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.

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[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.

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.

Random Rules (It’s Kevin, BBC 2)

That The Actor Kevin Eldon has landed his own series is worthy of celebration. His face, a precision-tooled comic device, perennially disappointed but never quite despairing, has provided beautifully judged support in two decade’s worth of television comedy, from Big Train

to Nighty Night

and seemingly all points inbetween.

It’s Kevin, though, can’t be all about this wonderful physiognomy. Indeed, it doesn’t seem to be about anything at all, except the pursuit of the random. In some quarters, it has been hailed as part of a welcome return of silliness and 'out there' comedy to the television schedules. While the first episode is recognisably silly, I'd query any suggestion that it is 'out there' in the sense of being challenging or unconventional. True, it doesn't have many sketches with immediately recognisable plots, but random for random's sake is itself a well-established and (dare I say) rather stale convention.  

Obviously, sketches don't need to make sense, and a sketch show doesn’t need to have a central theme or a unifying structure, but there is a danger in pulling too hard in the opposite direction which It’s Kevin unwittingly illustrates. It feels like it’s trying too hard, cramming in non sequiturs, sketches whose only attempt at humour is an unexpected juxtaposition, and what appear to be references for their own sake (e.g., the Monty Python-esque talking cardboard cut-out of the Duchess of Cornwall). Worse, a number of these elements, such as the vox pops, feel overcooked. In A Bit of Fry & Laurie, these were funny because of the lack of context and juxtaposition, rather than because of anything hilarious the talking heads came up with. Here they include a surreal bit about slicing a seal in two to make the perfect sandwich, which is not only trying too hard but perhaps missing the point of this format.

However, the thing about randomness is that sometimes it works, and when it does it is all the more compelling for being inexplicable; witness Hitler speaking in the voice of George Martin:

 

There is little point in analysing this sketch, beyond noting the slyly subversive juxtaposition of Beatles Anthology-style documentary with every History Channel programme ever made about the Third Reich (that is, every History Channel programme ever made). It simply works; the seal-slicing vox pop doesn’t. But this does prompt the thought that random humour, because if its very starkness, its either-it-works-or-it-doesn’t quality, requires its creators to simply throw lots of ideas at each other and hope that some stick together. And this means that to unearth the comic diamonds of sheer randomness, it is all but inevitable that you'll have to first dig through layers of sedimented wackiness.

This, for all I know, is precisely Eldon's plan. I'm still not convinced; I prefer him in shows with a clearer sense of drama or atmosphere in which his peculiar downbeat energy can work. But it seems that, given the choice, he would rather tit about. And after twenty years of supporting roles, it's hard to blame him for indulging himself.

Making it Explicit

A bit of delayed New Year’s cleaning-up, this: a post I began before Christmas, prompting by seeing Sightseers. The most interesting feature of a worth-catching-though-not-mind-blowing film was the violence, or to be more precise the ways violence was used. A great deal of time is spent building tension as what Tina and Chris are what they will do, interspersed with a few brief but surprisingly graphic depictions of murderous carnage and its aftermath.

I understand that these shots are important to the aesthetic of the film, both as nods to British horror and slasher films, and as providing Tina and Chris with an unpleasant verisimilitude. But, for what it’s worth, they jarred a little with me. In fact, I felt that they worked against the building of tension which preceded them in each case – it might have been better to hold back more, to string us out a little longer by implying rather than showing what happened. They felt a little cheap – which is not to say they cheapened the film as a whole.[i]

All of which poses a perhaps unanswerable question – would Sightseers work without these shots? Unanswerable in that any answer will amount to a subjective judgement and indeed an expression of personal taste regarding the need for violence in a film partly about grisly killings. A slightly more interesting question is whether it would work as a (very black) comedy without explicit violence. I’m inclined to think it would. The explicit bits aren’t funny in themselves,[ii] and I don’t think they were needed to bring out the humour. What’s needed is the contrast between the mundane nature of Tina and Chris’s travels and their wilfully excessive responses to the irritations they encounter en route; and this contrast doesn’t require that we actually see what happens.

