SUNDAY, 3 AUGUST 2025

One of my favourite comedy movies is The Producers, (directed by Mel Brooks, 1967). It came out of America, but I see it as a good example of what has happened to comedy over the last sixty years in UK culture as well. The film sends up just about everyone and uses outrageous stereotypes to do so, creating a cast of grotesques, including a cross-dressing gay man and his mincing partner, a dizzy Swedish blonde with an IQ in single figures who dresses in a bikini for her secretarial job at the office, a drug-addled hippie named LSD who sucks his thumb and peels a banana after singing a song about ‘love power’, an audition room of desperate, untalented, wannabe thespians, a psychotic Nazi who worships Hitler and dreams of the return of the Reich, and two main characters, one of whom is certifiably neurotic and the other grasping, greedy and fat. It also parodies the musical as a form, with its keynote song of Springtime for Hitler performed à la Busby Berkeley. (It was remade in 2005 following a stage adaptation a few years earlier, but with little of the oomph of the original, which perhaps goes some way to proving the argument I will make in this blog).

Several famous British comedians – including Gervais, Atkinson and Cleese – have publicly stated that comedy is being suffocated by our current readiness to appease people whose reason for being alive is taking offence. These grandees of British comedy argue that there is an element of cruelty in most great comic works and this means there must be a butt of the jokes, whether this is an Essex girl, a Frenchman with a string of onions around his neck, a screaming queen, or Baldrick. Most countries, for example, make members of a nationality into figures of fun on account of their stupidity: the Irish in England, the Belgians in France, the Poles almost everywhere, and so on. The question is whether this encourages and consolidates dislike or even hatred of the foreign Other, or provides a harmless outlet for that prejudice, or is understood by most of its audience to be a convention that shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

But before we dive into that question, we must first ask if the premise implied in my title to this essay is correct: that the quality of British comedy has fallen compared to that of the past. My personal response to this would be an emphatic ‘yes’, or at the very least I’d contend that comedy has become predictable and anodyne. Fifty years ago, sitcoms like Til Death Us Do Part (1965-75) and Rising Damp (1974-8) dealt openly with the issue of racism, using comedy to promote socially liberal values. With the political move to the right in the 1980s, and the beginning of the current split between the tribes of ‘woke’ and ‘gammon’, TV comedy began to lose its cutting edge and issues like race were largely avoided. Stand-up ‘alternative’ comedy ruled the roost instead and was purported to be ‘challenging’, but in my opinion it tended to be neither challenging nor alternative: it mostly gave its audiences the chance to congratulate themselves on their social liberalism. It rarely had any of the bite of Lenny Bruce. Meanwhile on TV, as the last century edged towards the millennium, sitcoms gradually dwindled into the dreary niceness of To The Manner Born and later The Vicar of Dibley.

The central character of Til Death Us Do Part is Alf Garnett, a loud-mouthed bigot and racist who loves to rant against the left and to put the world to rights. In Rising Damp, a sleazy landlord, Rigsby, ends up with a tenant who is a black African sharing his room with a hippie-ish young male student with long hair. This allows full rein for Rigsby’s prejudices, against both blacks and boys who look like girls. The point is that Garnett and Rigsby are the butt of the jokes in these sitcoms: for instance, the black character, Philip, is cultured and sophisticated and well-educated, the opposite of the know-nothing sleazeball that is Rigsby. Similarly, in the famous ‘Germans’ episode of Fawlty Towers, we laugh at Basil Fawlty’s crass little-Englander prejudices while his German visitors in contrast are the height of politeness and decorum. (Despite this, the BBC removed the episode for a while from DVDs of the series, but eventually reinstated it with a warning, in its customary pusillanimous position of getting splinters in its backside from sitting on the fence). I know I’ve chosen here what most critics would see as three of the very best sitcoms of the time, but lesser work, such as Love Thy Neighbour (1972-6), in which a black family move in next door to a white one in a working-class area, also tackled issues of race head-on (indeed, some of its language would now be seen as totally unacceptable, in this case probably with better cause), but the overall message was the same: racism is ignorant and stupid.

All of these shows depended on stereotypes to a large extent, whether it was the right-wing working-class bigot of Garnett, the seedy lower-middle-class landlord of Rigsby, or the host of clichéd figures that inhabit Fawlty Towers. Stereotyping has a long history in western comedy and can be seen, for instance, in the plays of Plautus and Terence (consciously borrowed in a late-60s series, Up Pompeii, set in the ancient city), imitated in Restoration Comedy with its clever servants and pathetically horny old men, and then in the masked Italian street theatre of Commedia Dell’Arte, which Cleese cites as a huge influence on Fawlty Towers. The lecherous old man, the quack doctor, the soppy young boy in love, the puffed-up military officer, the sly servant and so on are characters handed down through the ages, to which we have made a few modern additions.

