34 1GM Saturday September 5 2020 | the times
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weekend essay
T
he English, Milan Kundera once said, are the
funniest people in the world. He went
further, actually. The Czech novelist, an
ironist of gold-medal rank, said everybody
knew the English are the funniest people, as
though the matter had been settled by some
international decree.
It’s a great honour, and — let’s get out that trumpet
— fully earned. Whether we are being playful,
pompous, smutty or plain batty, the English (not in
this instance the Scots or the Welsh) have tickled
outsiders for centuries, even when they are baffled.
Particularly when they are baffled. Ils sont fous ces
Anglais. Or, as Albert Modley, now largely forgotten,
used to ask: “In’t it grand when you’re daft?”
Across the globe people know about English bawdy
humour from Chaucer’s pilgrims to the Carry On
team, whose self-mockery was captured in Kenneth
Connor’s utterance in Carry On Abroad: “Damnedfilth!” When Kenneth Williams crossed swords with
Sid James you could see every joke approaching like a
sea fret, yet audiences still laughed, and they continue
to chortle. “A double entendre,” said Kenneth Horne,
getting to the bottom of it, oo-er, “has only one
meaning.”
The world knows about our wit, too, from
Shakespeare to Tom Stoppard, “the bounced Czech”,
by way of Restoration dramatists. “No man was more
foolish when he had not a pen in his hand,” Samuel
Johnson said of his friend Oliver Goldsmith, “or more
wise when he had.”
Shakespeare was a comic writer, though he wasn’t
always funny. Dr Johnson was always funny, even
when he was being serious. His was a robust humour,
rooted in Anglo-Saxon common sense, not a quality
shared by his European contemporaries. The French
satirists, like Voltaire, were often clever, but that is not
the same thing as being funny. And let’s face it,nobody ever laughed at Goethe.
Our greatest novelist, Charles Dickens, is also our
funniest. From Henry Fielding to David Lodge our
literature is comic; not exclusively, but markedly
enough for Kundera to recognise the comic voice as
our preferred manner of speech. Think of Evelyn
Waugh’s crippling satires, PG Wodehouse’s unique
realm of enchantment, and the lacerating strokes of
Kingsley Amis.
It is Amis we need now. Not the Amis of Lucky Jim,
though that rip-roaring debut of 1954, dedicated to
Philip Larkin, is never a bad book to revisit. The Amis
we must turn towards for instruction is Girl, 20
published in 1971, with its ironic opening chapter
heading: “Imperialist Racist Sexist Fascist”. After all,
we’re guilty, every one of us.
Tim Davie, the new BBC director-general, has
prompted a national debate about the nature of
comedy, and the sort of comedians favoured by theThe demise of a rich comic history that runs from Chaucer’s bawdy tales to
1960s satire and Ken Dodd is no laughing matter, says Michael Henderson
chance to parade his social conscience, an opportunity
he booted merrily into the goal.
On Newsnight, election night specials, and virtually
every programme on Radio 4, even the inoffensive
book slot, A Good Read, comedians pop out like
cuckoos in a Swiss clock. But now there is to be a
reckoning. In Davie, a man who has indicated that the
BBC will not “go woke” on his watch, the
comedians with pure hearts and bulging
wallets may have met their match.
When did comedians begin to take the
weight of the world on their shoulders?
When was that Great Schism, which
cast mere entertainers adrift from those
elevated souls who consider it their job
not only to make us laugh but alsomake us better citizens? Performers
who would rather hear the applause of
approval than the laughter of
recognition.
You can place the turning in the road
precisely. On August 22, 1960, two
pairs of writer-performers educated at
Cambridge and Oxford gave a late-
night show at the Royal Lyceum
Theatre in Edinburgh. The hall was
half-full, and the show creaked like a
crofter’s cart, yet Beyond the Fringe
took off like a rocket when it
transferred to London’s West End.
Michael Billington, the long-standing
theatre critic, was in the audience on
that first night, and maintains “it was
every bit as important as Look Back
in Anger, performed four years before atAlan Bennett, Peter Cook,
Jonathan Miller and
Dudley Moore, seated,
represented the new wave
of Oxbridge humour in
Beyond the Fringe1GM Saturday September 5 2020| the
to
c w w W c e n m w a r p p C n T h c t t M t t e
inAn
corporation, many of whom are perceived by non-
metropolitan viewers and listeners to be smug,
predictable, and — worst of all — unfunny.
In the shallow end are the musty veterans of Have I
Got News For You on BBC One, which limps along like
a lame dog, and The News Quiz on Radio 4, which lost
its gloss when comedians began to outnumber
journalists. In the deep end paddles Frankie Boyle,
whose studied cruelty is a matter of record. Either
way, too many punters feel excluded from the club.
Every culture war fastens on a symbol that separates
the roarers from the scoffers. In comedy, the
performer with a bull’s-eye on his jersey is Nish
Kumar, the jack-in-the-box who presents The Mash
Report, the oh-so-smart alternative news digest on
BBC Two. To his admirers, Kumar is a left-wing
mocker who, in that self-congratulatory phrase, tells
truth to power. Others see a flatulent show-off, angry
beyond reason. We have certainly come a long waysince the days of That Was The Week That Was, when
David Frost would grill politicians ever so lightly.
Kumar’s party piece is to yell “f*** you, Boris
Johnson!” at an audience encouraged to return the
salute with lusty cheers.
Comedians, once content to be jesters, happy to
swell a scene with a joke or two, now appear
everywhere, and the more left-wing the better.
Kumar’s head was unlikely to get any smaller when he
was invited to be a guest on BBC One’s Question Time,
and so it proved. Like Russell Brand, Steve Coogan
and Eddie Izzard before him, the show offered a