jimmy carr – Bad Reputation A feminist pop culture adventure Thu, 21 Apr 2011 08:00:51 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6 37601771 A Lower Low /2011/04/21/a-lower-low/ /2011/04/21/a-lower-low/#comments Thu, 21 Apr 2011 08:00:51 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=5008 Please welcome the glorious Hannah Eiseman-Renyard to the guestpost soapbox…

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: THAT’S NOT FUNNY!

I love live comedy, honest I do. I spent two weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year and I’ll be there for the full three weeks this year. Some of my best friends are (very good) comedians. However, as a scene: live comedy has a problem. I haven’t been an aficionado for many years, so maybe it was always there – but if recent articles are anything to go by; it seems to be growing. Increasingly, the search for ‘edgy’ material is translating into a scene where the recoil laugh – the I-can’t-believe-you-just-said-that laugh – is the only one aimed for. The targets are ‘soft’ – minorities and marginalized groups – and the jokes prod at the same old prejudices. The numbers of times I come home from a comedy gig wanting to dry-clean my brain is rising.

Photo showing a red and white plastic windup 'chattering teeth' toy. Photo by Flickr user elasticcamel, shared under a Creative Commons licenceMy hackles were finally raised enough to write this article after an especially bad gig I went to recently. A sketch group of white, able-bodied young men performed a series of female grotesques which were so consistently unpleasant that – though cheerily presented – the unmistakable undercurrent to the evening was ‘we really don’t like women much.’ Most sketches involved a member of the group donning a plastic wig to ‘be a girl’ – and every female character was a Lolita, a whore, a woman giving birth or a mother who hated her children. The punchlines ranged from coat hanger abortions to incest to rape to paedophilia. At my table, from about halfway through, we didn’t laugh so much as look to each other for reaction shots and a reality check. This troupe’s final skit was a song and dance number, the ‘Cell Block Tango’ from Chicago, with the words changed to ‘she had it coming’. Had there not been other people on the bill who I really wanted to see, I would have walked out then and there.

The problem is more widespread than just one shit comedy troupe . People more eloquent than myself have pointed out this return to the bad old days. It seems like the decades of hard-earned progress, a basic standard of ‘don’t be a shit to the marginalised’, is being discarded because now it’s apparently ironic. Sexism is increasingly tolerated (after all, everything’s sorted and equal now, so just lighten up, bitch) and other kinds of prejudice are also creeping back, too. ‘It’s not racist, it’s just un-PC, and no one likes political correctness. So, while we’re at it, what about those immigrants, homos, and the disabled, aye?’

Increasingly comedians who get pulled up for saying genuinely unpleasant things (I’m looking at you, Frankie Boyle) have taken this to be their selling point and then upped the ante in general douchery. While Jordan, the gossip-magazines’ favourite glamour model, might seem a fair target, when exactly did her disabled son become fair game, too? Let alone in a joke about incest and rape. I’ll repeat that: an incest-rape joke about a disabled eight-year-old child.

While I’m sure there has always been some truly unpleasant comedy around, its apparent mainstream acceptance is a new trend. The Frankie Boyle joke aired on Channel 4. This worries me because our words do carry a power – they reflect how we see the world, but they also set our standards for what is normal, acceptable, okay. The trickle-down effect has real-world consequences. The rise of the rape joke can be a horrific trigger for those who have experienced it. In increments, these themes – packaged as entertainment – normalise these horrors and dismiss their seriousness.

This is not an argument for censorship – I had fervent arguments a few years ago with Daily Fail-reading colleagues about whether Jerry Springer: The Opera should be shown on TV (yes, yes, a thousand times yes!) – but there is a huge middle ground between Mary Whitehouse prudery and comedy which is getting pretty close to hatespeech. Please, guys: self-regulate a little by engaging the brain.

