy to the passing of Lenny Bruce, who is the first comedian in the English-speaking world, to be seen as a kind of heroic figure of countercultural attitude, someone who uses his position as a stand-up comedian to expose the hypocrisy of straight society. And he really is the template for later figures like Dan Carlin, Richard Pryor, in this country, Alexei Sayle, people like that. So it's kind of fascinating that Dylan, he casts Lenny Bruce as a martyr in some ways in this song, which is a very Dylan 1981 Christian thing to do. It's a very Dylan Christian way to think about a person and their heroism.

But the fact that it's Lenny Bruce, who was definitely not a Christian, that he picks upon is really interesting. So fascinating bit of cultural history, if nothing else, this song. Lenny Bruce is dead, but his ghost lives on and on. Never did get any Golden Globe Award. to sin in a he was an applaud I think that

that word to kill joy there is worth unpacking a bit because as good Spinozists of course accusing somebody of killing joy is like the worst accusation you could make do you know what I mean but I think it gets into something like because we haven't really talked about laughing too much at the moment but like laughing is always a social thing

You can laugh on your own, but you've always got an imagined other people in your head, and I'm adding to audience or whatever in your head. And it's also, it's contagious. So it's like trans individual in some sort of way. You know, you can catch laugh. In fact, it's very hard not to catch laughing. If somebody starts laughing, you will tend to laugh. Do you know what I mean?

It's like something which happens. There's like spontaneity involved in it. And like often surprise, you can surprise yourself laughing. So it's like it's an unusual part of life in that sort of sense. And so I think that's why people get so upset. When humor fails, basically, I think that's why people get so upset about it. But it's also about having your guard down and how that functions and where it functions. And going to going back to the point about like, you know, it makes people relax.

And if they're not prepared to relax and then they find themselves relaxing in the company of others or in a group, like that has a specific affect and effect on the situation, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's out of your control and it's physiological as well, like a yawn, like it's physiological, it's in the body. Yeah, so it's like a yawn, yeah, yeah. Because yawns are catching as well.

They're contagious as well, aren't they? As the listeners of this show will be experiencing right now. Kadam! Baboom! Well, I mean, Bergson says that laughter is not an emotional response. He just differentiates it very categorically

from an emotional response. and he says it's somehow unemotional it's something else and it's a really machinic basically yeah yeah and if you want to make a differentiation between affect and emotion then at least according to some models not all then that's a really good example

that laughter is an affect but it's not an emotion but humor isn't exactly an emotion and to some extent it involves a certain distantiation from emotion which ties into things we were saying earlier So, which is partly why it's sort of, you know, that's why historically comedy has been regarded as the less serious, you know, the less noble art form than tragedy, because it, because tragedy deals in authentic emotion in some sense, whereas comedy doesn't. It deals in something else. I mean, I thought, I rate an essay when I was, for my master's degree, I remember, about comedy and tragedy at one point, sort of thinking about that. Oh, so did I.

A, that's great. I mean, lots of people have written about this philosophical tradition of thinking about comedy and laughter, and there's this kind of persistent sense that there's sort of, there's something sort of, there's something countercultural about valuing comedy over tragedy instead of tragedy over comedy. And lots of people have different ideas about why that might be. It might be that the kind of earnestness of tragedy doesn't actually speak to the reality of most people's everyday life in the way that comedy does, or it might be that laughter and comedy are about

overturning power relationships and hierarchies. It was tragedy always sort of reinforces them. Yeah, it's, there's lots of different takes on it. Do you remember your essay, Nadia? Mine wasn't a master's essay. It was because I had a minor specialisation

in performing art. So it was about like deconstructing like tragedy and comedy over history and I was like doing Roman and Greek stuff. I have to find it. It was, I remember it being a really interesting delving into the difference between them and why. But I wasn't exactly dealing with the question about why one is elevated over the other. But I think it isn't, I mean, I would hazard a guess like to take a kind of overarching,

just stab at it, but it has to do with like what you think the fundamental condition of life is. Yeah, it does have to do with that, yeah. I mean, I only remember a bit of some of mine, but it was. was partly responding to this observation that psychoanalysis, that Freudian psychoanalysis has this, although psychoanalysis has things to say about comedy and Freud has his famous book about jokes and their relationship to the unconscious, that psychoanalysis has a fundamentally tragic view of human existence, which is partly why it slots so neatly in some ways into a particular culture of tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks and carries on to the future.

