Tragedy plus time?
A number
of perennial talking points were raised by the announcement that Channel 4 have
commissioned a script for a sitcom set in Ireland during the Great Famine. Hugh Travers, the writer, explained his thinking:
They say ‘comedy equals tragedy plus time’.[i] […] I
don’t want to do anything that denies the suffering that people went through,
but Ireland has always been good at black humour. We’re kind of thinking of it
as Shameless in famine
Ireland.
The
announcement has already generated a good deal of predictable (sought-after?)
blowback, and some predictable defences. Channel 4 tells us that “It’s not unusual for sitcoms to exist against backdrops
that are full of adversity and hardship”, which seems a rather harsh as a
description of its commissioning department. Rory Fenton suggests that
people calling for the show to not be produced “have failed to see the
difference between comedy about the Famine and a comedy set during the Famine”,
going on to note that
The
slaughter of the First World War wasn’t funny and yet Black Adder Goes Forth, set in the trenches, was. The Holocaust
couldn’t be further from humour and yet Life
is Beautiful, set in a concentration camp, was very funny.
I have no
desire to see an official list of topics which are or are not suitable for
comedy, or for any other dramatic or literary depiction; nor would I wish to
see C4 prevented by law from going ahead with this programme if they see fit.
But there are reasons to wonder if this project is appropriate, or whether it
has been properly thought through.
First,
there is Travers’ pocket description: ‘Shameless
in famine Ireland’. Granted, this may well have been a throwaway remark rather
than a summary of his pitch to C4, but it’s a pretty worrying comment to
include in an interview. It’s hardly stretching things too far to suggest that
much of the humour in Shameless comes
from a family whose members are presented as feckless and irresponsible, though
often sympathetic and even lovable. For all that can be said about the
structural and cultural causes of long-term unemployment and the serious
problems faced by people in that situation in modern-day Britain, their
predicament pales in comparison to people dying in their thousands for lack of
food. The premise of Shameless is
that no matter how hard things get or how badly the people behave, the safety
net of social welfare is always there. In Ireland in the 1840s, this was
emphatically not the case.
Second, to
return to Fenton’s distinction between a comedy about the Famine and a comedy
set during the Famine, it is worth asking why a sitcom should be set during
that period, unless the situation itself can be mined for humour? In order to
deliver on its audience’s expectations, and in order for the decision to make
creative sense, the script will have to address the reality of what happened,
even if in a light-hearted way. What’s required is something much more like Blackadder Goes Forth than Dad’s Army, a sitcom set during a terrible
war but which scarcely addresses it.[ii]
Finally,
there is the choice of genre. The famine is, in principle, perfect material for
black comedy – indeed, one of the earliest and greatest examples of that genre,
Swift’s Modest Proposal,
concerns similar conditions of dire poverty in Ireland. More recently, Alan
Partridge famously gave his considered opinion on the matter: "at the end of the day, you will pay the price if you're a fussy eater".
However, Swift
and Steve Coogan were driving very different comic vehicles to that which C4
are considering. Swift’s is a short and pungent essay – any longer and it would
be in danger of becoming fascinated by its morbid subject-matter and descending
into horror-show tourism. Coogan gave Partridge a few lines about the famine in
a longer episode, lines which, in the context, clearly reveal him to be the
butt of the joke. This kind of distance won’t be available for a sitcom set during
the famine; nor will it enjoy Swift’s brevity.
A good
rule of thumb for black comedy is that less is more. The butt of the joke is
usually something pretty simple (the pig-headedness of military leaders during
WWI, or the stupidity and ignorance of a certain kind of Englishman when it
comes to the sometimes complicated history of Empire). To keep going after
the point has been made risks losing the humour and (even more importantly) changing
the tone, from the casual understatement which is the genre’s hallmark to
something shrill or blankly nihilistic. It may be that Travers can pull off the
delicate balancing act his project requires, but it will take some doing. It
might have been better for him never to have mounted the tightrope.
[ii] Which is not to
say that Dad’s Army is not about WWII, just that it considers that war not as a
colossal waste of life but as Britain’s Finest Hour; and because the war was
widely remembered along those lines, there was no expectation that it would
address any of its more grim aspects.