A possible if slightly random comparison might be with Lena Dunham’s Girls, celebrated for its gritty realism and audacity, a large part of which involves some non-Beautiful People[iii] having non-stylised sex. This might indicate something about my attitude towards sex and violence respectively, but I think these scenes matter more to the success of the show and to its humour. For a start, they tend to be funny in themselves.[iv] They’re also a good way of getting straight to the key themes of intimacy and gender identity.

Furthermore – though this is more speculative on my part – it might just be that relatively explicit sex has a different effect to violence, particularly when it’s presented in the fairly naturalistic manner of Girls. After all, many of us have had naturalistic sex with non-Beautiful People, whereas very few of us have seen a murder take place, let alone carried one out. In the context of a bittersweet contemporary comedy, the sex still has the power to shock, but it doesn’t feel as though it’s there for that purpose. Rather, it gives Girls a feeling of emotional honesty we can relate to, and without which the show would lose much of its charm. Sightseers is honest in its own way about the frustrations of everyday life, but the violence which results jars any fellow-feeling we might have for Tina and Chris.

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[i] This isn’t true of all cinematic violence. Sometimes the film requires graphic and even disturbing images (see A Prophet, Hidden, and what seems like half the cinematic output of Korea). None of these, it should be noted, are celebrated as works of comic genius.

[ii] With the exception of the episode involving knitting needles, about which I can say no more.

[iii] Which is not to say that any of the people involved are ugly. This is television, after all.

[iv] A better example is the scene discussed in the opening paragraphs of Elaine Blair’s thoughtful essay on the series.

Attack of the Memecats

Una Mullally’s brief summary of internet humour in one of the many, many round-up-of-the-year articles published last month (a filler of round-ups? A google? An impending Christmas party?) caught my eye. It’s little more than a throwaway comment, but the following in particular got me thinking:

The humour around such ventures is hit and miss, but there’s a jaded predictability to the insistence of laughing at and then spreading increasingly tired gags. Putting the “ah here, leave it out” Dublin holler over footage of an aircraft flying into the Twin Towers just isn’t funny. Neither is a guy looking into the camera on The Late Late Show. Or the laziness of Lolcat text over endless photographs of strange celebrity expressions.

Some gif-based Tumblrs – the scrapbook for a generation – actually yielded some laughs, in particular Dublin Gays and Hungover Owls. But there’s still the nagging sense that trawling through photographs of people who look like things is a colossal waste of time.[i]

I think this is mostly right: there is something about internet humour which tends to make it increasingly jaded and lazy. My best guess is that this is a combination of two broad but plausible generalisations. Humour made for the internet tends to have little depth or nuance. It must work almost instantly, getting a response in the second or two that we typically give to a gif or photo, or the thirty seconds that we might spend on a YouTube clip. That’s why so much of it relies on celebrities or riffs on other well-known clips or tropes such as Lolcat text. The pool from which successful memes are fished is very broad (broader than any previous source of comedy) but very shallow.

Second, successful ideas are reproduced. This isn’t new: everyone has had the experience of hearing the same joke from different people, and usually they won’t have independently come up with the same idea. The internet amplifies this effect, by increasing the number of people who see something amusing and wish to pass it on, and the numbers of individuals who want a slice of the comedy pie and have enough spare time and technical know-how to get involved.  

Something similar has happened in music: the number of people putting out recordings to a (potentially) mass audience is now far greater than ever before, and it’s difficult to see it decreasing in the near future. The means of production and distribution are no longer the exclusive property of a handful of large corporations. But in music, this increases the pressure to stand out by being different (principally by mixing together as many genres and textures as possible). In comedy, the most striking effect seems to be endless variations on existing themes. Ideas tend to get worn out by constant repetition; gems are buried in the landslide of cheap imitations.

That said, I wonder if Mullally’s criticism is a little too sweeping. After all, jokes (particularly short, memorable ones) have been repeated and generated spin-offs for a long time now, without well-established formats (‘What’s the difference between…?’ / ‘How many such-and-suches does it take…?’) becoming obsolete. The fact that there are a lot of bad memes circulating doesn’t make the pictures-of-people-who-look-like-things format, for example, a waste of time in and of itself. It does make the case for greater quality-control, but on the internet it was ever thus.

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[i] A number of these examples are specifically Irish, but as far as I can see they’re pretty representative of the world-wide web.