And you can just read that as saying, well, Sophocles and Freud and Shakespeare and all these other people, they understand the fundamentally tragic nature of human existence. But you can also, if you want to, I think I did want to, you can say, well, it's also one of the limitations of psychoanalysis that it doesn't, that it's the comedic dimensions of every, despite having things to say about jokes as purely linguistic constructions, the fact that it's not that good on analyzing the comedic elements of everyday life or demonstrate some of its limitations. Yeah, totally, totally. It kind of fails, fails in that whole area.

We talked a bit about Scouse Humour, the great iconic Liverpoolian comedy band, other band Halfman, Half Biscuit, who come out of that post-punk dull culture scene of the 1980s. I think I're still active. And we're responsible for lots of very funny and quite anthemic songs in their early days in the early 80s and going forward. But one from a bit later, I'm not sure exactly what year this is from, has now become probably their best-known anthem, Joy Division of Oven Clubs. And what I don't know is if they made up the concept of Joy Division Oven Gloves and made a song about it and then people started marketing Joy Division Oven Gloves, or if it had already become possible to purchase Joy Division oven gloves.

But I and lots of people I know now own a pair of oven gloves which have the design on them, which is the iconic cover design from Joy Division's first album, which you still see a remarkable number of people of all ages wearing on T-shirts. I never stop. As someone who grew up in the Northwest in the 80s, I never stopped being surprised that people are still wearing that T-shirt. But Joy Division oven gloves.

The fascinating but telling incongruity of somebody having a piece of baking equipment, bearing a design associated with youthful post-industrial bleakness, it never stops being funny. Talk to the hands, talk to the hands. Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance. If you're a bit of your little bit of them. Oh, pick a little bit of pads. Oh, polishing the name

I keep wicked for the Quakers And be joined a version of looks And be joined a version of rocks And be joined a version of loves And be joined a version of rocks Perhaps this might be the point Where we could talk about the various theories About comedy, what comedy are

Is this the right point for it? Yeah, so when people talk about theories of comedy they normally categorise it in the three categories, which is like superiority theory, relief theory, and incongruity theory. And so superiority theory is sort of often associated with people like Thomas Hobbes. It would be, wouldn't it? Yeah. He's such a misanthrope.

Yeah. But it's sort of, it basically, it's this idea that laughter comes from feelings of superiority over other people, basically. And in fact, Hobbs says, laughter is nothing else but sudden feelings of glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others and with our own former self something like that and so yeah that's it yeah and like when we think about that we think about racist or sexist jokes these sorts of things you know in the in the 70s actually probably

the 80s as well you know an englishman a welshman and an irishman walk into a pub would be the set up to a whole series of jokes in which the Irish would be the butt of the joke because like they're stupid basically was the stereotype. So that's the sort of joke that you would sort of think about and then other countries have their own versions of the people who are

who are always stupid. I can't quite remember what they are now. In the States it was traditionally Polish people. Polish jokes and Irish jokes. It's an incredible bit of like cultural history that's rightly I suppose you've forgotten now, isn't it? Irish jokes was a massive thing when we were kids. like up until the end of the 80s.

And it was a real test of whether you came from like a family that had some level of political consciousness that you'd been taught not to tell Irish jokes. It was the first form of anti-racism that most people, especially people in working class communities, got taught was don't tell Irish jokes. Yeah, it's really interesting that that kind of like humour is a form of control as well, you know.

