I have of late been listening to Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar on BBC Radio 4 and apart from the rather unnerving fact that I have no idea if some the stories that he tells are real or not, I am yet again reminded why he was the virtual re-inventor of alternative comedy in the 1980s.
As the son of Marxist/Communist parents and knowing the language of the left better than most of his audiences, he was very well poised in a particular point in time to both ridicule the left and confuse the right. Not quite 40 years later and after the economic right comprehensively won, although the comedy tune that he plays is still mostly the same (albeit a bit more sombre), I was yet again reminded that comedy doesn't really work on the left/right economic axis but rather, the vertical authoritarian/libertarian axis; which as compass points are the north and south.
I find it almost amusing that comedy programs are often looked at with very frowny faces by serious news programs on commercial networks (Sky News is a prime culprit this), and accused of bias. Programs like The Chaser and Tonightly With Tom Ballard spring to mind and even though I didn't necessarily care about them, the amount of vitriol which was spat against them was remarkable.
I recently saw Chris Kenny on Sky News, shaking his rag at some comedian and as he was getting visibly redder, I had to question what the motivation was. The only reason that I could think of was that someone from the authoritarian north, needs to generate a point of annoyance to rail against so that the acceptable Two Minutes Hate for the day can be established. In order to be able to rage against an imagined villain, you first need to write the story.
I pondered this for a bit and I think that I am justified in my conclusion that in Australia at least, there aren't really very many right wing comedians. In order to make comedy work properly, the audience needs to be able to ride along in the wagon of mirth that you are pulling; I just don't think that the authoritative north in Australia is capable of doing comedy properly.
The reason why I make the distinction between the authoritarian north and libertarian south as opposed to the economic left and right, is that I am sure that in very communist/soviet style countries, is that there were/are still people doing comedy in opposition to leftist governments, officials, and bureaucrats.
The big problem that the authoritarian north has in doing comedy is that they need to punch downwards to make the mechanics of comedy work; the irony is that their defensive weapon is the shield of free speech, which is actually deployed as a shield against the consequences of what they have just said. The big advantage that the libertarian south has in doing comedy is that they have the ready ability to punch upwards into power to make the mechanics of comedy work; the irony is that their defensive weapon is the shield of censorship, which is actually deployed to protect sensitivities which are constantly being coated in new rules and new fabric, as the wheel of euphemism slowly turns.
My problem with the comedy of the authoritarian north and the libertarian south is that comedy which only really has the five base elements of vulgarity, sarcasm, satire, surrealism, and vanity, means that comedians only really live in the first two, occasionally visit the third, briefly look at the third and literally can not write comedy against your enemy using the fifth.
All of that means that as someone who finds pure vulgarity lazy (I'm not particularly offended by vulgar language, it's just that if that ends up being the basis of the joke, then I think it's a failure) and sarcasm boring if deployed constantly (because sarcasm itself is an explosion and if all you have is a stream of explosions, there is no longer any shock value), then I find the vast majority of comedy served up to us as that most terrible of descriptions that you can apply to comedy: unfunny.
You're more likely to find rightist comedians in the UK because the class system already provides acceptable targets and it is the universities of Cambridge and Oxford that often become the training grounds for stagecraft. In Australia, we pretend that we don't have a class system even though we totally do but because we haven't yet really developed old money and landed gentry (we're working on it), then the range upon which the right can poke fun at itself is still very embryonic.
At its heart, the basic mechanics of a joke involves setting up a scenario and then finding a way to knock it down. Since structures of authority are already set up, then they are naturally ideal targets to knock down in comedy. Unless you want to write jokes which are based upon race, gender, religion, where the actual joke is nothing more than parody and/or caricature, then writing jokes which punch downwards are inherently less funny and even unfunny.
I think that it is inherently difficult to write comedy against the libertarian south for the simple reason that in general, there aren't really any libertarian power structures which can be knocked down. There is a very rare strain of comedy which is based upon vanity but the comedy of vanity best works when the individual knocks down their own setups; by very nature that can not be done from the outside. When you have a set up where the individual could have taken steps to avoid their own downfall, that is classical tragedy; and although it is entirely possible to write tragic comedy, it mostly ceases to be either political or it rings hollow in the real world.
I will agree that there probably are a lot of unfunny leftist comedians but then again, there are a lot of things that I find unfunny to begin with. There are far fewer rightist comedians; which means that rightist comedy is far less visible and there's even fewer rightist authoritarian comedians because that is structurally difficult.
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