- An emotive story dominates the headlines for a few weeks.
- Comedians try to make something funny out of it
- Some of them come unstuck with unsympathetic crowds.
- The press treat them as public enemy number one.
- Repeat until story fades from public consciousness.
This year it's the turn of Patrick Kielty and Dave Longley.
I have a tenuous personal connection to both of these stories. The more tenuous connection is to Dave. I've seen him perform a couple of times and enjoyed his work. He has always seemed to me to be a comedian who tries to push boundaries, both in material and style, someone who wants to produce something a little different to the usual. I've also performed at Baby Blue, the Liverpool club he was booed off at. I did ok at my gig there, but remember it being a pretty tough crowd; lots of city-boy types who liked the sound of their own voices. I also heard about a recent gig that had to be abandoned there because a stag party got out of hand. And it's in Liverpool, a notoriously difficult city to perform comedy in. It's the last place I'd choose to try a risky topical joke about dead children. But that's me. Dave is clearly someone who enjoys pushing a crowd's buttons, and he often succeeds in getting the balance right.
I completely understand this impulse. All comedians have the devil in us sometimes, which dares us to say the funny thing, regardless of whether or not it's the sensible or sensitive thing to say. To some extent, that's our job. Laughter is often a response to surprise, and to get the biggest laughs it can be necessary to surprise an audience by straying out of the usual social comfort zone. For many comedians this involves talking about sex or other mildly taboo subjects, but a topical reference has the added novelty of immediacy. I managed to get three laughs when I was compering at a gig last week just by mentioning Northern Rock. I didn't have any jokes written about it - all I needed was to say the words and the crowd laughed. Everyone was talking about it, and we were all a little worried about it, so by referencing it I was releasing a little bit of tension. In the aftermath of the London bombings, I heard many comics start their sets by saying something like "Great to see you haven't been put off coming out tonight - after all if we stop watching comedy then the terrorists have won!" It's become a hack joke now, but for a few weeks it almost always got a laugh. When a big story is dominating the headlines there is a pre-existing tension in the room that, as a comedian, you feel that you have to try and defuse. The problem is that sometimes addressing it works and sometimes it makes things worse.
In Dave's case, I think that his biggest offence was really about football. By establishing that most of the audience were Liverpool fans, he was trying to implicate them in his observation about Everton shirts. The Rhys Jones case has caused understandable horror across the country and has also become strongly linked with football throughout the media. Liverpool and Everton fans have made very public declarations of solidarity with the family. Trying to exploit the traditional football enmity in this situation was misjudged. If the joke had been framed more as an idle observation, and had crucially not been delivered in Liverpool, I doubt it would have made much impact. But then maybe it wouldn't have been as funny. It certainly would have been less shocking. After all, to an outside observer, joking about Catholics in front of a comedy club may be funny, but joking about them in front of a congregation is hilarious and joking about them in front of the Pope is hysterical. Only to the observer, though. To the rest of the audience, it's not so funny. As Dave found out to his cost.
Onto Patrick. I have a slightly less tenuous connection to this story. At the end of the usual strident Mail nonsense, a spokesman defends him by saying: "He performed the exact same material last week in London with no complaints whatsoever." That's an interesting statement, because I was at one of his warm up gigs in London that week. In fact, I was compering it. And although it's true to say that there were no "complaints", there weren't that many laughs either. I was surprised that he opened with his Madeleine material, because the audience weren't very keen on it, and he then struggled to engage with them for the rest of his set. I didn't resent him doing it, because it was a small warm up gig and everyone needs to try stuff out, but I was surprised to hear that he'd proceeded to do it again in front of a much larger crowd where the likelihood of people taking offence is much higher.
This all comes down to one big question: should comedians make jokes about these kind of stories? My position on this has always been clear: You can joke about anything, but if you're going to joke about something very sensitive it had better be a really good joke. Or to put it another way: weak puns about sex or Easyjet are bad enough. Weak puns about dead children are unacceptable.
Personally I haven't made any jokes about the McCann case and I haven't heard many that have even made me smile. I think we are all so aware that it is a tragedy and unlikely to have a happy ending that I can't imagine many jokes working except in a very dark and shocking sense. The media circus that surrounds the case has provided much more potential for humour, but even so it's hard to bring it up in a comedy club without alienating the audience. I've seen a few semi-successful attempts to do it, but have never felt comfortable addressing it myself.
Despite all this, I feel strongly that comedians should have the right to address any issue in a comedy club. They should be special places where taboos can be confronted and sick jokes can be told. This doesn't mean that an audience has to laugh at them, but the comedian shouldn't be pilloried for them either. Unfortunately this increasingly seems like a unrealistic prospect, but it's a nice ideal to aim for.
I just hope I never end up having to apologise for a joke in the national media.
Not unless it's really good.
On a (hopefully) unrelated note: Am I the only person who thinks that dog-walkers and ramblers deliberate go out looking for bodies? After all, they're the only people who ever seem to find them. I imagine a dejected dog-walker returning home one morning:
"Morning dear? How was the walk?"
"Rubbish."
"Oh dear. No body?"
"No. And Jeff found two last week. All I found was a dead pigeon. And I had to kill it first."
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