But it's that forming the we that we talked about earlier, isn't it? Like, you know, I mean, we could link. this to the bit of history before alternative comedy comedy in the UK there were a couple of different circuits one of them was the variety circuit which comes from like vaudeville

a music hall etc and that's the roots of things like just sketch comedy Eric and Ernie etc and the two Ronies these sorts of people but then there was this other circuit which was the northern working men's club circuit in which you really would expect to have like sexist and racist jokes

but it's a sort of weird one that that circuit it had a sort of, it's almost like there's a shared pool of jokes, basically, and the idea was nobody could ever own a joke. And so people would just steal their jokes, et cetera, all the time. There was this show called The Comedians, which was on BBC, I think, in the 70s, which was just like Northern Worker Men's, clubs, comics, basically, doing racist and sexist jokes, people like Bernard Manning, etc. And, like, they had to, when they were doing the shows, they had to cross off when somebody had done a joke, because they didn't. all had the same jokes, right? And so they had to, you know, somebody later on in a bit,

I had to work out where the joke was, and so that sort of superiority comedy was like, you know, really, really, really dominant in that, not only that, but I know a singer on the, who still works on the sort of working man's club circuit, and like he does those jokes all the time, a guy called Jimmy Echo, who is my friend Harry's dad, and he's been like a singer on that circuit for ages and how he comes up he's up whenever you see him or when you see my friend harry he's always got a new joke from his from his dad jimmy and that was that was so the alternative comedy that jem was talking about earlier that was you know it was sort of in reaction to that that arose and they were mainly sort of like very short jokes or one-liners you know take my wife please

is the famous young henman one-line joke basically it was it was alternative comedy sort of starts in the early it's probably late 70s, early 80s of people like Tony Allen who formed this comedy club. There was a rejection of that and then they were looking to people like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, etc.

At which then eventually turns into and that's when comedy, stand-up comedy turns into this something much more elaborate, you know, your 90-minute show with all sorts of like callbacks too early and all sorts of structures get developed, etc.

It's much more of what we know now is a stand-up comedy. Anyway, that's a superiority theory, which is sort of, which obviously does, it obviously does address certain forms of comedy, doesn't it, right? You do get jokes that explains a racist joke. It also explains the liberal comedy news shows that you see, you know, in the US, etc., in which the joke is basically look how thick Trump supporters are. That superiority of theory, isn't it, basically, of a different sort of kind. Also there's that link

between this idea and I don't know where this comes from is that if if we brand people as stupid they're therefore no longer a threat. There's some kind of internalizing logic to that. So that works with the kind of Boris stuff. It's like I don't want to think

about, you know, Boris Johnson as a threat or I don't think about the Trump and his supporters as a threat. Therefore, I participate in this kind of cultural production to say that they're stupid, therefore I can draw a line under it and carry on with my life and not be an active participant in trying to create an alternative. Has that specific function?

That's interesting because basically people being stupid is a really big part of comedy, isn't it? It takes us back to Bergson's definition of comedy or laughter. He says like laughter is something mechanical encrusted upon the living. basically he's sort of like a vitalist so it's like what he's sort of saying is that like basically comedy comes about when when something like somebody's mind or body is shown as like really inflexible or it's reduced to a few characteristics you know what I mean and so he's got his theory of laughter which is what society really wants is greater elasticity and greater sociability

amongst its members so laughter is like a punishment for being shown to be inflexible in some sort of way do you know what I mean to be a little bit machinic some sort of way. And so you can totally think that about those characters, which we'd say a politician's becoming comic characters. And so obviously Boris, rather than Boris Johnson, Boris is the example of that. You know, he invents his character on Have I Got News for You in this famous segment where he's being torn a new one about this tape where he's arranging with a friend to get a journalist beaten up. It just goes on and on and on for ages. creates a really awkward dynamic, and in the end, the other guy who's like one of the hosts,

