Watching the print media rallying around to batter Channel 4 and Frankie Boyle is a strangely conflicting experience. Boyle's 'Tramadol Nights' has been in the firing line for eviscerating jokes about everything from Katie Price's handicapped child Harvey, Madeline McCann and now - and to such an extent it's caused MPs to get involved - accusations of Racism. This is on top of the repeated charges of misogyny that increasingly dogs Boyle (and many male comedians) also charged with 'going too far' - Jim Jefferies recent UK tour has received similar accusations as have Jimmy Carr and Chris Rock. Yet despite the abrasive material (and it is often a white-knuckle ride) Boyle's act (and Jefferies) are redeemed by being much funnier than they are unfunny and by the fact that ultimately nobody is that bothered who doesn't have a vested interest. Not really. Not like they were when Lenny Bruce did his routines about swearing and racism.
Indeed, in 2010 the reaction to extreme material in any art form is more often than not jaded, leading to boredom and indifference. When did art last genuinely shock anyone in Britain? When was anyone in the UK genuinely offended by art in living memory? In this context, abrasive Stand Up remains a uniquely potent force still just about able to test the standards of civilisation, the context of the Stand Up venue functioning as a laboratory in which extreme opinions can actually be explored. Boyle's problem is he's transferred this nihilism to TV (even though anyone watching would know well in advance what to expect). He hasn't said anything racist, just used racist terms to engage with an idea about racists (like Bruce, but lacking his dazzle and veracity). Boyle has also said stuff that was clearly 'out of order' - but still, nobody watching was incited to violent action, and nobody got hurt until the media removed the context and amplified a few choice sentences. It has left Boyle looking twisted - which won't bother him - and possibly unfunny (which probably will). After all, provoking no laughter is the Comedian's worst fear, not accusations of indecency.
I have written before how the notion we are desensitised to violence is patently untrue, that in fact we've never been more fearful of it (hence 'The Culture Of Fear'). The same is true of perceived "lowering of standards" - a standard claim ironically made about different things by both elitist intellectuals and rabble-rousing hacks. Tabloid TV may draw the highest ratings, from X Factor to The Apprentice, but then it always has because it's designed to be popular. Significantly though, it's audience is now fragmented between true believers and knowing ironists. Furthermore, increased choice now enables people who don't want to 'join in' to engage with something more intellectually rigorous on alternative channels ('A History Of The American Dream' say or 'Apocalypse: WW2 in Colour'). This wasn't an option in the 60's when 'Opportunity Knocks' was on. There was no escape.
Indeed, the idea that standards are lowering is such a fallacy when one considers the media furore itself. Newspapers are always given to hypocrisy, but in the 70's when Bernard Manning and his ilk were being genuinely racist in Comedy clubs across the country, when TV Sitcoms such as 'Mind The Language' (and even 'Fawlty Towers') genuinely marginalised minority groups, there was no outcry because back then standards hadn't been raised sufficiently to realise there was anything wrong.
Indeed, contrast the familiar sign in 70's boarding houses of 'No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs' with the European Court's defence of gay couples prohibited from staying at country Guest Houses. The battles fought in the name of Political Correctness (and as Stewart Lee illustrates they were conflicts utterly essential to the evolution of civilisation in the UK) were legitimate battles that have enabled the cultural terrain that comedians and artists work in to change significantly. It is a more ambiguous context now, harder to navigate, which is why some comedians still go 'too far'. But far better they have right to go 'too far' than that right is completely revoked. As Armando Iaanucci once noted, "If you're a comic you're bound to offend someone at some point. Comedy is all about exaggeration and distortion, you can't have comedy that is fair and balanced and accurate." As such, if you don't like it don' t laugh. Could it really be that simple?
4 comments:
It's the job of the comedian to go too far.
As you say it's not like the 1970s when the powerless were victimised for entertainment by the powerful (actually, I'll come back to that because it is, just not in comedy). We don't have mainstream comedians doing racist imitations of Black people for laughs. We're not in that world.
