British comedy: a post-mortem

If you want a perfect illustration of the dismal state of British comedy today, tune in to the second series of Last One Laughing. The concept is simple: get a bunch of comedians in a room for six hours and tell them to make each other laugh. The twist is that they all have to remain stony-faced throughout; if they so much as grin, they are expelled by Jimmy Carr, the ubiquitous host for programmes that involve forced fun (look no further than The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, which has become as predictable and unloved as Jools Holland’s ghastly Hootenanny).  Eventually, in episode six, the final two comedians have to go “head-to-head” and the first one to laugh loses. This year, nobody laughed, probably because the final two, David Mitchell and Sam Campbell, didn’t say anything funny. It was a suitably mirthless end.

One suspects that these contestants have been chosen not because they are allegedly funny, but because they meet a ruthless set of EDI criteria: there is the ageing comedian (Bob Mortimer), the ageing comedienne (Mel Giedroyc), the gay comedian (Alan Carr), the BAME comedians (Romesh Ranganathan and Gbemisola Ikumelo), the token intellectual comedian (David Mitchell), and the comedians few have heard of (Amy Gledhill and Sam Campbell). Look at the cast for Series 1 and the same applies.

Even the platform the programme can be found on (Amazon Prime) tells you how far comedy’s stock has fallen on terrestrial television. Sitcoms used to dominate the airwaves, but they seldom feature in any of the listings now: Mrs Brown’s Boys and Not Going Out are the last long-running series left. Comedy now only seems to be commissioned if it is a panel game: Taskmaster, Would I Lie To You? and, like a doddery old retainer stuck in the corner laughing to itself, Have I Got News for You continue to pay the mortgages of comedians who no longer bother writing jokes but, instead, mouth dull inanities off autocues.  If you want genuinely funny, innovative, comedies you have to go to the streamers, and usually to programmes made in the US.

British comedy has never been older, more self-satisfied nor less threatening. Go to see any member of the comedy establishment and you will be met with an audience that, by London’s standards, is remarkably uniform. At a recent gig in Hammersmith by Greg Davies, the warm-up act, Barry Castagnola, looked out at the audience of three and a half thousand and commented that it was a sight that would give Nigel Farage a wet dream. Some laughed nervously because there is a particular brand of melancholia that sets in when one realises that you are in for an evening of demographic confirmation bias. Standing in a queue for a £16 gin and tonic (served, naturally, by a member of a demographic not represented by the paying audience) you begin to suspect that British comedy has transitioned from the Young Ones of the 1980s, full of sound and fury and signifying something, into a palliative care ward for the middle-aged. Davies’s act consisted, mostly, of his predictable insights into getting old.

Perhaps a country gets the comedians it deserves

Where are the comedians who are genuinely angry about the state of the country today? There is plenty to satirise, lots to protest about, but the reality is that most working comedians are from the progressive left and helped to shape the current, degraded public square. No jokes will come from them about the failings of this government. Perhaps it is because they are all ageing and can now only rage against the dying of their own comedic light. When Frank Skinner commented at a recent gig at the Gielgud Theatre about going “snow blind” from the sea of white hair before him, it was more than a self-deprecating jab from a man who remains, stubbornly, actually funny; instead, it sounded more like a terminal diagnosis for his profession. We are witnessing the final settling down of a generation that once defined “alternative” comedy, now comfortably ensconced in a feedback loop of their own complacent making. 

Perhaps a country gets the comedians it deserves. If so, what does it tell us about Great Britain that we have gone from creating genuinely inventive, provocative and brilliantly funny comedians, ranging from Tony Hancock, Peter Cook, Morecambe and Wise, the Two Ronnies, Victoria Wood, Monty Python and Billy Connolly, to the cast of Last One Laughing? Well, it probably tells us what we already know: that we are in long-term decline. But whereas in the past the British always had the ability to laugh at ourselves, now we lack the imagination, or energy, to do so. Last One Laughing is a grim autopsy on the state of our collective sense of humour. The country has become a standing joke, only now there is no one laughing.

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This piece has been edited to correct factual errors. We regret the errors.