he sort of steps in and sort of like makes a joke out of it. And then suddenly Boris, you can almost see a light bulb go off in Boris's head. Oh, this is the way you get out of it, isn't it? You reduce yourself into a comic character who's limited in some sorts of ways. And then you can basically use comedy to step out of criticism. You know, you can see, you can go and watch that on YouTube, that comedy. You can see the moment that Boris Johnson turns into the character, so Boris basically. Something like Mr. Bean is of the every example of this sort of, you know, or this idea of like you reduce yourself down to almost like a caricature

or a very limited for like not a full vital human being. And we find that sort of funny. And of course that superiority theory sort of fits with that is that we can castigate a whole series of people as not fully human. And therefore that's the laughter is the punishment that we inflict on those people. Well, so what are the, how do we compare this with the other thing, the other main theories then? Well, the other theory is like relief theory is this idea,

well, like it says in the name, that there's some sort of buildup of like nervous libidinal energy which hasn't got anywhere to go and like the humour is the way to relieve that, which we just sort of saw that I was describing Boris's invention where it became really, really awkward and that sort of stuff. It's associated with like Freud,

his book jokes in relation to the unconscious. so in that there's sort of like there's some psychic energy is like some and forth for a purpose but it can't be dissipated it can't be released and so humor is the way in which that can be expended that are necessary i mean the model is basically nervous laughter yeah Freud's model is that nervous laughter is the most basic form of laughter and so in some sense all comedy is a sort of it's a deliberate cultivation of nervous laughter like it creates a sort of creates a bit of tension and the tension is then released and then that and that's how you get the comedy.

I mean, that's not totally incompatible with the other theory we're going to mention, with incongruity theory, is it? Yeah. I think it's really useful to describe that cringe theory, as in Kirby Enfusiasm being the best example of that, which we mentioned earlier. I love that show, but like it's fucking hard to watch, you know, because it gets so, you feel so awkward. Do you know what I mean?

Can't watch cringe alone. I can't watch it alone. I can't. Really? It's really weird. Yeah, it's really weird. of cringy things, I can't do it at all. Well, Kirby's enthusiasm is an interesting test case, isn't it?

Because in some ways you could read it as being funny through the superiority theory, that the whole point is that we just feel superior to Larry all the time, even though he's like one of the richest people in America. He's not really, but he's a member of a kind of, he's very, one of the richest people in show business. And that's so we feel superior to him. And there's also, there's the relief theory, which is that the whole thing is about generating awkward scenes that then result in a sort of discharge of life.

after. But I mean, in some ways, the oldest theory of comedy, which goes back to Aristotle, is the incongruity theory, which is a theory that just something becomes funny because, I mean, the famous phrase from Aristotle is humor is a buckled mill wheel. It's a wheel that isn't rolling straight. So there's just some sense

of incongruity of two things not quite fitting together. And, you know, the whole premise, I mean, I think nobody ever seems to say this about curb unty use. And for me, the whole premise is these, these people are living this kind of California lifestyle, but they're all, they're New Yorkers. Like, Larry and all of the other sort of central characters, they all come from New York and they all

behave like cliched, you know, wisecracking, misanthropic New Yorkers, but in the context of like LA, you know, Southern California elite culture. And it's the sort of incongruities of the way that, not just Larry, but the other central characters all negotiate that, but I think is really sort of generates all the humour actually. And so you can sort of understand it in those terms as well. And maybe they're not even, they're not even incompatible theories. No, I think that works because, like, the awkwardness comes from, like, that Larry is like he's not following social norms, or he doesn't quite know what the social norm is, and it's like that awkwardness that he's breaching social norms. And it's not just that, I mean, the persistent, the joke that develops over the series, that he's, he's got all his own norms. Yeah.