However, in the UK we tend to fall in love with the horrible human beings at the centre of these sitcoms. Although we think Garnett and Rigsby and Fawlty are morally repugnant and monumentally stupid, our attention perks up as soon as they appear on the screen. Like Jarry’s Ubu Roi, they have a monstrous vitality that attracts us as it repels. They become comic anti-heroes, much more vibrant and interesting than the decent characters around them, who come across as dull and wishy-washy. In Til Death Us Do Part, for instance, Garnett’s daughter and son-in-law are depicted as lazy liberals who are happy to sponge off the state and do nothing to change the world despite the ‘progressive values’ they are keen to express, while the hippie-ish co-tenant Alan in Rising Damp comes across as naive and rather bland: these characters have none of the manic gusto of Garnett or Rigsby. In another famous sitcom of the time, The Good Life, (1975-8), about a nice, idealistic couple who leave the rat race and try to be self-sufficient by turning their suburban garden into a farm, the energy sags when they are alone on screen because there’s a goodie-two-shoes quality about them that bores us or turns us off, but instantly revives when their snooty next-door neighbour, Margo, a harridan of social snobbery, appears on the scene.

Perhaps comedy performs a valuable role here by pointing out some of the weakness of middle-of-the-road decency when faced with bigotry. The latter has the energy of its anger and intolerance, as in Yeats’ oft-quoted poem, The Second Coming, in which ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’.  Brecht hung a Japanese wood-cutting of a hate-filled face on his wall to remind him of the sheer strain and effort that malevolence demands. This difference in energy and commitment may go some way towards explaining the failure of satire to do much to cure the world’s ills. I read that when Peter Cook was asked about the political influence of Beyond the Fringe, the satirical review that was the hottest stage show in town in the early 1960s, he pointed out that satire had done nothing to stop the rise of Hitler (and there was plenty of vicious satire in Weimar Germany, typified by Heartfield’s work). When I watch shows like Til Death Us Do Part nowadays, I feel I can understand why the left has struggled so much politically over the last twenty years; it is clear from the tepid characters who surround these ranting monsters that the decent a-political majority have none of the insane zeal and tireless stamina of those who are consumed by bile.

Perhaps the very best comedy nearly always contains an element of rage and a consequent cruelty: laughing at rather than laughing with. Freud argued that comedy serves as a form of sublimated aggression which helps people to release their anger in a harmless way and thereby lessens conflict within a society. I know his thinking is totally out of fashion nowadays, replaced by people who talk about neurons and ganglia, but I feel there is some truth in what he says. So can we ever have comedy without targets and victims? There are some early modern examples in silent movies in which actors like Keaton take on physics instead of other people and perform stunts that challenge reality. But the same silent movies are also full of slapstick routines where characters get a custard pie in the face or kick each other up the backside or slip on a banana peel or set themselves on fire, and still we laugh. Or think of Punch and Judy, entertainment for kids at the seaside in the traditional versions that existed when I was a child, in which Punch beats everyone with his stick, including his wife. Or the way Basil routinely mistreats Manuel.

So violence is rarely far from the surface in comedy, but to what extent can comedy happen without stereotypes? Another big hit of the time, Are You Being Served?, which ran for the relatively lengthy period of 1972-85, was set in a department store and featured the assistants who worked there: an array of stereotypes, including the snooty Captain Peacock, the ‘dolly bird’ Miss Brahms, and a middle-aged working-class woman with a would-be posh accent, Mrs Slocombe, who informs us in each episode about what has happened to her ‘pussy’ (something that would almost certainly lead to the blue pencil nowadays). The most famous character of all, and by far the most stereotyped, was Mr Humphries, an outrageously camp figure who minced and limp-wristed his way through every episode. When I was younger I railed against this portrayal, but these days I shrug my shoulders and even laugh along: I now see a kind of teasing in this depiction rather than malignancy. The show aimed to be a-political (at least in the popular use of the word, although no art can ever really be devoid of politics) and belonged to a long tradition in British comedy, typified by the Carry On series and McGill’s saucy postcards with their double entendres and ribald jokes, dating all the way back to music hall and drag shows in working men’s clubs.

Although I began this blog with The Producers, my content since has been exclusively British (although perhaps it would be more accurate to say English) because there is such a vast difference in humour between different cultures, and even between two countries, the US and the UK, ‘divided by a common language’, (this quote is most often attributed to Shaw). In the US, we are usually meant to like and even admire the central character: Lucy, Bilko, Mary Tyler Moore, Top Cat, Seinfeld, Carrie in Sex and the City. There is the obvious exception of Homer Simpson, but even he is more of a lovable rogue than a bigot who earns our contempt. In English comedy, in contrast, the central character tends to be at best a buffoon or an unbearable snob or a garrulous, self-important nonentity that we look down on, and at worst a deplorable human being that we laugh at. This probably mirrors a difference between the two cultures and the grudging, uncharitable streak that lies deep in the English character. On the positive side, though, it reflects a culture where people can laugh at their own foibles and have a healthy disrespect for anyone who puts on airs and graces or flashes the cash and expects immediate regard.

