There are two masks on the front of the theatre...
... and tragedy alone won't do. Not making shitloads of comedy is a cultural disaster.
OFCOM has, once again, for the seventh year running, categorised Comedy as an ‘at risk’ genre. Roughly half as much scripted comedy was made last year compared to 2010-11.
Usually ‘at risk’ sections of broadcasting are the sort of worthy but easy to underfund thing that public service guidelines and overseers like OFCOM were designed to make sure didn’t die at the hands of a brutal marketplace: local news, niche interest factual, serious arts coverage, puffin-cookery slots for the remote islands.
But… comedy? I mean. That’s one of the two masks. That’s half of what the ancients decided was the breadth of human expression. We might not make *that* any more?
Really?
The OFCOM report focuses on the BBC, the spiritual home of British comedy. But the story isn’t vastly different across other broadcasters, also struggling to justify funding big comedy slates. And on the streaming services, with their reluctance to fund shows that might only hit one market – clutching the cold data that comedy doesn’t travel – the situation is not any brighter.
It’s a bit deceptive because while very little scripted or narrative comedy is being made, agencies and production companies employ comedians to do almost all the other jobs on television, from travel shows to arts coverage to, probably, making the sounds of the animals on David Attenborough documentaries (most jungle birds are Alan Carr, apparently, and all fish are Josh Widdecombe). So television is positively groaning with comedians, while it makes very little comedy.
There is still scripted comedy being made, and much of it is very good indeed. (For god’s sake please do go to the catch up services, click on the comedy tab, and give half an hour to one that you like the look of, so the figures get back to the powers that be. Loads of it is brilliant.) But every single one of those comedies now has double the weight of expectation on it. And if you’re a comedy fan – by which I mean a human being because we all like comedy of some sort, though not the same stuff at the same time – that’s not healthy.
Why? Because of that ‘not all liking the same stuff’ thing. We need more comedy, and more sorts of comedy, and more hours of comedy, if we’re going to make ourselves laugh. And we need to laugh because that’s half of our culture. You know. The theatre masks? Half of the Shakespeare folio? That.
The need for a breadth of choice is inherent within comedy. We all broadly agree on what’s exciting or thrilling or tense or dramatic, but comedy is often far more personal. Popular drama is a bomb going off. (In fact it often literally is that. It’s how you get everyone to lean forward and agree something’s exciting. Tick tick tick BANG!)
But comedy has no blast radius. It’s a sniper shot. A great joke that hits you right in the head and heart and fells you where you stand might leave the person next to you untouched, gawping about in confusion, distressed at what just happened.
And that is why we mustn’t make very little of it.
Making very little comedy makes making *any* comedy harder. The hoops each new comedy show has to jump through to get commissioned and made get tighter and tighter the less comedy is out there. More and more people have to agree that it’s worth spending the limited funds available on any particular show. That’s a hell of a lot of pressure for something as fragile and foolish as jokes. It puts a platoon of stern teachers between the class clown and their audience. “So… why is that funny? Maybe you’d like to explain it to the class…?”
So a show that is wonky and weird and inexplicable and unique, unlike anything else, one that is trying a new way of looking at the world, or a new approach to the craft of comedy – those shows which experience tells us often turn out to be the best, longest lasting, most influential comedy – will hit a ‘no’ fairly quickly. “What *are* you playing at?”
Which is why there is so much more comedy-drama than comedy these days, I reckon. A show that has another reason to be made other than being funny will get made, but a comedy that’s “just” a comedy? Harder to justify.
Desperate to justify itself, modern comedy tends naturally towards explicable dramatic arcs. It also begins to shift away from the broad and the silly or the abstract, towards the very personal. Which is great. And, importantly, a lot of the best modern comedy gives access to an underrepresented voice, or tries to be about something instantly recognisable or topical. Which are urgent, often corrective, needs for our culture. But what if you don’t want to tell *your* story, just do some good jokes?
Given a tiny purse, comedy that can be justified for another reason than simply aiming to make its audience and creators laugh feels like a prudent use of the limited funds. Those are solid, justifiable, report-to-your-boss, account to OFCOM, explain to the Culture Secretary reasons to make shows. But they’re not comic reasons. They’re the ‘other stuff’.
Comedy can be all those things. (And it should be too.) But if we only get this must-have stuff – the urgent, honourable, vital stuff – and stop making dumb shit that’s full of dressing up and farts and puns and silly wigs and falling over and logical dead ends and gibberish and the stuff that only comedy can do, we’re missing a lot of fun.
And it makes comedy seem less important.
I worry that narrowing the output of comedy to the same criteria that would justify making a drama – urgency, topicality, self-expression, depth, raw storytelling – makes comedy seem like… kind of… junior drama about small subjects. If it’s got spies and detectives and crime and dead bodies in: drama. If it’s got a family in it: comedy. And it’s not that. Subject matter doesn’t define a craft. There aren’t masks in front of the theatre for all the different topics. There are two faces. Two ways of talking about reality. Comedy. Tragedy. It’s comedy. It’s an art form of its own. Not a junior partner within the other one.
