Natalie Haynes: journalism

The Times, 29 October 2008

When is a joke not a joke? The answer is simple – when no-one laughs. Comedy is quite different from other art-forms in this regard – if someone doesn’t enjoy a sad film, they might call it sentimental, mawkish, or boring. But we don’t usually suggest that the film isn’t sad. We just think it’s not to our taste. We have a completely different reaction to a failed joke. No-one ever hears a line which doesn’t make them laugh and says, yes, that’s me, I have no sense of humour. We don’t think it’s subjective. We all take refuge in the same attack – It’s not funny. If the joke doesn’t work for us, we deny its very existence as a joke.

Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross are currently experiencing the aftermath of a joke gone horribly wrong. What do you get if you cross a Spanish waiter with ill-judged prank? 4700 complaints and rising. After a series of on-air phonecalls to the 78-year-old-actor, Andrew Sachs, about a liaison with his grand-daughter, the two men face calls for their resignations, an Ofcom enquiry, and even a suggestion that they should be prosecuted. Why is the British public, normally so proud of its sense of humour, suddenly not laughing?

The first issue is power. The dynamics between comedian and audience are complex. An audience is happy to be complicit in all kinds of unpleasant jokes, so long as they don’t feel bad. Essentially, the rule is, laughing at the rich and famous is comedy, laughing at the poor and disenfranchised is bullying. The past few years, for example, have seen a plethora of jokes about Heather Mills, told on prime-time terrestrial television. Because she’s a wealthy celebrity, audiences are far more comfortable laughing at her disability than they would be were they listening to jokes about another woman crippled in a traffic accident.

A similar shift has occurred in racist jokes – most people would now balk at jokes predicated on someone’s ethnicity, but nationality is still fair game. The comedy circuit is full of people who wouldn’t dream of making jokes about Asian or black migrants, but don’t hesitate to make jokes about Polish plumbers. And when Anne Robinson consigns The Welsh to Room 101, or The Simpsons deride the French as cheese-eating surrender-monkeys, we’re quite happy to see that broadcast on TV. Robinson faced a few calls for an apology, but it didn’t exactly harm her career as one of the best-paid women on television.

Interestingly, it seems to be the age of Andrew Sachs that has caused the most disquiet – a straw poll of my colleagues suggests that even other comedians don’t think it’s funny to badger an elderly man. Yet we’ve all heard jokes about John McCain’s age without being worried. Again, it’s about power. McCain has thrust himself into the public eye, competing for the Presidency. If he’s going to have his finger on the red button, goes the reasoning, he should really be able to take a joke. But Andrew Sachs is someone people remember fondly – and he wasn’t looking for publicity. I wonder if it is also the number of calls which has upset people. One stupid prank call would have been forgivable; four messages of increasing insincere apologies less so.

The second issue which has caused so much concern is that the show was a pre-record. Speaking as someone who once said f*ck on 5Live (after midnight, but still), I know that BBC audiences are perfectly willing to forgive a slip of the tongue on live radio, particularly if you apologise instantly and unreservedly. The fact that a producer heard this show and then thought it was fine to broadcast seems to have left commentators absolutely baffled. This is, of course, a problem with television and radio that live comedy doesn’t face. If you make an off-colour joke onstage, the audience tends to respond instantly – they gasp, or boo, or even walk out. I once told a joke about Siamese twin babies at a gig in Chertsey which caused a third of the (admittedly tiny) audience to leave. One of whom then hammered on the window, wailing, until her husband dragged her away. It didn’t stop me from telling the joke again, but it certainly convinced me I should judge my audience carefully before I tried it next time.

An audience acts as a valuable barometer of what is and isn’t okay to make jokes about – it’s fine to pursue a tasteless joke if it bombs once or twice, but if it only ever bombs, it’s probably just not funny enough to counter its offence. I crushed a heckler once, who was trashing my gig with his random shouting, and only later realised he was mentally ill, and a war veteran. The audience knew immediately that I was wrong – some of them were delighted that I could be such a bitch, most were appalled. I still feel bad about it, years later. It’s difficult to replicate that audience-barometer with a small production team – what seems funny to four or five people who know each other can obviously miss the mark completely for millions of listeners.

Russell Brand is a terrific stand-up, and a large part of his act is toying with his audience’s expectations what is or isn’t appropriate. It’s hard to see what he loses from a scandal: he has a young audience who aren’t going to be easily deterred. The censure of Jonathan Ross is far more virulent – is it because he has daughters? I find it rather depressing that in all the furore, no-one, other than Sachs himself, seems to have thought to offer or demand an apology for his grand-daughter.

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