There’s a famous line by E.B. White which has been rattling around my head the last few weeks. It goes like this: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process”. This is a brilliant line, of course, but lately I can’t help thinking that the inimitable White was slightly off-the-mark on this one. After all, can a joke really be understood better by analysing it to death? Or does the process of picking it apart not only kill its impact, but also compromise our ability to understand it?
You couldn’t truly ‘understand’ a painting by dividing it into separate heaps of coloured paint. In the same way, trying to reach some objective or rational understanding of a joke –usually attempted by shearing it from context and distilling its contents under a mental microscope – can only hope to give us the most simplistic and rudimentary of knowledge.
Now, I’m not usually one to ruminate too deeply on the inner-workings of comedy or the philosophy of art, if for no other reason than to avoid killing the proverbial frog. However, the sheer intensity of criticism that has been levelled at comedy lately – from Dave Chappelle to Joe Rogan to Jimmy Carr – makes me think it could be high-time to strap on the goggles and whip out the dissecting blade.
And the Jester sang for the King and Queen
Is comedy as we know it on the way out? And, if it is, do we really appreciate what it is we stand to lose were it to vanish? Comedy has a storied and venerable role in our societies, and it is probably no exaggeration to say that the average citizen trusts comedians more than they do their elected leaders. (Not always a good thing, of course. One wonders how much of the ‘liberal metropolitan bubble’ we hear so much about is a result of that armada of comedy panel shows on both sides of the pond, which cater almost exclusively to left-leaning audiences).
This enduring trust that people have in comics is firmly established, and its origin seem to be centuries old. In the courts of medieval Kings, for example, the role of the jester was to make the courtiers laugh by poking fun at the world around him. Occasionally he would poke someone powerful a little too hard, and heads would roll. For the most part though, jesters were given a surprising degree of freedom in feudal society to do and say as they wished.
This was no doubt helped by the fact that, for most esteemed members of the Court, to take offence at the witticisms of a multi-coloured clown with bells on his feet was patently absurd. They knew that his words were the equivalent of a flea bite on an elephant`s leg – small, harmless, and so trivial as to be below contempt. It was, quite simply, all in good jest.
In the modern world, where comedians have ventured out and become jesters for the whole of society, this attitude has (largely) survived. For the most part, we in the West have made a collective decision not to take too seriously the words of comedians who, after all, exist solely to entertain us. Some limits always exist on this of course, yet by and large the classical liberal consensus has given an extraordinary degree of freedom to the professional funnyman. Unfortunately, there are signs that this consensus is beginning to fray.
The appeal of dark comedy
The controversy surrounding Jimmy Carr`s recent Holocaust joke is a case in point. Aimed squarely at the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, this comment has sparked tremendous fury online and in the press for what is perceived as its overtly racist content. ‘What kind of monster casually disregards the suffering of an entire people?’, many have asked. ‘It’s time to stamp down on this kind of hate!’
Now, there is little doubt that this was a deeply offensive joke. Indeed, given that Carr has built his career on this kind of exceptionally raw material (just Google ‘Jimmy Carr mosquito joke’ for proof), should any of us be at all surprised? And yet, to witness the shock-and-awe reaction of the chattering class, one would be forgiven for thinking that a fresh new Satan had come to Earth to wreak havoc with his wicked words.
Almost a full month after the His Dark Material Netflix special released (a name which may have given perceptive fans a clue as to the show`s tone and content), almost the entire media has descended into a frantic moral panic over Jimmy Carr playing the role of… Jimmy Carr. And accompanying this has been what can only be described as a collective act of mass frog-dissection (well…. not only, I guess).
Plastered across almost every major newspaper has been the dreaded Traveller joke, set down accusingly in cold hard print alongside reams and reams of outraged commentary. One can hardly imagine a worse setting than this for trying to understand the nature of a joke on its own terms. Devoid of all context and nuance of delivery, is it any wonder that these words appear more like the xenophobic diatribe of a closet Nazi, rather than the offensive but unserious material of a career comic?
For many, Jimmy Carr`s casual disregard of the pain and suffering of millions of Roma who to this day live under the shadow of historic trauma is utterly unacceptable. Fair enough, and those who taken to the internet or the press to express their discontent have been perfectly justified in doing so. The line must be drawn somewhere – and without a public backlash, comedians can never be sure quite where the laughter ends and the ‘knuckle’ begins.
And yet, for all the people deeply hurt by the joke, I am sure there are many – Traveller and non-Traveller alike – who see very little harm in it. Indeed, some may even have committed the unforgiveable sin of laughing at the joke, an act of outrageous sedition that could soon get them arrested, if SNP councillor Julie Mackenzie is to have her say.
Are such people really racist? And for that matter, do people who enjoy jokes about dark and disturbing things really deserve to be treated like a pack of beasts in dire need of locking-up? Or maybe, like many ordinary members of the human race, they are drawn to dark comedy because it helps them to process and cope with a world that is rarely warm and cuddly. The mistake being made here seems to be the equivocation of laughter with assent – the judgment that to laugh about a terrible thing means in some way to approve of – or deny the existence of – that thing. This is simply not why most people enjoy dark comedy.