Comedy can be about all the subjects and use all the techniques that drama does. But what about the other amazing stuff that comedy and only comedy does? And I say ‘does’, not ‘did’. I’m not harking after a lost glorious past that ‘they’ won’t let us do any more. Because every year at Edinburgh, comedians show the breadth and invention of the comic form, an artform that has been perfected in all its wild lunacy over milennia. And every year I turn on the TV and see… almost none of that. Cos the comedy that’s just comedy is the pure, uncut shit. And we don’t do that any more on telly, apparently.
It’s like we’ve forgotten how to judge or make comedy that’s just comedy. Like we can’t decide it’s any good, worth spending money on, unless it’s also like something else. As if we arbitrarily decided that, because we couldn’t work out how to define ‘funny’ adequately to get it on the spreadsheet to pass up to accounts, all comedy should aspire to the state of some other popular broadcast form in order to be funded. What if instead of drama, we’d picked Formula One? “I like this script, but all the characters really should be travelling in a circle at 180 mph, or is it really worth making?”
There should be shows that are made because they’re great comedies by people who know what they’re doing. And that’s all.
We’ve put loads of our comic weapons beyond use, and just stuck to the things that comedy can *also* do, forgetting what it can *uniquely* do. Because a lot of that stuff is pretty dumb when you say it out loud. “I want to build a huge plastic bum that blows Kenny Everett backwards” or “I want to build a rig that lifts a Nosferatu Lloyd Grossman into the air so his winklepickers graze a full English plate of Jesus’ face” is going to go down very badly if that means not having a beautifully written bittersweet tale about infertility that’s going to nab you a BAFTA. But I think we’d all like both, wouldn’t we?
Commissioners are under terrible pressure, and comedy is a really hard sell. Because it’s wonky and abstract and stupid, and often finds its comedy in a crazy waste of resources. (I’ve written about this before – how we often laugh at comedy’s wilful profligacy, the glorious waste of it all, the bathos of the huge staging of a fragile conceit, because it’s a delight to see in itself. Of course it’s expensive to put a whole orchestra and Andre Previn with Eric and Ernie, but that’s the joke.)
And stuff like that looks terrible on a pitch document or a balance sheet.
A show whose contemporary vitality and relevance is harder to read (something allegorical or absurdist or in a strong authored comic voice) will struggle to make it through all the gatekeepers, because it can’t justify itself with enough articulacy beyond ‘this is comedy’ or '‘we think it’s funny’. So comedy starts to be other things as well, and there’s an argument that it should be those things second, because the other departments (drama, factual etc) will be doing that stuff already. What they won’t be doing is being stupid and making people spit tea over their laps. Which is comedy’s job.
What I fear most is that limiting the amount of comedy that is being made limits the audience who will go to their TVs expecting comedy. It breaks the habit. We have vastly increased the breadth of voices in comedy away from the bad old days of it all being made by eleven white men who were at college together. (Though, boy, could those guys make comedy. Practice, I suppose.)
But because we make so much less comedy, that breadth of voices and subject matter has come at the expense of a narrowing of comic style and form. We’ve all but abandoned high-risk and expensive forms like the sketch show and broken comedy. A burst of inflation applied to knife-edge budgets mean nobody’s going to risk a sketch show now. Hit-and-miss isn’t a selling point. And maybe sketch was a site specific art form, one we can’t do now, because we shut the factory. (When drama was in the same building, nobody had to account for renting all that dress-up junk and single-use props privately. You’ll be shocked how much a captain’s hat costs to hire privately for an airline quickie.)
Getting hold of enough money to make something funny is a big factor in why comedy isn’t being made, I suspect. You’re persuading people to open their wallets for something that – by definition – not everyone will enjoy.
But that’s not a bug of comedy; it’s its heart.
Comedy belongs to each of us individually. It’s personal. And only when a joke rings our private little bell at its specific frequency of relevance and reference and agreement, do we feel like we belong to a little giggling tribe of people who agree with it. And then we delight in not belonging to the idiot tribe next door with their stupid unfunny shows.
You might think that some comedy is universal - slapstick, say – but plenty of people hate Laurel and Hardy (I mean, fuck off, but they do). And you’ve probably got a strong opinion on Mr Bean or Mrs Brown’s Boys precisely because you know how many people love them, their unashamed mass appeal, and you don’t want to join that gang, cos screw those guys.
Comedy is identity. We can’t just make three or four shows. That won’t work.
We need to make absolutely shitloads. Or we’re not making comedy properly.
I’ll probably write more about this, because it’s an ongoing issue, and existential for my industry. There are loads of reasons. Loads of implications. But the most important thing to understand is that it’s not enough to make a small amount of comedy.
Because if we do, we might as well not make any at all.
Because comedy doesn’t work like that.
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I’ve got a book about the craft and science of comedy and This Sort Of Thing coming out next year. You can order a copy here.