Clown. It’s a great word, and I use it often. Though not a great fan of emojis, the clown face one is the one I deploy most frequently when answering unwanted and insincere private messages on X. I do this because the meaning of the word ‘clown’ has changed considerably over the years. Once it meant a jester, a droll, an entertainer intent on causing jollity. Clowns could be wildly different – from Marcel Marceau to Morecambe and Wise – but their basic purpose was to add to the gaiety of nations.
Putting the ‘ick’ into Icarus, James Corden apparently flew too high
Comedians aren’t generally like this anymore. (‘Comedian’ has also taken on a less cheery alternative meaning; ‘Looks like we’ve got ourselves a comedian!’ TV policemen may sneer as an ineffectual criminal lies to them.) They’re bitter and angry, mainly because the populace doesn’t pay their pronouncements any mind at the polling station; painfully unfunny, lazy thinkers parroting the party line on their state-sanctioned group-think radio station (Radio 4) tittering about Donald Trump and Brexit.
There are too many of them to mention, but Stewart Lee epitomises the ‘regime comedian’ – ‘someone who aligns snugly with dominant orthodoxies. He poses as an anti-authoritarian, while ignoring the cancellation of dissenters, a moral and artistic coward,’ as Graham Linehan put it. Similarly, when I use the word ‘clown’, I don’t mean a pleasant funny man who is keen to raise a titter. Nor does it mean a fellow in strange garb getting into scrapes in a circus ring. No, it generally means a berk; someone who is bitter and boring and paradoxically both empty and full of themselves.
We’re familiar with how the word ‘tragic’ has changed its meaning too; once it meant extremely sad, now the Urban Dictionary defines it as: ‘A person who lacks any sort of self-awareness or conception of how others perceive them; often characterized as woefully oblivious to their gaping flaws, which prevent them from achieving others’ respect or appreciation…To refer to someone as “tragic” is an all-encompassing derision that asserts a person’s utter lack of redeemable qualities, coalesced by physical unattractiveness, dullness, incompetence, ill temper, social ineptitude, and idiocy.’
Which leads us neatly to James Corden. Back from the States after hosting The Late Late Show for the last eight years, the ‘entertainer’ is said to be ‘open’ to taking the reins of the London mayorship from that other tragic clown, Sadiq Khan, under whom our once-glorious capital has become a teeming bin of machete fights, knife killings and vape shops. The Daily Mail reported this week that Corden ‘fancies his chances running for Mayor of London’. The paper suggested that the actor may be tempted by a future in politics after he was spotted chatting to politicos at the Baftas earlier this month. Londoners may soon have another thing to complain about.
Corden is a successful comic actor who inexplicably became massively famous in America; mind you, with an English accent you can get away with a lot across the pond. I’ve known men with faces like verrucas who’ve gotten more sex from American girls than Aerosmith on tour.
Anyway, putting the ‘ick’ into Icarus, Corden apparently flew too high; in 2023, Newsweek magazine felt moved to publish a piece called ‘The Rise And Fall of James Corden’ in which they took his did he fall/was he pushed exit from the prestigious television show he hosted as a prompt to examine the trajectory of his career.
‘The star has been plagued with accusations of bad manners, box office flops, rude backstage behaviour and presenting a fake “good guy” persona on screen,’ Newsweek said. It quoted a director who called Corden ‘the most difficult and obnoxious presenter’ he’d ever worked with’. It’s always the ones you most expect, eh?
How did he get like this? In The History Boys, Alan Bennett’s play (2004) and film (2006) about Oxbridge applicants, we saw Corden as he was: fatter, yes, but apparently talented and clearly happier than he’s ever been since. Those piggy eyes were full of nothing but hope! And he was actually likeable, hard as that is to credit these days.
The lad was clearly going places, but it still rather smacks of some contractual arrangement with Beelzebub that his every crazy showbiz wish was so swiftly granted: the hit sitcom (Gavin and Stacey), the award-winning stage play (One Man, Two Guvnors), the huge American chat show.
One might even venture to suggest that he’s led a charmed life. So why all the raging? When he was pranked by Ant and Dec on Saturday Night Takeaway, the results were ugly. This is far from the only time that Corden hasn’t looked like a happy bunny. In 2022, he admitted he was ‘ungracious’ to a restaurant server in an incident which saw him temporarily banned from a New York restaurant.
‘It was never my intention,’ to offend restaurant staff, he said. Someone wise once said that how a man treats his ‘inferiors’, rather than his equals, is the real test of someone’s character. How true.
Perhaps Corden is insecure. That could well be the tritest possible explanation for why Corden is the way he is – and unfairly reductive if you applied it to almost anyone else. But Corden is the tritest possible man. Maybe he will always be ‘insecure’, because he is at least clever enough to understand that he was promoted way above his station. Can you just imagine how unbearable it would be to see Corden lording it over London?
Corden is thought to be a Labour supporter. But while he was smart enough to speak out against Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous leadership, that doesn’t mean he has much political acumen. ‘I can’t shake the feeling that if Tom Watson had been leader of the Labour Party the outcome of this could’ve all been so different,’ he tweeted after the party’s 2019 election wipeout.
Great political judgement there, JC. Would that be the same Tom Watson who used his maiden speech in the House of Lords (an ennobling which Lord Lamont called ‘an absolute disgrace’ and a ‘stain’ on the second chamber) to apologise for his considerable role in promoting false sex abuse claims, thus ruining quite a few lives?
Can you just imagine how unbearable it would be to see Corden lording it over London?
With the very odd exception, like Glenda Jackson – someone who is, without any shadow of a doubt, extremely serious about what they’re doing – showbiz and politics do not mix. We’ve been here before, and relatively recently, after Eddie Izzard failed to be chosen as Labour candidate for Brighton Pavilion in 2023, a year after getting the same treatment from Sheffield Central.
How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements/involvements not work, but have an actual repelling effect? Beyonce and ‘The Boss’ sure helped cook Kamala’s goose; when the rich and famous swank around telling hoi polloi who to vote for, the masses have a habit of doing exactly the opposite.
Anyway, if Corden does become Labour’s London mayoral candidate in 2028, it’s funny that the supremely humourless Keir Starmer would be this comedian’s boss; gimmicky acts like this, which treat the public like children (‘Ooo, a famous person – I must vote for them!’) are precisely the kind of detail which will push Labour ever further towards defeat at the hands of Reform. Abounding with clowns and comedians aplenty though the People’s Party is, one feels that they won’t be laughing then.
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