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.
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