Dissecting the Fringe: Edinburgh Diary

Tuesday 11^th

Matilda Wnek & Rosa Robson, the duo who make up Beard, describe The Grin of Love, as mixing ‘sketch, clown, theatre and nightmare’. For some of us, the term ‘clown’ will always have nightmarish connotations, but Beard carefully disarm any such link. Their pocket description is in fact as accurate and succinct as one could hope for. Not hoping to match it for brevity, I can nevertheless fill in some of the details.

The Grin of Love is one sense an abstract work. Instead of sketches with discernible plots or scenarios, Wnek and Robson present a series of set-pieces, most of which bear a delightfully tangential relation with reality. But in another sense their work is rooted in the concrete. Rather than beginning with characters or situations, each set-piece is anchored in a particular prop or props (e.g., a glass of wine, a veil and some disturbing make-up, an orange and a banana) deployed in a particular way (to indicate, respectively, a bored person of substantial means, a twisted gentleman’s club, and the miracle of reproduction). Some of the props look ridiculous and are played for laughs, but more often they are entry points to an otherwise hermetic world, and vehicles for the performers to playfully explore their own presence on stage.

Almost every sketch features audience interaction, but in keeping with a recent trend (for instance, Ben Target) it is neither threatening nor humiliating. The first audience member brought up on stage is asked to participate in a weird rite where the humour lies in the strangeness of what happens rather than what is happening to the victim. Later on, the entire audience is invited to wear blindfolds, to throw beans through two hula-hoops in answer to survey questions, and to collaborate in the supposed magic powers of each performer.

This way of approaching sketch comedy is the polar opposite of such troupes as The Pin or Minor Delays, who use few if any props and tend to provide variations on a more orthodox characters-in-a-recognisable-situation formula. But for sheer inventiveness and the detail with which they have worked out their ideas, Beard are a match for any of these groups. The Grin of Love may look ramshackle and deliberately odd, but it shows all the signs of having been thought through in some detail.  

Dissecting the Fringe: Edinburgh Diary

Monday 10^th 

The one-person character-and/or-sketch show is a formidably versatile vehicle, as demonstrated by Douglas Walker’s Möglich and Daniel Nils Roberts’ Asp.

Walker’s is the more theatrically accomplished of the two. His improv background shows in the precise characterisations and range of accents, accompanied by a relatively sophisticated lighting design. Between the sketches the stage is strongly back-lit, with Walker telling short jokes in almost total darkness; the same effect is also employed very effectively in one of the sketches where a journalist recounts his ordeal at the hands of kidnappers.

The most effective sketches – an intrusive psychiatrist, a lollipop man facing a crisis of confidence, and an elaborate set-up for a wonderfully contrived pun – come at the end of the show, following some less interesting ideas in the first half-hour. Each of these sketches is quite involved and demands a certain commitment on the part of the audience – for instance, the journalist sketch has no jokes for well over a minute – and perhaps Walker was reluctant to risk these too early. As a result, Möglich has a rather lop-sided feel of a very accomplished performer and writer who is perhaps a little tentative in how he approaches a fifty-minute show.

Asp has a less ambitious range of characters, and overall feels more like a work in progress. Roberts relies heavily on powerpoint slides, which can be inventive but sometimes feel like a crutch for characters who have not been developed in enough detail. A sketch character need not have a fully worked out backstory, but – to take one example - the UNICEF representative is so ill-informed about his job and the organisation he works for that the sketch feels somewhat pointless. Even the more successful sketches, such as the bellicose army cook, work because of individual jokes rather than a carefully-developed character or plot. Where Asp shows the most promise is in left-field touches such as the recurring theme of things seen or described from a bear’s point of view – not all of these work, but the Shakespearean reference he contrives is a delight, showing how effective his more lo-fi approach can be.

Dissecting the Fringe: Edinburgh Diary

Sunday 9^th

Since at least Monty Python, a criterion on which sketch shows have been assessed has been their formal inventiveness. Four years ago The Pin, a freshly-minted ex-Footlights troupe, offered a baroque twist on what was once a formal novelty, the idea of developing an overall narrative through a series of sketches. In their case, the sketches not only formed a narrative, but were presented in reverse order in such a way as to reveal how each situation was set up by previous events.  It was undeniably clever, but it wasn’t clear if the chronological trickery added much by way of humour.

This year’s model, Ten Seconds with the Pin, marries formal invention with a running theme of explaining the mechanics of sketch comedy to the audience, and crucially, both elements have been precision-tooled for comic effect. For the sheer number of ingenious premises and formal ideas this show, and in particular the first half, is as good as anything I have seen. To convey this properly one would need to outline the mechanics of several of the sketches. One example will have to suffice: the three versions of a sketch featuring a character called Jason recounting how his date has gone. The sketch calls nominally for three parts, two of which the duo (Ben Ashenden and Alex Owen) play in turn in each version; each time they elicit new humour from the variation, and the humour is on each occasion of a different kind (from revealing that one of the characters is superfluous to the scene, to showing what Jason’s friend is really like). Metacomedy plus new ways of presenting sketches plus laughter generated by each of these: this sketch, and much else here besides, is a model of what cerebral and self-reflective comedy should be like.