And that these norms are presented as somehow idiosyncratic to him, but they're not really. They're the norms. They're the norms of like a sort of, of someone in Brooklyn in 1956, I think, which he's then somehow. we're trying to apply in the culture of Southern Californian kind of advanced elite consumer capitalism. Yeah, but I like that analysis, but it fits for that idea of like awkwardness comes from like the social norms being violated and like basically it just becomes more and more excessive with Larry and yeah, and like, you know, basically just builds and you can, you can almost, you can, you can, you can feel the cringe coming from the setup earlier in an episode. You know, that's going to unfold later on in a really, really cringy way. But that also, that fits with like, it doesn't, I don't think that has to be

superiority theory because it also fits with the sort of relief theory because it's that, you know, the awkwardness builds up, but we don't know what the, the way to dissipate that, you know what I mean, to re-erect social norms in some sort of way. Well, I mean, that show, I mean, that show also, I think, I mean, it plays with superiority experiences a lot because like half the time you're cringing and feeling superior to Larry And half the time Larry himself is the moral agent, like exposing the venality of Californian elite norms. So I think all of those things apply in different ways. I would want to throw in, because I think we've already sort of alluded to it earlier, actually,

like more contemporary theories of comedy. Coming from people like Paolo Verneau, coming from some contemporary readers of people like Bergson and Batai, like you famously, it has a famously complex relationship to Bergson's theory of comedy. And they all have to do with things actually we've already talked about earlier in the conversation, the idea that the point of comedy is to sort of creatively explore social norms. So comedy is really, really important in everyday life because because it is a way of demonstrating your kind of expertise, your fluency with social norms, precisely by, bending them in ways which are amusing but not so extreme as just to appear mad I mean one of

the arguments is and this would go back to say Lauren Balance stuff about um you know another much missed figure I have to say another Lauren Balance stuff about the come on the comedification of everyday life this idea that well in a postmodern culture one of the features of contemporary culture is that compared to other cultures the humans have usually lived in, we're perpetually conscious of many, many different social norms applying in different context and different people having different norms and the norms not really being fully agreed on in many areas of life by the society. And so one of the things you have to do to successfully negotiate this context, which is, I mean, I do go along with this. I mean, some people can test it, but I think

I do sort of go along with the idea that it is a feature of contemporary cultures that they're extremely complex by historic standards to the extent that people are having to live in societies where they know that their way of life and their value system are quite radically different from people they're having to live with and interact with like all the time a lot of the time and that is a relatively unusual feature of human cultures it's not totally unprecedented but it's probably unprecedented on this scale what living in such a culture demands of you, it demands of you a certain flexibility and a certain fluency and the ability to move between different social registers and social codes. And under those circumstances,

humour is a way of demonstrating to the people around you, your facility at moving between those codes. And that's one reason it's so important. But of course, that comes back to stuff we were talking about earlier. One reason why, so many of us experienced the humorlessness and the kind of non-comprehension of those 90s comedians when faced with the cultural historical shift which Corbinism represented, it's because it seemed like they were not doing their job. Their whole job as comedians is supposed to be

to encourage us all to cope with change, to cope with discursive fluidity, to understand the provisionality of all worldviews and all value systems. That's supposed to be their job as comedians. To some extent, And that's always been the job of comedians. Like always, there's always been the job of comedians.

Going back to like the ancient Greek, you know, the ancient Greeks, the whole point of comedy was partly to sort of demonstrate the relative contingency of the norms of your own culture and society. So when you have a bunch of comedians, you can't do that. When faced with a radical historical rupture, all they can do is sort of scream at it and try to make fun of it. It feels like they're not doing their job. It feels like they're not doing their job in a way which really highlights.

something about the limitations and the non-provisionality for them of their world view. Yeah, no, that sort of fits with like a Berksonian conception as well, because they became figures of fun, basically, on my part of Twitter, because they were, like, they were showing their inflexibility, their inability to adapt, basically, or the inability to recognise how they sat within something much, much, all right, let me do it this way. There's a whole set of, like, Lacanian sort of, post-Locanian sort of theories of comedy.