Some would argue that if I don’t like this brand of comedy, I just shouldn’t watch it. To some extent they’re right, and I do try. When I saw a poster in Edinburgh for a standup show called ‘The Lying Bitch and the Wardrobe’ (I see what you did there) I had a pretty strong inkling that this wouldn’t be my kind of thing and I didn’t go. But on a mixed bill (as almost all small live comedy gigs are) there’s rarely any warning what each person will do – so while you might have gone along because you recognise one name that you like, there is no disclosure until you’re hearing it that the third act, Joe Bloggs, will be your prejudiced asshat for the evening, berating you all with a microphone for at least ten minutes.

Oh, and you paid to see this.

I don’t think anything should be off-limits – but some topics are so unpleasant (not to mention increasingly over-mined) that if a comedian wants to tackle them they will need to be so damn funny, so ingenious, original, tactful – that 80% of comedians just shouldn’t bother. Needless to say, the 80% that aren’t up to speed don’t get this, and the 20% that can do it well often have better things to do than prod triggertastic subjects and tired old clichés with a great big stick. They’re off crafting material that makes you belly-laugh (and think) rather than just titter nervously in disbelief.

Fat Kitten Improv logo: a cartoon cat with a mischievous expression peeping out of a yellow basketAs my friend James Ross, who runs the consistently wonderful Fat Kitten Improv group and the Better Living Through Comedy night put it: “From a purely technical standpoint, shock humour suffers acutely from a law of diminishing returns: the audience build up a resistance to it, and that alone would be good reason to limit its use.”

I think the thing which is missing (besides originality) is a measure of basic empathy. In the increasingly desperate search for ‘dark’ and ‘cutting edge’ material, comedians forget that a lot of their lazily-picked targets are people. Real people. People with feelings and also (self-interest alert, guys:) people who go to comedy gigs.

The rising amount of ‘ironic’ misogyny is not creating a particularly friendly environment for a certain 50% of punters. Last year I went to the Comedy Store to see twelve different comedians being filmed for The World Stands Up. I wasn’t entirely sure if the person who’d invited me along had intended the evening as a date or not, so it was potentially awkward already. Then, as the evening unfolded, four out of twelve comedians used ‘bad fellatio’ as the bedrock of their sets. One standup spent his whole set mocking his wife for not pleasuring him correctly. In the narratives that we heard that night, women’s main role was as dispensers of sexual favours – and we couldn’t even do that right. Thanks, guys. I haven’t been back to the Comedy Store since.

For another example, I was once out with a group for a friend’s birthday when a standup did a set about making a mess in the disabled toilet and blaming it on a disabled person. While he wasn’t to know that birthday girl, sat in the front row, had cerebral palsy, why did he think this would be a good topic in the first place? How many times has he encouraged the able-bodied to laugh at this disadvantaged minority’s expense?

Photo showing Catherine Semark, a dark haired white woman in a blue shirt and black leggings, performing on stage at Edinburgh Fringe

Example of good standup! Catherine Semark performing at Edinburgh Fringe. Photo by me.

One piece of etiquette that people seem to be riding roughshod over is whether you have a ‘claim’ to your material. While there aren’t any rules about who is allowed to talk about what, whether or not you’re on the receiving end of a prejudice can make a huge difference to whether or not you have the empathy, warmth, and originality to do it well. Richard Pryor, Omid Djalili, Sarah Silverman, or Goodness Gracious Me on race: usually very good. Jim Davidson on race: enough said.

This isn’t an argument for ‘nice’ comedy. Some of my favourite comedians are pretty darn dark and twisted – Bill Hicks, Dylan Moran, and I heartily recommend London sketch group The Beta Males – but the ‘type’ of twisted is crucial. Jokes are about status – people use them every day to agree boundaries of what’s acceptable, and with that comes a certain amount of responsibility. When activist comedians such as Mark Thomas or Kate Smurthwaite use humour to mock people in power for making bad decisions, that’s something very different to a middle class standup laying into ‘chavs’ for ‘talking funny and drinking cheap booze’.

Anger and humour are very often interlinked, but where you aim that anger makes all the difference. Aim it ‘up’ at deserving, more powerful targets and it’s subversive, it can hold people to account – satire has a long and proud tradition. Aim that anger ‘down’ at the underdog and it’s tired, old and – frankly – it’s bullying.

