Mock The Weak

According to a little page-filler in the back of today’s Guardian, sales of tickets to comedy gigs have risen dramatically recently   “luring in customers with affordable tickets and topical stand-up routines on the economic downturn.”  It’s a cheap night out, the paper suggests, and the pickings are ripe for a new generation of angry young men to come forth and vent the collective fury of the ineloquent and the inactive alike.  But something is missing.

There is – and I say this with a fair degree of self-assured self-importance – a wealth of very funny comedians around at the moment.  In fact, I would even go as far as to say that, in terms of mainstream entertainment, the standard of British comedy is as good today is has ever been.  Mark Watson and Michael McIntryre, to name but two, are exceptionally funny observational comedians who deliver consistently likeable and new material on an almost weekly basis.  On the small screen, The Inbetweeners is an hilarious ode to youth – closing a decade that has already bore witness to The Office, Peep Show and 15 Storey’s High, with snobbery being the only reason not to utter these in the same sentence as Black Adder and Monty Python.

But let’s return to stand up for the moment – truly the finest and foremost marker of what can undoubtedly be one of the noblest of art forms.  What are Watson’s and McIntyre’s jokes about?  A pigeon flying into the back of a man’s head at Liverpool Street train station in Waton’s case, and a man’s draw full of outdated foreign currency in the latter’s.  So, where’s the beef?  Where is the Ben Elton of our generation?  Critics of the Iraq War are forced to simply rewatch Bill Hicks ever ponient lines from two decades before.

It is a sad indictment of our time that the closest we have to hard-hitting comedy in the semi-mainstream today is Mock the Week’s Frankie Boyle.  Undoubtedly a gifted and cutting comedian – “Have you heard that the Spice Girls are reforming?  The only way I ever want to see Geri Halliwell draped in a Union Jack again is if she dies in battle” – he is, all the same, just a tad trivial and often purile.  And even he is on a leash.

But not that of the BBC, I would venture.  Rather, it is the choking leash of public indifference.  Could it be that, with the mediocrity of our current age and our tired adherence to this unenfranchising system of ‘consensus based politics’, so too has such woe come to betide stand up comedy?  Oh, how I long for a George Carlin, Lenny Bruce or young Chris Rock for today… someone to help us question that which we are too tired to have thought about ourselves.  Comedians who do not just satirise and mock the world as they find it, but offered an alternative vision as well.  Our current breed, by stark contrast, sneer without care or consistency.  The result: a banal hybrid of gaffs about Peter Andre and Jordan, and a reliance on swearing and foul imagery as end in itself, so as to maintain a veneer of being ‘edgy’.

I know what some will say: “for good comedy, you need to go to the clubs mate, not sit in front of the television”.  And that may be so.  But today I fear that even our greatest comedy venues have become bastions of mediocrity.  And I have been to a few.  Even The Comedy Store, on Oxendon Street, lest we forget was the place that first brought us Eddie Izzard and the alternative comedy boom that accompanied Thatcherism and the economic downturn of the 1980s.  Today, it is frowned upon to even make a witty heckle.

Play it safe.  Make your money.  Bums on seats.  Don’t offend anyone.

Humour is, rightly, the end point of all good stand-up comedians.  Hicks and his ilk would always maintain that they were humourist first and satirist second.  But as we approach a dank, dark winter of channel flicking and inevitable social unrest, somebody – please – step forward and grab this momentous opportunity by the horns.  You will only be saying what we are all thinking: some of us just haven’t realised we wanted to hear it until now. And it could go a long way towards changing things, as have many of the greatest artists before you.