One of them is from Alenka Zupanic, who wrote this book called The Odd One In. And she's got this weird sort of conception, which is that comedy comes when the universal is revealed as particular, right? And so, like, I think one of the things she uses is this idea of, like, you know, the king whose universal slipped on a banana skin and the universe has revealed as particular. I think that's what's going on with like the 90s comedians. It's typical of the Ljubljana school, Slovenian, Licanians. It's making a completely trite point, which as anyone who's listened to the show should be aware, has been obvious to anyone who's thought about the nature of comedy since Aristotle.

And yet it thinks it's a really profound point. Sorry, a bit of academic sectarianism there. It's been anti-Lubiana prejudice. Brilliant. Brilliant. the universal has been made particular. No one's ever thought that before. But that is what's going on with the comedians,

is that, like, they think that they have, like, a universal position, and the change reveals it as particular and very constrained, you know, basically the result of a particular historical era and social circumstances in which they arose, you know what I mean? And so that's why they become a figure of fun because of their inflexible, you know? Yeah. You should cut my rant there,

people who just think I've got something against Slovenians. I know it's for your benefit. No one else needs to me. We should play because I got high by Afro-Man, which is about smoking weed and being stupid, basically. It really fits with a big sonian. So this is an excessive. This could be comedic because I'm treating something pretty flippant

as a serious, to apply serious theory to. But it is that like, you know, that there's a whole set of comedy around getting high, you know, Cheech and Chong films from the 1970s, I imagine, actually, Cheeching Chung, about people getting really, really stoned and, you know, basically behaving, like not full human beings, behaving in an elastic way. That's like a lot of comedy around people being drunk, etc. It fits that bigsonian idea that actually what we're laughing at is people reducing their capabilities in some sort of way.

and once again the laughter would be originally be the sort of punishment that we would inflict on that subject because in fact what we really want is for people to be full vital beings I was going to clean my room until I got high I was going to get up and find the broom but then I got hard my room is still messed up and I know why Why, man. Because I got ha, because I got ha, because I got ha, because I got ha. I was going to go to class.

The last conception of comedy I wanted to raise was this American theory is called Todd McGowan. He's also a sort of like, he's coming out on the Canian sort of thing as well, because he says that, like, humor comes from the encounter of lack and excess, basically. And so, like, the whole Lacanian thing is the subject is, you know, defined by a a lack or whatever, and then the drive to for wholeness, it explains all sorts of things, nationalism, blah, blah, blah. But I quite like that idea of like, so it's sort of like

that excess and lack thing is sort of like, like when you treat something, which is actually quite trivial in a massively excess way, or you treat something which is really quite excessive in a really minimal way. So one of the examples comes to mind is like, you know, the black night scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail.

So he's the guy who, basically, you know, he's like, you know, come on, I'll fight you. He gets an arm chopped off. He's like, it's only a scratch. And he gets both arms and both legs cut off. And he's like, come back, you coward. I'll not you into the middle of next week. And it's like, you know, so it's treating this like, like really excessive wounds

as though they're almost nothing, do you know what I mean? But I think it also helps to explain like that black humor that you get in like, you know, emergency services or doctors and paramedics, etc. that sort of, I suppose that's relief relief theory as well. Yeah, definitely. That's sort of like relieving it because you're treating something

really serious as though it's trivial or something like that, do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think that is a good model. That is a nice theory. Because partly what we're talking about here is comedy is always, comedy is always sort of foolish and there's the whole etymology of the word fool

which meant a sort of clown and it means a clown in the middle ages. It's something I say to the kids sometimes, So the fundamental nature of wisdom and maturity is getting things in proportion. It's knowing when it is appropriate to be this upset about that thing happening or not care about this thing happening. It's about proportion. Then if comedy is always about things being deliberately put out of proportion,