So, who is offended? Not the powerless. The comfortable are offended, the complacent, those who don't wish to be challenged.
Fuck them. It's the comedian's job to challenge those people. It's the comedians job to challenge me to prod me out of becoming those people. And above all it's the comedian's job to be funny.
As long as Boyle is funny, he's doing his job. How many of those who were offended actually were? How many of them watched it? I've seen that episode, by chance (it's actually the only one I have seen oddly enough). His joke was not a racist one. Later in the same episode he got into territory I thought possibly was racist, but nobody complained about that.
And nor did I. If I think Boyle's actually being racist in a joke I don't laugh and if he continues I turn off or turn over. What more power of censorship do I need than to stop watching? If others continue to watch that's their business, if I continue that's mine.
I loathe the wretched whinging newspapers fan up about things nobody really gives a shit about it until the papers tell them to.
Where I think the powerless are victimised is on some of the reality shows you mention. Some remind me of Bedlam. The mentally ill, the socially inept, those who aren't quite managing to reconcile their view of the world with its actuality are paraded for entertainment and mocked on national television. We take our lunatics and where once we poked them with sticks now we make them sing and laugh at how bad they are.
That's the powerful mocking the powerless, but we are the powerful. Those people need support, possibly treatment. Instead they are humiliated for entertainment.
So I don't watch them. That said, a little historical perspective shows it was always like this. People cheered as prisoners were mauled by lions, knitted at the foot of the guillotine, poked those sticks into the cages at Bedlam, and now watch the desperate and the sad flail on live television. The manifestation changes, we do not.
Glad you're singing from the same hymn sheet Max - fuck 'em indeed!
You're 100% correct too that the dubious motives of increasingly sadistic, low-grade 'talent' shows are far more problematic than a ranting comic as they have an institution behind them, making everything permissible, however predatory.
A further consideration re this topic that I didn't develop in the post is that whee most art fails to shock now - though it tries and tries - a stand up comedian finds them self occupying an increasingly unique licence to go 'too far'. There is something cathartic about this ritual.
The visual arts and literature struggle to make such a direct, and compelling challenge to their audience now, due to the degree of respect they are afforded. Where as a Stand Up can ambush you easier. Indeed, the Stand Up's ability to spontaneously assault an audience's sensibilities remains a raw and vital contribution to the arts. Certainly, such antagonism is rarely found in traditional sources for vitriol - rock and pop music, so it's all the more important it is allowed free reign in Stand Up comedy.
Some modern art continues to have the power to shock, though it's fading through overuse.
A few years ago the Turner prize would provoke outrage. Is it art? All that sort of thing, demanded in a hysterical tone.
It's fading because the public by and large doesn't care much either way. Even now though there's potential there.
Of course the shock isn't at the work. The shock is that it gets rewarded by prizes and worst of all by money. What was shocking about Hirst or Emin wasn't ever really the content but how much they got paid for it. The shock was that of the outraged shopkeeper more than anything else.
Now even that's largely gone, taking us to your stand-ups and their unique place. Interesting.
You're right about shock being a reaction to cost more so than content (ironically rendering Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' 'shocking').
I think though the 'shock' people might need from the visual arts has less to do with controversy, say, than the ability to see things differently. Cubism, say, was a radical way of looking at things. In this sense it was 'shocking'. It's this emphasis upon 'ways of seeing' that I think has the greatest capacity to 'shock' - the ability to look at life in a way the audience hadn't anticipated. Savvy art crowds are inevitably harder to 'shock' as such, and maybe that's why it's much rarer to see visual art that looks radically different.
Emin didn't 'shock' because she simply showed us the familiar as we already know it. Hirst, maybe did more as the executions were bolder - but often felt like that's all they were - concepts.
Exceptions to this trend from recent years might include something like James Turell's 'Sustained Light', which places the viewer in the work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWekIcZaKns
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