Lloyd Evans charts the death of political satire and looks to where comedy is heading next
Live comedy ought to be extinct. For five years the internet has been waving an eviction order in its face, but despite the YouTube menace, and its threat of death-by-a-thousand-clips, live stand-up is blossoming. You’ll have noticed this if you read newspaper adverts. Eighteen months ago they were full of barmy invitations to take out a loan for 10 times the value of your house, or to ‘buy’ (that is rent in advance for 99 years) a room in a boutique hotel in Prague or a glass-box-with-a-view in Abu Dhabi. These schemes have been replaced with full-page ads promoting comedians on nationwide tours. The scale is vast. Stadiums like Wembley Arena and London’s O2 (née the Dome), usually the preserve of rock stars, are being booked by stand-up comics. Sheffield Hallam’s 14,000-seater stadium will this year host Russell Brand, Al Murray, and Eddie Izzard. The internet has rewritten the commercial rules of comedy just as it has for recording artists. Before YouTube, comics reluctantly toured in order to promote their cash-making DVDs. Now the position has reversed. Recordings make relatively little and the major revenues come from ticket sales.
Happily for the comics there’s a powerful craving for the congregational experience, for public acts of cathartic mirth. Frank Skinner recently hosted a Credit Crunch Cabaret in the West End, top price a tenner, which consciously evoked the austerity of the 1930s. ‘I’m a George Formby fan,’ said Skinner, ‘and I love the idea of him making jokes and pulling us through the Depression and fighting Hitler.’ But the economic blues don’t fully account for the comedy boom, not least because the closer you look at this downturn the less impressive it seems. The economy has shrunk by 2 per cent this year, so we’re 98 per cent as rich as we were on Christmas Eve. Which doesn’t sound too bad. Oil shares are up, mining’s climbing, China’s economy continues to rage like an infected boil, Tesco just made another billion quid, Debenhams stocks have doubled this year, and even the gloomiest forecasters point their long-range lenses at 2011 and see green shoots everywhere.
More likely what we’re after is restitution, a psychological corrective to the disarray created by our legislators. Under this government we’ve begun to look at life in the same state of terrified wonderment with which Stone Age man viewed the cosmos, as a random and malign sequence of arbitrary upheavals organised by an irrational deity with no apparent principle beyond a blundering and fitfully effective self-interest. Oddly enough, despite the muddled heads of our present masters, political satire is almost completely absent from today’s stand-up culture. Marina Kempinski, owner of the Jongleurs comedy chain, says, ‘Political comedy ended in the 1990s, partly I think because comedians never got a handle on Tony Blair.’ Certainly, Blair was inexplicably hard to mimic. Handsome, youthful and nicely groomed, he had a harmoniously proportioned face that yielded no easily distortable feature. His accent was posh but bland. The timbre of his voice was affably innocuous, and even his particular strain of demonic perkiness resisted being transformed into a weapon that could harm him. As soon as he entered Downing Street, the captain of the angry comics, Ben Elton, promptly renounced political satire. ‘People ask me why I don’t do that left-wing stuff any more. Well, if Labour doesn’t bother why should I?’
With Blair seemingly impregnable, comedy turned its gaze to his shadowy court of advisers. In Feelgood, Alistair Beaton’s savage assault on the culture of spin, the playwright keeps the Blair figure off stage throughout and focuses on the slogan-mongers and truth-masseurs around him. Rory Bremner took a similar route. Having failed to hurt Blair with his cosy impersonations he produced a series of darkly caustic sketches in which a diabolical and all-powerful spin-doctor feeds lines to a gormless, chimp-like PM. Number 10 was said to be profoundly alarmed by their accuracy.
What differentiated these critiques of New Labour from the earlier assaults on Mrs Thatcher is that in the 1980s satire was essentially optimistic. Left-wing comedians genuinely hoped that crooked Tory greed would be replaced by Labour probity, virtue and self-sacrifice. How laughable that sounds now. One of New Labour’s unintended bequests is a pandemic of cynicism. A trust deficit has opened up, a permanent and unbridgeable gulf between what politicians say and what voters know politicians are really saying. When New Labour’s generals seized control of the message, their mastery of propaganda became their most discussed attribute. So, quite by accident the electorate was treated to a decade-long seminar in the theory and practice of political falsehood. Result — every voter in the land is as wise to the arts of public hypocrisy as the sneakiest libel-spreader in Downing Street’s dirty tricks department. Paradoxically, this has removed politicians from the list of legitimate targets and placed them beneath the attention of comedy. Quite a stroke of luck for Brown who has the misfortune to resemble a walking caricature. The bruised eyes, the surly hair, the pained Presbyterian manner, the strange jaw-jerk at the end of each sentence and the smile that seems to be wired up to a different power-source from the rest of him. What a feast for the comics, but they ignore him because he presents something exhausted and irrelevant. To wallop him with mirth, to give him the 21-gun salute of satire, would be as pointless as granting a squashed earwig a peerage.
Comedy has turned elsewhere, and the circuit thrives as never before with freak-show acts, music-hall turns and caustic, foul-mouthed grandmothers. On the South Bank this spring you may catch sight of a vast purple upside-down cow, the Udderbelly, a mobile comedy arena normally resident in Edinburgh. The bill features a range of established acts and emerging stars, and prices start at a crunch-compliant £7. English audiences won’t be familiar with Lewis Black, an agreeably dyspeptic social commentator from Washington. ‘Thanksgiving — when we commemorate the first time the Protestants and the Indians sat down together and gambling was invented.’ Sir Tim FitzHigham is a young adventurer who barely qualifies as a stand-up at all. His set consists entirely of anecdotes inspired by his CV of eccentric stunts: crossing the Channel in a bath, rowing up the Thames in a paper boat, fell-walking on Vesuvius. Topping the bill is Joan Rivers with her blend of twinkly-eyed misogyny and taboo-busting mischief. She was the first American stand-up to make gags about 9/11. She’s still making them. ‘Two and a half thousand widows, each with a cheque for five million dollars. There’s got to be six happy.’
Udderbelly will be at the Southbank Centre from 27 May to 19 July.
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