I don’t feel that all lefty comedy automatically rules itself out of being properly funny. Well, not always. For example, much as the late Jeremy Hardy was a fanatical advocate of everything I loathe, I could see that had a lively and imaginative wit. Same goes for Frankie Boyle, another creative wordsmith whose politics suck most of the fun out of his comedy act. However, I can still admit that there are some quirky and humorous ideas hiding behind all the heavy-handed left-wing political proselytising.
The latest Jo Brand debacle is as tiresome as it is typical. The cloth-eared BBC is immune to accusations of its own hypocrisy, but we shouldn’t automatically ‘hate’ Jo Brand and everything she does.
“I have been watching, or listening to, Jo Brand for almost 30 years now and have yet to be even mildly amused by anything she has ever said. She’s fat, eats a lot and doesn’t like men — yes, I get it. But if only she could say something startling, revelatory or just — you know — funny about those stock subjects of hers, just once, I’d be happy.”
Rod Liddle isn’t exactly elfin-like himself. And off-the-cuff humour isn’t his strongest suit. So, arguably, it’s a case of “pot, meet kettle.” By the way, I don’t like Stewart Lee. Rod Liddle has a habit of inserting something jarring into his otherwise spot-on rhetoric. In written form, obviously.
In fact, Jo Brand has a droll wit about her, and as far as black comedy goes, her sitcom with the excellent Vicky Pepperdine was high-quality television. Personally, I could do without the man-hating stuff, the period porn and self-deprecating jokes about being greedy. If she applied herself to a more original narrative she’d be rather good. So would Boyle and the oversubscribed cadre of comics whose default, left-wing assumptions and repetitious attacks on the same old targets from Thatcher to Trump and back are so predictable that they’re almost never funny.
I hope these will be my last words on the ‘joke’ made by Jo Brand, which wasn’t one of her best, but at least (in her defence) it was (presumably) off the cuff; she was expressing the default BBC political view (which is that right-wing politics and politicians are evil) but I suppose it’s her right to do so. even if she was doing it on the so-called impartial BBC, because it was in the context of a programme called Heresy. “belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious (especially Christian) doctrine.”
In an earlier post, I tried to explain why I thought it was a poor joke. I‘ll try again. The concept was unoriginal and unimaginative because throwing acid isn’t ‘absurdist’. It’s not even far-fetched, for the simple reason that people actually do it.
I’m going to be annoyingly pedantic and deconstruct the ‘joke’. Here goes:
’Why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?’
said she.
The word ‘bother’, in this instance, is quite funny because, well, how much bother does it take to get hold of a milkshake? Not much I’d say. So it’s the word ‘bother’ that turns the remark into droll and dry humour. More so than if she’d just said: “Don’t use milkshakes”.
However, things take a turn for the seriously problematic when we get to the punchline:”
“…….when you could get some battery acid” (boom boom)
What if she’d missed out the word “battery” and merely said:
"Why bother with a milkshake when you could get some acid?" There. Not so funny now, is it?
In other words, why bother with humour when you can easily use straightforward incitement.
“Get some acid“ looks a little like unadulterated incitement, but she didn’t say that, did she? Carl Benjamin didn’t say he was going to rape Jess Phillips either. Nor did he threaten to rape her, but simply joked that he ‘wouldn’t even’. Not nice, but no-one’s nice these days.
Did Nigel Farage really have to increase his security arrangements because of that remark? Did the police really interview Jo Brand? The police? Are the police going to monitor Frankie Boyle and co as well?
Incidentally, anyone curious about the word Samizdat might have come across the thriving website “Samizdata”. A regular contributor to that site, Natalie Solent, used to be a co-proprietor of Biased BBC, and she too addresses the Jo Brand farrago. Farage-go.
The weirdest thing of the lot is the media bonanza it has engendered. Including this post.