In fact, the undeniable catharsis and emotional release that comes from making light of the truly horrific could not exist without a genuine acknowledgement of horror in the first place. In such situations, we laugh precisely because what is being joked about is so awful.
Of course, there are those who use may comedy as an outlet for validating their own prejudices. Closet bigots seeking validation for their beliefs in a crowd – either on-stage or off – is no mere wokeist myth. For most who genuinely liked Carr`s joke, though (constituting the majority of his audience on the night in question) it`s hard to imagine this was their reason for laughing.
Rather, what gave the joke its comedic heft was a completely unanticipated and atrocious sentiment delivered deadpan by Carr. No one was expecting it, and it is overwhelmingly likely that the punchline turned everyone`s stomach. Yet, this strange combination of sharp surprise and patent wrongness – mitigated by the comforting certainty that this is not really what Carr believes at all – is what made people laugh. (Myself included; I must admit).
I think we can consider that frog thoroughly dissected.
Hanging the Jester
So, who is right about the Traveller joke – the offended or the tickled? Perhaps neither, perhaps both. Or maybe comedy – like music, art, and so many of our cultural treasures – really is at the mercy of individual taste. Perhaps each one of us, based on our temperament, history, and personal values, weigh-up the merits of each joke according to our own internal sounding-boards.
If this is the case, then who could really determine whether a joke is ‘objectively’ acceptable or not? People will reach wildly different conclusions about what does and does not constitute an appropriate topic for humour. This is as it should be. Indeed, how could it be any different?
Then again, I suppose we could just let Nadine Dorries decide. The Culture Secretary made headlines last week by saying Carr`s comments were “abhorrent and they just shouldn’t be on television”. She followed this up by stating that “what Jimmy Carr did last night is not comedy”. This is a remarkable statement to make, considering that the Traveller joke was told by a comedian, as part of a stand-up routine, to an audience who (if somewhat guiltily) howled with laughter.
But Dorries didn’t stop there, adding one more ominous promise: “we don’t have the ability now, legally, to hold Netflix to account for streaming that but very shortly we will”. Just to be clear, this is an elected Cabinet official openly expressing a desire to police what is allowed in comedy – a prospect that should send an Orwellian shiver down the spine of even the most jaded political spectator.
For their part, the media has piled on with Dorries` comic-denialism by qualifying every use of the words ‘joke’ and ‘comedian’ with the much-dreaded inverted comma. The insinuation here is that what Carr said was, of course, no joke at all – but rather a rare, unmoderated flash of his true beliefs. Apparently, the government and the media have an insight into the mind of Jimmy Carr to which the rest of us are not privy.
The true question here though isn’t about the quality or acceptability of the Traveller joke – a judgment which will vary from individual-to-individual, as many conversations with friends and colleagues have shown me. The real issue is whether the backlash against it from a political class which is all-too-quick to condemn the blunders of others – whilst denying responsibility for any of its own missteps – is proportionate or justified.
From those in the Traveller community who felt truly hurt by Carr`s joke, a strong negative reaction is to be both expected and sympathised with. But from those in power who have used this scandal as a pretext to tighten the leash on what constitutes the acceptable bounds of free speech, such words of compassionate outrage ring hollow.
The disconcerting thing about the recent spate of comedy-bashing in the West is that it forces us to ask difficult questions about where we are drifting as a society. No longer are the quips and jibes of our professional funnymen treated as all in good jest. On the topic of race, as well as many other common powder-keg topics – transgenderism, gender equality, and sometimes even Greenism – public discussion has been permeated by an absolute inability to separate light mockery from serious political assertion.
It would be easy to argue that this is the case based on the unique sensitivity of these topics. Except contentious issues have always existed in politics, and even many of our modern ‘no-fly-zones’ for comedy are less volatile than they used to be – the racial politics of the 1960s, for example, far outstrips the situation we have today in terms of intensity and divisiveness.
So why is comedy under threat here? And why now?
To apply Occam’s mighty razor, the simplest explanation here may the best: perhaps modern people, with all our cultivated sensitivities and creature comforts, are increasingly becoming incapable of taking a joke. ‘Take’ is the key word here – to take an uncomfortable comment on the chin, to tolerate the existence of jokes which you personally find abhorrent and wrong. These are the widely-held social qualities that used to make comedy possible, and what else do they amount to but a wide-spread agreement to let people make their own call on where the boundaries of acceptable comedy lie?
Our classical liberal ancestors didn’t have to like every joke they heard, nor did they have to refrain from expressing their offence publicly. But their go-to response was very rarely to ban the offending party outright, or to institute draconian laws which would make it actively illegal to compromise their ‘right’ not to be offended.
At the beginning of His Dark Materials, Jimmy Carr told his audience that “tonight’s show contains jokes about terrible things. Things that may have affected you and the people you love. But these are just jokes. They’re not the terrible things.” Perhaps modern Westerners would do well to remember that dark or offensive jokes are not violence; they are flea-bites. And flea-bites, no matter how unpleasant or irritating, are very rarely fatal.