What a marvelous piece from Brendan O'Neill on Comment is Free:
So much political comedy these days upholds the cynical and even mainstream view rather than challenging it. It will be a nippy day in hell before anyone is surprised by something Rory Bremner says. His routine ("routine" being the operative word) reads like a list of the petty prejudices passed around the dinner party circuit of London N1. Used to love Tony Blair but now hates him: check. Thinks there should be a legal inquiry into Iraq: check. Reckons all politicians are liars and connivers: check. David Walliams' explanation for why he depicts so many grotesque people in Little Britain – incontinent old women, thick ugly chavs, etc – could have come straight from an internal Islington council memo: "We don't stereotype. We celebrate difference."
Marcus Brigstocke does stand-up routines on how global warming sceptics are evil and deluded, which, seriously, at a time when sceptics are publicly branded as "deniers" and serious commentators say they should be denied air-time, is about as fresh or challenging as making a joke about Thatch. What next, a comedy routine on how awful paedophiles are? As Antonia Quirke said recently in the New Statesman, Brigstocke, like so many other political comics and satirists of our time, "just assumes the audience will be complicit in the utterly bog-standard, unsurprising bit of wafty liberal observation that is coming out of his mouth."
Exactly. On the way to Birmingham last Friday, a friend and I turned on Radio 4 to hear the Lib Dem celebrity Sandi Toksvig (who?) present a news quiz programme in which no one wavered from this attitude. I was entirely unsurprised that if you put five liberal elite luvvies in front of a microphone, those would be the views you get. What is striking is the obvious belief that the views are politically subversive, and the smug assumption that they are shared by all.
In fact, as O'Neill argues so well, these views are tediously mainstream. Imagine writing a manifesto based on the views Bremner, Brigstocke or Toksvig express every time they are given a microphone. Smugly pro-EU, anti-prisons and so on, you could get most of the political and media class to sign it enthusiastically - the Chris Pattens and Douglas Hurds as much as the Polly Toynbees and Charles Kennedys.
What these aren't, for the most part, are majority views. These comedians so confidently base their material on the fact that people listening must agree - they don't so much argue for them as make disagreement the butt of their jokes. If this were a correct assessment of public opinion as a whole, it would be very difficult to explain how how Margaret Thatcher won so many elections, or how Ken Livingstone ever lost, or how the Conservatives enjoy a consistent poll lead now.
Of course, there is no requirement that comedians reflect the politics of the majority. There would be something sinister if they all did. But isn't there also something sinister about almost all comedy that isn't apolitical reflecting the views of this country's political and media class infinitely better than the views of British people? Such supposed 'subversives' would be the dream of many a tyrant.
