Comedy and Distinction: the Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour
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Sam Friedman Comedy and distinction: the cultural currency of a ‘good’ sense of humour Book (Accepted Version) Original citation: Comedy and distinction: the cultural currency of a ‘good’ sense of humour, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014, 228 pages. © 2017 The Author This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/59932/ Available in LSE Research Online: September 2017 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author’s submitted version of the book section. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. Introduction: Funny to Whom? In January 2011, the scheduling plans of Britain’s biggest TV station, BBC 1, were leaked to the press. After the recent success of BBC comedies such as Outnumbered and My Family, BBC1 Controller Danny Cohen apparently told his team of producers that BBC Comedy was becoming ‘too middle class’, and failing in its responsibility to appeal to working class viewers (Gammell, 2011; Revoir, 2011; Leith, 2011). Attempting to clarify Cohen’s position, a BBC source told The Daily Telegraph: ‘[Danny] feels the BBC has lost its variety and become too focused on formats about comfortable, well-off middle-class families whose lives are perhaps more reflective of BBC staff than viewers in other parts of the UK. One of his priorities is getting more programming that reflects different social classes and what he describes as ‘blue collar’ comedies. In the past, programmes like Porridge, Birds of a Feather and Bread were about real working families and the workings of their lives. Danny is conscious there are not programmes like that on BBC1 at the moment and is making it a priority to change that. The key point is to make everyone feel like they are engaged with BBC1’ (Pettie, 2011). Within 24 hours this leak had caused a media storm. Columnists, sitcom writers and comedians all rushed to denounce the comments. Cohen, most argued, was being fundamentally short-sighted, even patronising. But most importantly, he was neglecting the golden rule of comedy – above all it has to be funny. It is not about who is being represented in comedy, Vicky Frost argued in The Guardian, or indeed what type of people are watching, ‘it's about the jokes’ (Frost, 2011). Similarly, 1 giving an industry perspective Alan Simpson and Ray Galton, creators of Steptoe and Son, told The Daily Mail, ‘Cohen is missing the point, good comedy is classless. The best comedies are funny regardless of whether their characters operate at the depths of society or in middle-class comfort’ (Simpson and Galton, 2011). Likewise, Jeremy Lloyd, creator of Are You Being Served? commented: ‘Laughter crosses boundaries of class and age – humour is universal’ (Lloyd, 2011). Having worked as a critic and magazine publisher in the British comedy industry for the last ten years, I couldn’t help but feel a little bemused by both Cohen’s comments and the ensuing reaction. Certainly, I shared the frustrations of those that felt that the BBC1 Controller’s comments were misguided. While I didn’t necessarily support Simpson and Galton’s suggestion that ‘good comedy is classless’, I felt instinctively uncomfortable with Cohen’s presumption that broadcasters can discern the makeup of a comedy audience simply by looking at who is represented within the programme. To me this seemed a simplistic and somewhat reductive assumption, which was wholly unsupported by any empirical audience research. Yet although I was baffled by Cohen’s comments, I was even more troubled by the media and industry response. Rather than challenging Cohen’s shaky association between comic representation and consumption, most instead argued that the BBC 1 controller had underestimated the one universal that underpins comedy – funniness. But to me this posed an even more fundamental question – funny to whom? How can we definitively discern what is and what isn’t actually funny? And why is it that everyone writing about comedy was so sure that their sense of humour was shared by everyone else? In fact, these questions have captivated and eluded me in equal measure throughout my involvement in comedy. As a comedy critic at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, I have reviewed hundreds of comedy shows, representing every possible style and approach. And what has always fascinated me about my role as a critic is that I am somehow handed the power to decide, on behalf of my magazine’s audience, whether a piece of comedy is funny or not. However, I have never judged a comedian’s 2 funniness in terms of how much they made their audience laugh. Of course audience reactions have a bearing on comedy reviews, but I’m yet to meet a critic that has written a review based solely on audience reaction. The more pressing issue for me, as a comedy critic, is not what is funny to everyone, but what is funny to me – according to my sense of humour and my aesthetic criteria. My role may be to communicate an authoritative sense of which comedians are funny, but the truth is such judgments will never accord with everyone’s sense of humour. Indeed, if there is one thing that I have learnt from a decade of comedy criticism it is that there is no such thing as ‘universally funny’. Despite what all those criticising Danny Cohen might say, a piece of comedy is never simply funny or unfunny. Indeed, as a keen observer of live comedy audiences, I have always been fascinated by the lack of uniformity in what people find funny, by the diversity of aesthetic experience enjoyed during a comedy performance. This diversity is apparent not just in the kinds of people at different comedy gigs (which, incidentally, is striking), but also the diversity of people, and their aesthetic reactions, within the same gigs. Once people are engrossed in a comedy performance, many don’t laugh at the same jokes, and even when they do they’re not necessarily laughing at the same time, or with the same levels of enthusiasm. Such observations about comedy, and its vast interpretative diversity, acted as the main catalyst for undertaking this book. In 2008, after years of informally thinking about comedy consumption, I realised that I wanted to take things a step further and understand it sociologically and empirically. Moreover, in doing so, I didn’t want to make presumptions about what audiences find funny, or assume their reactions based on comic representation. Unfortunately, such approaches are not just confined to the media; they also dominate academic literature on comedy. Indeed, in disciplines as wide as English literature, cultural studies, media studies, film and television studies and sociology, there is a long tradition of 3 assuming audience reactions to comedy1. In some cases these have echoed Cohen in presuming modalities of consumption from analysis of comic representation (Wagg, 1998; 2; Thomas, 1998: 59; Stott, 2005: 119; Harvey, 1987: 665-678), and in other instances audience interpretation and makeup has been presupposed solely in terms of a comedian’s authorial intention (Gray, 2009: 154; Rosengard, 1989: 9; Medhurst, 2007: 194-99; Wilmut and Rosengard, 1989: 30-45; Sutton, 2000: 23-32). However, in this book, I wanted to purposefully question such approaches. Echoing a multitude of literature highlighting the diverse ways audiences interpret cultural texts (Morley, 1978; Ang, 1985; Hill, 2007), my aim was to interrogate the full spectrum of British comedy taste. I wanted to understand what kind of comedy different people like, how they read and make sense of this comedy, and in turn what their tastes reveal about their sense of humour2. As a sociologist, I also wanted to examine 1 The problem here is less one of research deliberately rejecting the notion that audience responses to comedy are complex, and more that humour is a woefully under-researched area (particularly considering its prevalence within all societies) and therefore the frameworks that define the field are still being thrashed out. The rather amorphous field referred to as Comedy Studies often argues that theories of humour can be divided into three main kinds; Superiority Theory, Incongruity Theory, and Relief Theory. Superiority Theory suggests humour is a result of what Thomas Hobbes calls “a sudden glory” (1991 [1651], p45) whereby jokes assert the laugher’s superiority to whomever or whatever is being laughed at; Incongruity Theory argues we find funny things that are not where they should be and thereby defy our expectations (Kant, 1931 [1790], p223); and Relief Theory takes a psychological approach, seeing jokes as a mechanism for expressing repressed ideas and desires (Freud, 2001 [1905]). The first two of these theories consistently make assumptions about audiences. Superiority Theory assumes the social hierarchies comedy draws upon are straightforward and understood in the same way by everyone, whereas Incongruity Theory assumes everyone will respond to incongruities in the same way. While Relief Theory is an analysis of individual psychology, it remains precisely at the level of the individual, and fails to explore how the individual’s response might change from context to context.