  • Hannah Eiseman-Renyard is a short, fat, ginger four-eyes who nonetheless loves live comedy. She works as an editor by day, a writer/performance poet by night, and on the weekends she fights crime. She’ll sleep when she’s dead. Hannah runs the Whippersnapper Press, a web-publishing site for short, innovative and funny creative writing. She is twenty-five and lives in North London with her three grandchildren and thirty cats. Her turn-ons include moss, handicrafts and Bohemian clichés.
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Ten O’Clock Live: Three Men and a Little Lady? /2011/02/16/ten-o-clock-live-three-men-and-a-little-lady/ /2011/02/16/ten-o-clock-live-three-men-and-a-little-lady/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2011 09:00:09 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=3348 Seen Ten O’Clock Live, then? …Yeah. Breathlessly billed as Britain’s answer to the Daily Show, a return to the satirical standard set by 1962’s groundbreaking That Was The Week That Was and the grand guignol glory days of Spitting Image, with hype like that the show was perhaps doomed to fall short of expectations.

Titlescreen for 10 O'Clock Live: blue background with purple and blue shimmery shapes in the background, white block capitals in stylised lettering reading "10 O'Clock Live"I’ve been more or less enjoying Ten O’Clock Live’s exuberant attempt to blend righteous indignation and political analysis with gags about Ed Balls’ surname. Britain’s current political nightmares certainly need and deserve something like it. Inevitably, there’s a lot to criticise: the show can be lightweight and facile, and its concern with playing to a broad audience can lead it to simplify complex issues and treat them in a manner often unhelpfully flippant and glib. Tonal inconsistency exists between its sporadically vicious satirical intent and the soft-soaping it tends to give when interviewing political figures. The much-vaunted live format adds little, the graphics and set make Brass Eye’s intentionally eye-bleeding credits look soothing, and the pace of the initial episode felt frenetic and rushed, as though the show’s producers didn’t trust the audience to pay attention beyond the length of a YouTube viral – although they’d hardly be unique in that.

My main concern, though, is Lauren Laverne, whose involvement I’d been avidly anticipating. Full disclosure: I was a teenage Kenickie fan, and I hoped Laverne, their former singer, would bring some of the arch wit, droll delivery and star-spangled glamour which she used to rock onstage, as well as the stridently socialist principles she used to espouse (in the run-up to the 1997 election, she wrote a politically-conscious column for the NME, and Kenickie repaid Geri Halliwell’s pro-Thatcher drivelling by succinctly denouncing the Spice Girls as ‘Tory scum’). In fairness, over ten years on, that sort of expectation was both naïve and nostalgic. While she wasn’t great, her performance didn’t have me rapt in the slack-jawed horror which appeared to be affecting some reviewers, whose critical responses to the show singled out Laverne, its only female presenter, for her allegedly pointless and tokenistic inclusion and relatively toothless comic chops.

Promo image for the show, with all four presenters looking into the camera. All three men in dark suits, Lauren Laverne in a red dress and black tights brandishing a clipboard.

left to right: Mitchell, Laverne, Carr, and Brooker.

A few of these responses betrayed problematic attitudes of their own, seeming unwilling to countenance the idea of a regional-accented blonde with an indie-pop background and glittery eyelids as anything more than eye-candy. The Telegraph’s Ed Cumming, in a review entitled ‘What is the point of Lauren Laverne?’, dismissed her as ‘northern totty’ and declared ‘it’s hard to see what, apart from the sadly obvious, she brings to the table’. The Metro described her as the show’s ‘weak link’ and claimed, less than accurately, that she ‘looked lost and confused when The XX or Mumford and Sons didn’t pop up in the headlines’. Kevin O’Sullivan in the Mirror sneered that ‘Poor token female Lauren Laverne … comes across as a bland bombshell recovering from entirely ­successful comedy bypass surgery’.

