The great British sense of humour

Comedians were in trouble again last weekend. This has reminded me that I have a genevois cousin whose demeanour lends itself entirely to the old joke, “How do you make a Swiss cross?” To which the answer is often, “Quite easily.”

One of his laments is that the English live in a permanent mission to be funny. To a nation whose twin personalities have split between the discreet guardianship of ill-gotten gains or communicating by horn across distant alpine valleys, the idea of finding humour in the oddities of life is anathema, not to say difficult. 

Please note, this is not a paeon to the great British sense of humour which, nowhere else in the world, is held in higher regard than in Britain itself. But, one must concede, both the language, and the close proximity to which this overcrowded island’s urban citizens have long had to live, means that seeing the funny side is easy and often quite important. 

Elsewhere, “a German joke is no laughing matter”, while America’s infamous irony deficit can render them puritanically po-faced. The French, meanwhile, invented the phrase homme sérieux and, in Emmanuel Macron’s fractious response to Boris Johnson’s “clown”, one might observe its cultural importance in action.

Here, James Bond meets both M and imminent exotic death with an amused raised eyebrow and a facetious comment playing at his lips and our greatest literary figure litters his plays with jesters from the Fool in King Lear to Bottom in a Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

This latter phenomenon, it strikes me, has much to answer for. Those driven through “lit crit” will doubtless know that the Shakespearean fool has a certain licence to “speak truth unto power” without necessarily being dragged off to a dreadful medieval finale. He also speaks to “the groundlings” who would, it is suggested, much rather have a scatological laugh at the expense of their betters than follow the twists and turns of dynastic struggle. And, in a world where passing dukes are capriciously blinded or the raging madness of paternal dementia pertains, they do, after all, provide a certain light relief. 

Much the same thoughts, it seems, occur to the producers of political television programmes where the temptation to add a soupçon of sniggering clown can rarely be resisted. 

Former BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg’s new show is just the latest to fail to resist the siren call of a travelling minstrel and let soi-disant comedian Joe Lycett have a shake of his bells. The up-shot seems largely to have gone down like a floater in a jacuzzi. 

She’s not the first to succumb, of course. I have held forth before on the mistake Question Time repeatedly makes in allowing variant bladder-bangers on the panel, ostensibly to tick all the Shakespearean boxes but often to make entirely predictable grand-standing cracks with the paradoxical aim of getting an easy laugh and to be seen as serious social commentators. 

The late lamented David Frost, for whose Sunday morning show I was, like QT, occasional press officer, also threw open his castle gates to Rory Bremner, a man who impersonated the powerful to a point where one always felt he thought he’d actually become them. 

He hadn’t, of course, and this is the great fault in their overuse. They don’t stand so they can’t deliver. “They are”, as Irish playwright, Brendan Behan, once described critics, “Eunuchs in the harem. They know how it’s done. They watch it every day. but they are unable to do it themselves.”

This is a situation in no way helped by the fact that often they are a tired parade of right-on smart-arsery of a form that has finally been rumbled. Nish Kumar and Mock the Week have been de-commissioned, to their angry bafflement. And, if a weekend performance which saw the PM condemned as “cosmic c**t” is anything to go by, the long-fading Have I Got News For You may soon follow.  

Agreeing or not, isn’t the point. It is entirely right that the not inconsiderable egos of our political class are kept well in check by a barbed remark. As another famous comedian, the great Billy Connolly, once remarked,  “The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever becoming one.”

True, the Big Yin also said: “Anybody who listens to Boris needs professional help. He’s a big silly toff. Britain’s been listening to big silly toffs for years. It’s time they listened to themselves and got on with it.”

And of a Labour politician: “She started to try to ‘out slum’ me, saying my slum was worse than your slum. That thing Labour politicians do. I find it pathetic.”

An even-handedness on the essential ridiculousness of politics that others might learn from.

But there’s another thing at play here. The times are serious. Politicians have spent much of the post-war era slowly eroding our trust in their principle-free running before the latest media wind, their devotion to can-kicking and to short-term expediency. 

It isn’t funny anymore and our tendency to brush it off with our wry British amusement rather mimics the rogue’s gallery we like to laugh at. Like visitors to Bedlam, we point and snigger without ever wondering what this says about ourselves.

Comedians are not an oracle. Theirs is the harlots prerogative. They have no greater monopoly on the truth than journalists or politicians themselves and even less claim on power and responsibility. Their contribution is largely that of reminding our leaders, like the Roman slave, that they are mortal, a fact we poor bloody voters long since grasped. 

It’s time to get serious. Jean-Jacques, this one’s for you. 

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