30 years of Viz

I have actually cried with laughter six times in my life. Once, when I was 14, watching the famous “Germans” episode of Fawlty Towers; a few years later at the Ku Klux Klan scene from Blazing Saddles. More recently I shed a shaky tear when the politician Ron Davies explained to police that he’d been “watching badgers” in a copse near the M4, and at around about the same time I saw Brass Eye’s fabulously offensive paedophilia special. Twice, though, I have been reduced to tears by the Geordie “adult” comic Viz. Back in the 1990s, when it produced a mock “limited edition” ceramic giftware called “The Life of Christ in Cats”, in which scenes from the Saviour’s life were depicted by felines – little kitten in a manger watched by pussycat figures Mary and Joseph, disappointed-looking tabby cat nailed up to a cross, etc, all painted on a plate. And then, four or five years ago when they did the most perfect take-off of the Guardian local government jobs pages in a spoof called “Vagrant Recruitment”, an entire page of job adverts for tramps written in precisely the condescending, self-important gobbledygook of local government: An opportunity has recently opened for the post of part-time Grade 3 Underpass Vagrant…..you will have considerable experience of menacing children and shouting loudly at traffic, etc etc. Wonderful stuff.

Viz is 30 years old, apparently, and the Spectator – which has always rather liked the comic – marks the fact with a fine article by Sinclair McKay (no link – buy it from a newsagents you tight-fisted bastards). I say it’s a fine piece, but I think Sinclair does make the mistake of believing Viz to be well to the right of centre, and even Tory – given its scathing depiction of yob culture, sexual profligacy, idleness, drunkenness and stupidity and its magnificently un-PC approach to homosexuality, feminism, environmentalism and indeed racism.