you know, that sort of fits with that in a way in an interesting sense. I think that is quite interesting. Yeah, because I mean, the other thing about the fool, of course, is like that. The fool is the only person who's allowed to say the truth to power, etc. you know what I mean that's the thing and I think that sort of feeds into the thing that we sort of sidestepped at the beginning of the show and we've probably got more

ammunition to deal of it now which is that that whole like a BLM, Me Too a sort of backlash against that from certain comedians and like a defence of like free speech and you should be able to say that you want and take the piss out of anybody sort of thing

and in some ways it's I think that it's almost like within that sort of comedy or that comedic world, you know, the comedian that claims some sort of jest as privileged, you know what I mean, to say stuff that you can't say in other sort of, you know, other sort of circumstances. And so you're exempt from those sorts of having to behave in a certain way in relation to social norms or something like that.

I also think what's going on is a generational change, a bit like the 90s comedians, basically, where basically people have been passed by by social norms. And so now they've got that rage that comes from, from having failed humour basically because, you know, they were the ones who controlled what humour was in the past, and now it's past them by, and so there's that rage that comes out, you know.

We should play Tears of a Clown, which was written in 1967 by Smokey Robinson, but I think we should play the 1979 version by the beat because it is great. One of the last year, baby, baby, baby, oh, yeah. One of the reasons I think all of this is sort of important is because I do think, like, one of the big problems we have is like, how do you make sincere political statements in a time of just, because I do think, like, one of the big problems we have is like, how do you make sincere political statements in a time of just, generalised of mass cynicism, basically, mass cynicism about politics. I wrote an article a couple of years back,

well, a few years back now, about why comedians are becoming populist political figures. And so, and it was just basically, it was sort of provoked a bit by Russell Brand when he had that big flare up just before the 2015 general election where he was, you know, all of a suddenly became a sort of prominent political figure.

And then you can look at all other figures. I mean, the most obvious one is Beppe Grillo, who's a comedian in Italy, who basically formed the five-star movement that basically went on to be the governing, you know, the biggest party in Italian parliament, etc. Once again, you know, a very populist, sort of almost anti-political, a bit like the Russell Brand thing was anti-political, although he's very much on the left at that point. And then there's all sorts of other figures, you could point to Zelensky, who was the president of Ukraine famously. he was a comedian who played a comic character of the president, being the president of Ukraine before he was actual president of Ukraine. There's lots of other figures you could point to as well. John Naa was a comedian who became the mayor of Reykjavik, etc, and these sorts of figures.

And it was definitely constrained in a certain period of time, and I was trying to think through what was going on with that. And I think it is this thing of like people trying to work out what the relationship between like generalised comedy and generalise cynicism and being able to make sincere political statements that you actually do need to make, you know, in order for politics to occur. And so it's like the comedian are the people who are most trained on stepping back and forth over that boundary. Do you know what I mean? In comedy, people can venture a sincere statement and if it didn't go down, well,

well, you've got the tools to get back to an ironic stance, etc. I think that period has gone. And like the other thing that was going on at that time is like the creation of Boris, perhaps Nigel Farage, etc., which is political figures taken on comic aspects in order to escape from censor, basically.

You'd probably put Trump in that, even though he had no sense of humour, who had never seen laughing, hated to be the subject of humour, but he could provoke laughter, you know, superiority theory laughter in people who would go to his talks, etc. In that article, I was sort of like

trying to present this idea of like post-ironic sincerity as a way through that. And that would just be where you make a political, a sincere statement, but you realize, what you're trying to reveal is that, like, this mass cynicism is not something which is trans-historic.

It's produced by certain historical institutional structures and it can go somewhere else. So you basically put forward a sincere statement, but like after you've moved through irony, so that you show that you're, you know, you're not naive, you're like the knowing audience, but the knowing audience who's not just hiding behind irony, something like that, basically.

Whatever you think of that argument, I do think that the general problem of like how do you make and see his political statements without being cast as the naive audience is like a general problem for left politics. Oh, that's deep far out.