Great leaps forward in comedy happen by asking the big questions. What if you created a show that unapologetically showed the horror of war? You get M*A*S*H. What if you created a sitcom about nothing? You get Seinfeld. What if you filmed a dog falling into an indoor swimming pool while a disembodied Harry Hill makes snide comments about the wood panelling? You get You’ve Been Framed from 2004 onwards. And so we witnessed another great moment in comedy this week, when the BBC’s head of comedy asked the question we didn’t realise needed to be asked: is comedy dying because the internet is turning people into Victorians?
Last week, at the launch of the well-meaning British Comedy Foundation, Shane Allen railed against the way social media has imposed a “Victorian moral code” on comedians, which damages the medium’s ability to “test boundaries and challenge orthodoxies”.
It was a bold statement, for a number of reasons. First, it’s always fun to get a lecture about comedy being dragged back in time from a man whose department has in recent years revived Are You Being Served (which first aired in 1972), Open All Hours (1973) and Porridge (1974). Consider our boundaries truly tested.
It was also a very interesting choice to make these comments in the same week that Fleabag ended: if the adoration Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s show received on social media is evidence of a 19th-century moral code, I guess the Victorians were way more down with priest-shagging and gags about miscarriages than I realised. In fact, most of the best comedies of the past five years have been helped, not hindered, by the supposedly puritanical forces of social media: Derry Girls, This Country and Famalam all have legions of online fans, while Twitter helped turn The Mash Report into a global phenomenon thanks in no small part to that cartoon of Piers Morgan and Donald Trump.
Was this what Allen meant? I feel like I’d have remembered from GCSE history if the Victorians enjoyed sharing illustrations of the most powerful man in the world being sexually pleasured.
It might seem unfair to take Allen to task for a few offhand comments about social media, especially at the launch of a foundation focused on getting more underprivileged people into the comedy industry. But his comments have weight – especially when they can generate headlines like “Social media is killing our jokes, says BBC boss”. It perpetuates a culture war based on ignorance, allowing rightwing newspapers to paint a dystopian caricature of social media, where white men are oppressed with terrifying phrases like “check your privilege” and “identity politics”, and opinionated children burn effigies of John Cleese.
This misunderstanding about how social media works is borne out by Allen’s chief concern: that social media strips comic material of context, taking away its subtleties and making it seem plain offensive. It’s a reasonable fear – but it misconstrues the nature of many of the “misjudged” jokes that go viral. Context often does not make these jokes better. Would anyone angered by Louis CK’s disastrous return to standup last year – when he mocked the Parkland school shooting survivors and said Asian men are “all women” – have been placated by some subtle point that was missed in the set-up? Did we really miss a wider comedic point buried in Mark Meechan’s antisemitic videos that context could have provided? No.
A good joke, with an inherent truth, can survive being pulled from its carefully crafted surroundings (the Mash Report illustration, for example, is funny in context but also works as just a grotesque exaggeration of the power dynamic between Trump and Morgan). Most of the time, “you took that out of context” is really another way of saying “you weren’t supposed to hear that” – and if a comedian is falling back on excuses like that (or “it was just a joke”), they’re refusing to analyse their own material for fear of discovering their own prejudices.
For example, earlier this year high-ranking Brexiteers excused the fact that they referred to themselves as “grand wizards” by claiming it was just a joke – but in reality, there’s no such thing. Jokes can be devices for critiquing power, but they can also be extremely effective ways of othering people. By making that joke – even ironically – they’re implying that ethnic minorities are not welcome in their cabal. “Jokes” like that don’t tell a universal truth, they are just another dank corner of society where racism and fascism is allowed to fester.
It’s these kinds of “jokes” that social media is beating out into the open, and while it may occasionally be a blunt instrument, it’s one – in a scary world where politicians can hide violent rhetoric behind a chuckle – that I’m increasingly grateful for. And if that makes me a Victorian prude, then put a bonnet on my head and call me Florence Nightingale.
• Jack Bernhardt is a comedy writer and occasional performer
