Undoing Gender Bending in Contemporary British Radio Comedy

Home , Dead Ringers (comedy), Have I Got News for You, The Goon Show, The News Quiz

Ellie Kennedy

“But I’m a Lady!” Undoing Gender Bending in Contemporary British Radio Comedy

The two BBC radio comedies Little Britain and On the Town with the League of Gentlemen present a quirky view of turn-of-the-millennium Britain where gender and sexuality are perpetually in crisis. This paper explores the characters “rubbish transvestite Emily Howard” and Barbara, the pre-operative transsexual cab driver. A theoretical base is provided by Andreas Böhn’s “imperative of flexibility”, which he posits as a new paradigm for subversive post-modern comedy. This base is supplemented with Judith Butler’s concept of “undoing gender” and Marjorie Garber’s class-focused reading of cross-gendering. Through this combined theoretical lens, I read Barbara’s hyperbolic flexibility and Emily’s hyperbolic inflexibility as comic and subversive devices which expose the crises in gender, class and sexuality at the core of contemporary ‘Britishness’.

Radio comedy in the UK enjoys a tradition perhaps unrivalled anywhere, largely due to the investment of public broadcasting. For some sixty years, the BBC airwaves have been a testing ground for comic strategies considered too avant-garde for television, from satire through absurdist deconstruction to tongue-in-cheek topical commentary.1 Since in recent years the fashionable topics of gender and sexuality have tendered rich comic material, contemporary BBC radio comedy provides an ideal site at which to analyse intersections of gender, laughter, and media. Furthermore, aural comedy’s home within – and indeed its status as – a national institution means that such analysis inevitably yields insight into constructions of British identity. The two BBC radio comedies Little Britain and On the Town with the League of Gentlemen present a quirky view of turn-of-the-millennium Britain where gender and sexuality are perpetually in crisis. Two characters in particular, “rubbish transvestite Emily Howard” and Barbara, the pre-operative transsexual cab driver, test the limits of gender flexibility. Andreas Böhn, in this volume, posits “the imperative of flexibility” as a new paradigm for subversive

1 Successful television comedies which began life on BBC radio include Hancock’s Half Hour, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Room 101, Have I Got News For You (based on Radio 4’s The News Quiz), the ground-breaking Anglo-Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me!, the impressionist satire Dead Ringers, and the science fic- tion comedies Red Dwarf (inspired by Son Of Cliché) and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which became a television series, a novel pentalogy, a feature film and, recently, an internet encyclopaedia. The Goon Show in the late 1950s introduced the British public to the intelligent, off-the-wall style of humour that was later developed to its full potential on television by the Monty Python team. 252 post-modern comedy. Böhn draws on Henri Bergson’s notion of laughter as a corrective to inflexibility (Bergson 21), but suggests that laughter in contemporary comedy has a more complex function than simply bringing non-adherents into line with dominant ideologies. He further argues that the binary paradigm of ‘laughing at’ versus ‘laughing with’ is insufficient for an understanding of laughter as subversive. If we laugh at those who do not conform to a particular norm, we merely reiterate that norm; however, if we laugh with a non-conformist at the norm, we acknowledge and thereby re-affirm the power of that norm. Thus, if both laughing at and laughing with the norm serve to uphold the norm, true subversion is barely possible. In search of a more enabling theory of the comic, Böhn posits flexibility as the new “super-norm”. In contemporary societies, Böhn argues, identity is context-dependent rather than fixed within a stable hierarchy, so that behavioural norms must continu- ally adapt to changing circumstances. Furthermore, in a post-PC world where simplistic black/white divisions are frowned upon, and a degree of personal flexibility is required vis-à-vis most norms, we might laugh at those whose individual performatives are too flexible, or are not flexible enough. This notion could, in fact, serve as a paradigm for analysing most of the comedy in Little Britain and League of Gentlemen. Focusing on the two gender-bending figures Emily Howard and Barbara, this paper argues that their gender flexibility pre- cipitates identity crises, not in themselves, but in fixed notions of gender, class, nation, and indeed the stability of ‘identity’ itself. Such destabilizing potential, I contend, makes Emily and Barbara subversive characters. The theories of Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber prove useful for exploring the subversive potential of gender bending. As Judith Butler has written recently in Undoing Gender, norms of identity can be undone: under certain conditions seemingly fixed identity categories will reveal their instability and lay themselves open to potential resignification.2 While Butler is not writing specifically about transvestism here, her notion of “undoing” is a useful sup- plement to Marjorie Garber’s 1992 text, Vested Interests. Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. Garber argues that the function of transvestite figures in art and literature is to indicate a “category crisis”. In the face of certain gender-flexible acts, seemingly impermeable boundaries between categories such as ‘male’ and ‘female’ prove to be permeable after all. This permeability constitutes a crisis in ‘fixed’ identity categories such as gender. Garber laments that scholars writing about transvestism tend to fixate on the biological sex of the body underneath, rather than on the multi-faceted totality

2 Although Butler has previously written specifically about ‘drag’ and subversive laughter in Gender Trouble (1990), her recent thoughts on ‘undoing’ identities prove more fruitful for the present study.