Ghostwriters
Stewart Lee,
well known for his musings on the authorship of jokes, has
returned to the topic, criticising prominent stand-ups for using jokewriters
without making it clear or acknowledging the hired help (from 23.50 here):
His talk, which is well worth a look, only touches very briefly on this topic. But it was
these brief comments that, predictably enough, generated the usual Stewart
Lee-sized media furore.
There are a
couple of separate issues which we can distinguish here. One is the treatment
of the writers. To use someone else’s ideas and not acknowledge them, even if
you have paid for the privilege, does seem shoddy practice. The more idealistic
among us might question the propriety of using someone else’s ideas in this
way, even if credit has been given. People who make a living writing jokes
might reply that they can rarely afford this level of idealism.
Another
issue is whether comics, especially when doing stand-up or television panel
shows, should be bringing in this kind of help at all. I’m inclined to say that
they shouldn’t, or at least that it should be the exception. Stand-up audiences
go to a show with the reasonable expectation that the jokes coming from the
stand-up’s mouth originated in the recesses of his or her brain. It is true, as
Lee acknowledges, that this was not always the case; this expectation has only
become prevalent in recent decades. Nonetheless, that change has occurred, to
the point where a comedian who performs other people’s material should have
some excuse for doing so (it’s a tribute, or they are re-interpreting it, etc –
i.e., they are engaging creatively with the writer or the work, rather than
just using it willy-nilly).
Of course,
that this expectation exists does not mean that it should. Bruce Dessau
suggests that Lee is drawing on the distinction between comedy as art
and comedy as entertainment, “the difference between Samuel Beckett and Andrew
Lloyd Webber”. I don’t think this is quite right. What Lee is pointing to, it
seems to me, is the role of authenticity (which need have little to do with any
artistic purpose). In the alternative comedy world in which Lee’s comic
sensibility was formed, the stand-up would perform their own material, written
in their own voice, drawing on their own experiences to express their own
worldview (see Lee’s description of Lenny Bruce at 10.30 in the video above).[i]
The comedian is the sole creator, more or less, of what the audience get.
There’s a
lot to be said for this as an ideal for stand-up (other forms of comedy, such
as sketches, are more complicated, but then again they are more obviously
collaborative enterprises to start with). However, it’s worth pointing out that
authenticity is a slippery notion. While popular music has placed a premium on
singers and musicians performing their own material since at least Bob Dylan,
there is also a long tradition of re-interpreting and re-inventing other
people’s music. Sometimes this is a matter of simply performing a piece from
one genre in a different one
but often the
performer’s own individual style comes through
In that
case, the line between authentic and inauthentic becomes blurred – or better,
the idea of authenticity becomes harder to apply.
This isn’t
directly applicable to the issue of comedians using writers to contribute
individual jokes– for one thing it is much harder to say where the contribution
of the writer ends and that of the performer begins, unless you know which
jokes have been written by whom. But it would be possible, in theory, for a
comedian to perform a whole set written by someone else (another idea that Lee
has floated, in a slightly different context). In that case, the writer and the
performer would be (more or less) equal creators of the show, and to think of
it as an expression of the experiences of one or the other might well be a
non-starter.
[i] It
is true that comedians on panel shows don’t try to do this, but for the most
part they are on the panel shows because they have done exactly this on the
live circuit.
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