Sincerely Yours

Edgy comedy is a little passé; the most recent furore over rape jokes is nearly a year old, and civilisation seems less likely to collapse at news of Frankie Boyle doing what audiences pay good money to hear him do. Nevertheless, it remains instructive as regards the relation between the comedian’s attitude to their act and the audience’s attitude to each.

For instance, Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais have each been embroiled in controversy over jokes concerning disabled people. Discussing these cases with a work colleague, he was willing to give Carr but not Gervais the benefit of the doubt. The suggestion was that Carr didn’t mean to offend paraplegics but was poking fun at those who would find straightforwardly offensive comments amusing, whereas Ricky Gervais was hiding his genuine prejudice behind a veneer of irony, or so my colleague maintained.

I don’t know enough about either Carr or Gervais to judge whether they mean to cause offence, or are flirting with it for the sake of edgy but ultimately acceptable comedy. But what I found interesting is the suggestion that it’s valid to judge a comedian’s act partly on their attitude towards what they say. A comedian who says things which on the face of it mock vulnerable people, and who fully intends to do this, can be judged differently to one who says similar things but without this intent.

One obvious issue this raises is knowing what a comedian’s attitude really is; another is the danger that remarks intended for a comedy-savvy audience who are aware that the comedian doesn’t mean them will reach those who don’t or won’t appreciate such subtleties. But more generally, it is interesting that the sincerity or otherwise of a comedian’s comments can be seen as relevant. This marks quite a change from the days before stand-ups wrote their own material, when comics would simply recycle material without any thought being given to the attitude expressed.

It also allows stand-ups to play with a kind of irony which can be particularly potent because it is unclear, at least some of the time, what the comedian’s own attitude is. More precisely, a stand-up can do this in real time, in a game of chicken where they dare the audience to draw an implied conclusion which is never actually stated. For instance, consider the following Tim Minchin ditty:

 

The dynamic of the comedy is pretty clear, and by this I mean not just misdirection, but that the misdirection concerns Minchin’s own attitude. Indeed, this is a sophisticated example, with two different suggestions which are confounded: that he’s about to use a certain epithet; and that he’s making a point about the use of this epithet and so setting himself up as something of a do-gooder (a point he still makes, but in a round-about way). Not all of this kind of misdirection involves edgy comedy – consider the introductory words to this song, which perform the same trick:

 

But comedy about taboos and our attitudes towards them is where it flourishes most easily.

A final thought: this kind of comedy seems to rely on irony, so in theory it shouldn’t work if the comedian is sincere in the apparently offensive things they say. But I suspect that once this kind of game has started, it might be possible to play it successfully regardless of one’s own opinions. In which case, a kind of comedy that relies on the audience’s views as to the comedian’s attitude would in effect become independent of that attitude.  Whether this is actually ironic or not, I'll let Alanis Morissette decide.

What is a Joke? Same Joke, Different Day

In a previous article in this occasional series, I asked when a joke is not a joke. A slightly different question is when a joke is the same joke but in different clothing.

Some jokes, which different people arrive at independently, are the same in a very obvious way. For instance, someone I know who dabbles in stand-up and comedy writing (and hopefully won’t take that description as an insult) came up with the following gem:

‘I met a guy who insisted that he was an Eighties pop star. I didn’t believe him, but he was adamant.’

A gem which a couple of years later I discovered a fairly well-known stand-up had also arrived at (he didn’t use it in his set, but each audience member got a sheet with extra jokes he couldn’t fit in, and this was one of them). The wording was different, but only very slightly (there’s only so much leeway this kind of joke allows).

A slightly trickier example: compare Demetri Martin’s joke about toilet graffiti (11.20 here)

 

With Mark Smith’s observation about dates (at 5 minutes):

 

I’m inclined to say that these are the same joke – they have the same premise, are structured the same way, and only the details of each situation differ. On the other hand, it’s possible to judge them as better or worse jokes (I prefer Smith’s), whereas if they really were the same joke, it should only be possible to contrast the delivery of each, or perhaps the phrasing.

In thinking about these examples together, a short answer is that they fall at different points on a sliding scale, from being all but identical to having something more abstract in common. What’s lacking is the kind of structured way of thinking about jokes that is possible with music, where we can compare pieces in terms of melody, harmony, chord progression and so on.

One practical implication of these questions concerns the thorny issue of joke theft. Apart from cases where the wording (or the relevant gestures) is exactly the same,  such cases can only be accounted for by a common idea, or a common idea set up in the same way. [ii] But of course what counts as a common idea or as the same way of establishing it is very much up for debate, as the above examples indicate.

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[i] Full disclosure – this is one of mine. I first told it a few years ago, hence the now misleading age.

[ii] Obviously it requires more than this to show that it’s a case of theft as opposed to comedians independently coming up with the same joke (as was the case in each of the examples above). But without some criterion for the ‘same joke’, the issue of joke theft could not arise at all.

Local Heroes

The internet may or may not have led to the creation of new kinds of humour (depending on how novel you take lolcats to be), but it has certainly allowed existing forms to flourish in new and unexpected ways. An online hit from last year was Sminky Shorts, a series of brief cartoons trading on the basic formula of animals talking like humans:

The Sminky phenomenon raises a couple of interesting issues. One is the degree to which these cartoons work because of their distinctively Corkonian inflections and idioms. Some of them are good sketches in and of themselves

whereas others, such as ‘Crocodiles’ (the first video above) get by almost entirely on charm – although I found this one just as amusing as ‘Tommy’. I’m curious to hear whether readers not fortunate enough to hail from Cork like these films, and if so why.

The other interesting trend Sminky Shorts illustrates is the rise of local humour with global reach. There is an audience on the internet for distinctively regional comedy, either original material (as with Sminky Shorts and a previous Irish hit, the Rubberbandits), or redubbing existing footage, for instance Scooby-Doo with north-eastern accents and copious swearing:

This would have been all but impossible twenty years ago, when local humour tended to be confined to a local audience (for instance on regional radio stations). Humour which reached a national or international audience required a major platform (usually television or cinema), which couldn’t, by and large, risk carrying anything too parochial. Thanks to the internet, people in Colchester, Canberra and Quito have access to cartoons by and about Cork people. And not just people, but agents and production companies as well.

Sminky Shorts has global reach, but can it achieve global popularity? Jason Sullivan has signed to London agency, but it remains to be seen what new markets he can find with them. For all the on-line success, I suspect the cartoons are primarily a hit among Irish people, and more specifically people from Cork. There is no reason in principle why crudely-drawn shorts can’t develop into something with much greater impact, but whether Sminky Shorts can do this while retaining the local flavour which has until now been its selling point is a different question.