Not all comedy is dependent on stereotypes. There is a softer comedy which is mostly based on characterisation, although still usually with more than a hint of exaggeration. Dad’s Army, a huge hit that stretched from 1968 to 1977, was this type of show. Set in the Second World War, about which Britain (more accurately England) has obsessed since the day the war ended, and featuring a mixed bag of characters who are members of the Home Guard which was set up to protect the English coastline, it was almost bound to be a success (as was the much less subtle ’Allo ’Allo, also set in the war but far more dependent on rather coarse stereotyping). Dad’s Army is unlike the other shows featured here in that the humour is rather gentle and not aimed at any one target (except perhaps the Germans, but they are mostly invisible and the bulk of the humour comes from the interactions between the English characters.) Some stereotyping remains, but it is essentially benign: the pompous but well-intentioned Captain Mainwaring, the dour Scotsman Frazer, the Cockney spiv Walker, and the pampered mommy’s boy Pike. Comedy of this gentler type can also become dry and witty and cerebral, producing a wry smile rather than bursts of laughter, with Yes Minister (1980-4) as the supreme example.

Quirkiness is often a key feature of comedy, as expressed in incongruity theory with its roots in the work of Bergson (who, like Freud, thought that one of the functions of comedy was to provide an outlet for suppressed aggression). According to this theory, most comedy is funny because it shatters our expectations in some way, whether it’s the two differing meanings of a pun clashing against each other, or the sudden shock of a snappy punchline, or Lemmon and Curtis unexpectedly appearing dressed as women and struggling to walk in high heels, or the Major in Fawlty Towers holding a conversation with a moose’s head. Plus, of course, Monty Python and Milligan’s Q series would take this further, into the realm of absurd nonsense and surrealism. This seems to contradict those theories which focus on the role of stereotyping where part of the reason we laugh is that our expectations are met (the chef is Swedish so he will have a funny accent).

Personally I don’t see why we need to choose between these options: both seem to be operative in comedy, and a suspension of everyday reality and logic is one of its most regular features. Extremists of all kinds tend to be rather poor at doing comedy because they desire a world from which all surprise and spontaneity have been expunged. Fascism seeks to reduce human beings into identical units with no distinctive features, an army goose-stepping en masse. Comedy is an antidote to this reduction of human beings to interchangeable pawns. The far right may have done much to colonise social media, but one field they will never flourish in is comedy, except perhaps for the crudest and most violent forms of slapstick. In most good comedy, people are basically odd and bursting with idiosyncracies, something totalitarian governments of all stripes cannot cope with and certainly not allow as representations in the nation’s art (think of Nazi and Soviet painting).

Before I conclude, I’d like to take this chance to pay tribute to the quality of comic acting in Britain. There’s almost nothing in which the UK can even pretend to lead the rest of the world anymore, or often merely to keep pace with, but the list of comedic geniuses in the 20^th century is almost endless, so it would be unfair to single out an individual. Even if the scripts were lame, as in many of the Carry On movies, the performances were always impeccable, combining a sensitive observation of ordinary human behaviour with over-the-top flourishes that often imbued the portrayals with a tinge of eccentricity or even delirium. The characterisation and consequent representation were always flawless. Sadly, it is starting to look as if even this last area in which the UK led the world is just one more remnant of its past.

In contemporary society a bizarre juxtaposition has emerged of an online world in which people split into tribes and spit venom at each other, alongside a public arena and mass media in which enormous effort goes into trying never to offend anyone in any way. This sense of walking on eggshells has been highly deleterious for comedy and is sapping its potential to soften the abrasive edges of society by bringing us all together to relish some good old honest fun. One of comedy’s key virtues is that it gives us the chance to laugh collectively (at slapstick or ridiculously flawed anti-heroes) or knowingly smile and shake our heads (at Yes Minister). I accept that this collective response can happen at the expense of othering those who are not part of the in-group, but believe that most people recognise that the jokes are merely jokes and it is condescending to assume that they do otherwise: I’m sure no one who watches Fawlty Towers thinks Manuel deserves a good thrashing because he comes from Barcelona. A second key virtue is comedy’s ability to help us accept humanity’s imperfections and the random nature of life and even derive some pleasure from its screwy ups and downs.

Ultimately, I suggest, the problem isn’t ‘woke’; it is an atomised society where people no longer publicly meet and interact and there is no centre we can hold to. Comedy cannot function in this situation because it depends on shared values and there is no consensus from where it can operate. In my opinion, this is dangerous. If Cook is right and satire can never halt fascism, and will instantly be silenced in any country that goes down that rabbit hole, for any society to stay free requires a space for healthy, collective bursts of laughter and the bearer of that is comedy, even if at times it may be cruel. More than ever we need comedy as a shared public source of pleasure and joy to bring us together, but more than ever this is starting to look impossible in the fissiparous, high-tech world we now inhabit.