While I’m sure her looks and residual indie cred didn’t harm her chances, asserting that Laverne was picked for ‘northern totty duty’, able to engage with little beyond the autocue, seems overly harsh. Apart from an occasional turn on Mock the Week, Laverne’s background is in presenting and live broadcasting on the Culture Show and 6Music, and her anchorwoman role on Ten O’Clock Live is presumably based on her abilities and experience in this arena, rather than that of live comedy. The two require different skillsets and Laverne is an excellent host, introducing and concluding the show, linking pieces, throwing to break and chairing roundtable discussions. That’s what she brings to the table – she’s not a weak link, she’s the link, there to be the viewer’s guide. Unfortunately, her function as this – the show’s secretary, or Mum, or primary-school teacher – means that she’s there less to perform and more to keep the boys in order and to ask them what they think, the opinionless eye of a satirical storm whipped up by her more vocal and dynamic co-presenters.

Photo: head and shoulders shot of Lauren Laverne (a young Caucasian blonde-fringed woman in a loose-fitting brown top) outdoors in Central London

Lauren Laverne poses for Green Britain Day in June of last year. Photo: Department of Energy & Climate Change Flickr gallery. Shared under Creative Commons licence.

When Laverne does step out of the secretarial role, she’s badly served by her material. The opening show’s skit in which she played an airhead newscaster may have been an attempt to play on the superficially vacuous persona which several reviewers were expecting of her, but its feeble stabs at humour reinforced the image rather than subverting it. The same was true of the recent piece in which she haplessly ‘volunteered’ backstage, a part which could have been taken by one of the male presenters to make the same point – that making public services reliant on ill-informed and inexperienced amateurs is a blatantly bad idea – without the Ditzy Provincial Blonde aspect to which her material seems wedded. Elsewhere, Laverne’s rants on corporate accountability and the Coalition’s selling-short of liberal democracy, while gobsmackingly commendable (and she clearly means it, man), impress more for rhetorical power than comic panache. In the show’s third episode she invoked the spectres of her past by quoting the Manic Street Preachers during a defence of public libraries; I loved the principles behind this piece, but it was annoyingly punctuated by lazy self-deprecating gags – she’s a girl, so she’s looking up what ‘menstruation’ means! And she’s got access to all these books, but she just wants to read something by Katie Price! – which undermined her authority to make the serious points at the sketch’s heart. Again, perhaps the idea was to knowingly play on or subvert the dumb blonde image, but Laverne is alone in resorting, or having to resort, to jokes at her own expense rather than that of the show’s purported targets. Laverne is also a mother who frequently mentions taking her kids to the local library – this angle could have been used to support her case as well as introducing nuance to her persona, but I guess motherhood would have been unsexily out of step with the show’s desired audience. In a comedy catch-22, while I’d like her to be more than the attractive anchorwoman, when she does so the material she’s given seems to reinforce the recommendation that she stick to presenting.

All this says less about Laverne’s own intelligence or ability and more about her frustrating under-use by the show’s writers and producers. To place her in this ‘straight-man’ role, and to have her as the only female, seems surprisingly regressive. We’ve come a long way from women in comedy troupes, notably the Pythons’ ‘glamour stooge’ Carol Cleveland, being little but dollybird foils. The Morris/Iannucci axis of satire particularly excelled at utilising performers like Rebecca Front, Doon Mackichan, and Gina McKee throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Since Laverne’s position as the show’s lone female exacerbates any criticism she receives, might some of this critical heat simmer down if Ten O’Clock Live featured another woman, in a performing rather than presenting role? There’s no shortage of vocal and opinionated female comics – I can think, before Googling ‘female political comic’, of Natalie Haynes, Shazia Mirza, Jo Brand, and Josie Long – whose participation might be as interesting, amusing and incisive as that of Brooker, Mitchell or Carr. But after all, once we start analysing the show’s diversity beyond gender, it becomes painfully apparent that Laverne’s fellow presenters are three middle-aged, middle-class white Englishmen in suits, all but Brooker Cambridge-educated, with the most diverse thing about them being their haircuts’ degree of aerodynamism. My problems with Laverne are symptomatic of greater problems with the show: while sometimes refreshingly radical in perspective, it’s still small-c conservative in parts.

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine

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