When does comedy stop being a laughing matter? I was idly changing channels, in that warm post-Christmas haze, when I came across the Channel 4 Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2012, which featured a bunch of television personalities answering questions on news events from the previous 12 months. The show is an annual event: it has the feel of a festive parlour game, which is sometimes a bit rude but generally features good-natured sparring between the contestants.
What followed came as a shock. The young, plummily spoken comedian Jack Whitehall was saying: “If you had given your number to someone like Carly Rae Jepsen [a Canadian singer] and discovered how annoying she was you would suck someone’s ---- off to get rid of her.” I didn’t know what he was rambling about, but it sounded crude and misogynistic. Nor did it add up to a joke, since it didn’t make sense.
Another contestant, the actor Richard Ayoade – who seemed clearer-headed – amusingly reminded him that the usual method of getting rid of someone was simply to make an excuse and leave the room. Then, however, to show what was not normally necessary, he mimed the act of oral sex, which got a laugh. So he carried on miming it, and on, at which point I began to think – as the Americans say – enough, already.
Soon after that Whitehall and James Corden, the actor and comedian, answered a quiz question about an unfortunate Twitter hashtag for Susan Boyle’s new album with the line: “Subo loves it in the ----”. Corden, convulsed at his own wit, even thought his comment – made about a middle-aged woman with a lovely voice and delicate mental health – worth repeating. The show had descended into a smutty teenage boys’ club, with the sports presenter Gabby Logan, the sole female contestant, looking frozen in discomfort.
I asked my husband the time, assuming from the material that it was much later than I had thought. In fact, it was just after 10 o’clock, and the programme had started at nine when – it being the Christmas holidays – many slightly older children would be naturally drawn to watch it. In the rest of the show, the “humour” apparently extended to equally creepy, sexually prurient remarks about the Queen, Barack Obama and Usain Bolt.
In the ensuing furore about the material, the public seems to divide between those who found it obnoxious, and those who thought it was all grist to the comedy mill. The actress and comedienne Jackie Clune spoke out against the “easy, casual misogyny” of the “drunken, boorish comedians” on the show, and was rewarded with abuse from some of their fans.
In some insidious way, however, the desire to offend for the sake of it seems to have become the whole point for many such comedians: increasingly, they don’t even bother to tie a weak joke onto a slur. The long-standing host of the Big Fat Quiz of the Year is Jimmy Carr, a comedian who is undoubtedly quick-witted; it’s just a pity that his instincts so often lead him to make light of topics such as rape (a Carr favourite: “What’s the difference between football and rape? Women don’t like football”) and children with learning disabilities.
Also on the show was Jonathan Ross, who has resumed his television career after the infamous “Sachsgate” affair in 2008, when he and the comedian Russell Brand rang the elderly actor Andrew Sachs to leave taunting messages on his answering machine claiming that Brand had slept with Sachs’s granddaughter.
Now, as it appeared on the quiz, the mantle of sexist boorishness has been passed down to younger comedians such as Whitehall and Corden. Whitehall is an up-and-coming star, and Corden, too, is capable of more than his exposure on the quiz show would suggest: in 2012, he won a Tony for his lead role in the play One Man, Two Guvnors. So why would any of the participants wish to embarrass themselves with sloppy, misogynistic performances on a seasonal Channel 4 show?
Because they don’t believe it will damage their incomes or their careers; quite the opposite. Channel 4 had the opportunity to edit out some of the worst remarks from the programme, since it was pre-recorded, and declined. There is a whiff of communal arrogance from the New Boors. They are all doing, or have already done, very well financially, and en route they have learned that you can insult women, the elderly, or even the disabled with impunity on peak-time shows and still get commissioned.
Comedy can be a shaky and unpredictable career, often reliant on friends in the industry, and many female comedians know that to protest too loudly at the sexism on panel shows might limit future job offers (although Victoria Wood and Jo Brand, both veterans of the comedy circuit, have openly criticised the intensely combative nature of certain such shows; Brand will no longer appear on Mock the Week). Yet Carr and Co appear to believe that each time they make audiences uneasy they are producing outré comedy that follows in the ground-breaking tradition of Lenny Bruce.
Bruce was perhaps the nearest thing comedy has to a martyr; indeed, Eddie Izzard once referred to him as “the Jesus Christ of stand-up”. The comedian, who was born in 1925 and died of a drugs overdose, aged 40, grew up the hard way. He joined the US Navy at 16, and later started on the comedy circuit (his first stand-up act in New York earned him $12 and a plate of spaghetti). Whether one liked his stage show or not, he was the real deal, and the risks he took were authentic, too: he was repeatedly arrested for obscenity and frequently broke. Bruce’s act was often intensely political and, in a much more socially and sexually repressed era, genuinely subversive. He took aim at racism and establishment hypocrisy from the perspective of the underdog.
For a young comedian today, in a squashily liberal climate, to think that by unleashing a swear word he is displaying any of the screwed-up, complicated courage of Lenny Bruce, is pure self-delusion; it’s like sitting in a centrally heated house with a full fridge, nicking the top of your ear with a razor and thinking it makes you Van Gogh. Indeed, it is arguably the cleaner comedians today who take career risks, since there are those in the comedy hierarchy who will view them as too “safe” to be interesting – but if they can break through, they invariably meet with a warm reception from a grateful public.
Miranda Hart might divide critical opinion with her surreal, self-penned, mildly slapstick sitcom Miranda, but she is immensely popular with a certain section of the British public. As a performer, she freely mocks her own awkwardness, yet possesses a kind of happy confidence: she speaks for a viewing constituency who ponder the wisdom of salsa classes and get excited about a new pudding in the Marks & Spencer food hall. It’s about as far away from the world of what Billy Connolly recently dismissed as “these London guys who all hang out together in the Groucho” as you can get, but then so is most of Britain.
Comedians such as Michael McIntyre and Peter Kay are also successful with audiences yet often knocked by fellow stand-ups, a reaction partly explained by envy, and partly by the view that their style of inclusive, observational comedy is not abrasive enough to be admired.
Still, most comedians, even those widely seen as family-friendly, will have had a moment in their careers when a joke seemed to cross a line into dubious taste. And some material – such as the scurrilous recordings produced by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore – can be filthy, and yet still executed with a creative originality that makes it funny.
When it goes wrong, however, it is usually not just about bad language. It’s about the context of performance. It’s about the point where the joke departs and dull-witted, nasty abuse begins. It’s about choosing not to pick your targets from the ranks of the vulnerable. On all such grounds, Channel 4’s Big Fat Quiz was bad comedy and bad manners. Whether it ever becomes bad business, however, is down to the British public.