Having raised the bar so high, it’s understandable that The Pin don’t always meet their own standards. The finale felt a little like their 2012 show: a clever twist on an existing idea (in this case, sketch shows featuring spoof ‘cast and crew commentaries’, a la DVDs) but one which generates admiration rather than mirth. In not delivering on its premise, this sketch throws into sharp relief how impressively Ashenden and Owen have succeeded, for the most part, in extracting the maximum reward from thinking hard about their chosen form. 

The Philosophy of Humour: A Debate

Despite the fact that I’m interested enough in humour to write the occasional blog post about it, and that my day job is teaching/doing philosophy, I’ve always been rather suspicious of the philosophical study of humour. Philosophers can and do discuss humour, but I suspect it’s always going to be of rather limited interest as a philosophical topic.

Teaching at Leeds alongside Dr. Nick Jones, whose staff profile lists among his research interests The Philosophy of Humour, provided the opportunity to explore these issues in the context of a relaxed debate for the Leeds University Philosophical Society. The contributions from both Nick and myself can be found here, in separate files.[i]

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[i] Nick’s talk contains numerous references to Great Dead Philosophers and their weird and occasionally wonderful thoughts on humour and laughter. Readers interested in chasing some of these references up could do worse than have a look through this.

The Menace of Comedy

Watching Force Majeure, I was strongly put in mind of a term which to my knowledge has hardly ever been applied to recent work: the comedy of menace. If this term is heard nowadays, it is usually in relation to theatrical writing in a specific context (Britain in the late 1950s) and in particular to the early work of Harold Pinter.[i] But it strikes me as a precise characterisation of what Ruben Öustlund is up to in his film.

The comedy of menace is perhaps easier to recognise than to define. Francesca Coppa notes that menace “depends on ignorance; the terror of it stems from the vagueness of the threat. We do not know what is happening or why, and the lack of information leads us to fear the worst”. In contrast, black comedy “treats serious themes comedically, without the respect they deserve; it says too much, it says what should not be said”.[ii] That is, it makes it too clear what is really going on.

To this point, I would add that a sense of menace requires not just that characters be under threat, but that the audience empathises with them enough to feel a kind of vulnerability themselves. The effect is very different to seeing a comedy where you know something bad is going to happen to one of the characters, but you feel no empathy with them:

Tomas and Ebba (Johannes Kuhnke & Lisa Loven Kongsli) are taking a holiday with their children in a ski resort. In the face of an unexpectedly violent avalanche, Tomas abandons his wife and children to their fate. The avalanche turns out to be harmless, but Ebba cannot get over this betrayal. The incident and the themes it raises are discussed in three scenes – a dinner with a couple they met at the resort, a dinner with their old friends Fanni and Mats, and a scene between Mats and Fanni – which are masterpieces of tension and awkward comedy.

Awkward or cringe comedy, where the humour is rooted in the social embarrassment felt by the characters, has been a staple of television in particular for years. Where Force Majeure develops the form is in the length of these three scenes, and the naturalistic presentation of the characters before and during them. Larry David and David Brent are well-rounded characters, but we are never in doubt that they are comically deluded about themselves. Neither Tomas nor Ebba are presented as comic prior to the incident with the avalanche – indeed, the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the film could easily pass as a finely-observed drama of bourgeois life. The comedy is introduced slowly and inexorably, with far less plot machinery and a much more drawn-out (in a good way) pay-off than is typical of sitcoms specialising in cringe comedy.

One difference between the comedy of early Pinter and that found in Force Majeure is that the menace in the latter is not that vague. We have a pretty good idea of what’s happening and what will happen, in outline at least – indeed, it is so excruciating precisely because of this. That said, there is still menace afoot, in that we certainly fear the worst, even as it is unfolding before our eyes. This is perhaps the novel element which cringe comedy introduces to the comedy of menace: the sense of vulnerability we feel is heightened not the by the vagueness of the threat, but by its gruesome familiarity.

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[i] The Wikipedia entry on ‘Comedy of Menace’ focuses almost entirely on Pinter’s work, with a brief discussion of the article in Encore by Irving Wardle which popularised the term.

[ii] ‘The Sacred Joke: Comedy and Politics in Pinter’s Early Plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter.

Contextual Analysis

While Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed discusses the role played by shame and shaming across contemporary society generally, it is in large part focused on internet firestorms where thousands or hundreds of thousands of strangers anonymously ridicule and abuse supposed miscreants. In some cases, the victims are famous people who have committed some sort of transgression – for instance, the author Jonah Lehrer, who was disgraced after it was revealed that he had made up quotations from Bob Dylan. But non-celebrities can also be swept up in the whirlwind. The examples Ronson discusses by and large centre on jokes which were either misunderstood or interpreted in the most damning way possible. Ronson’s key example is Justine Sacco, who was cyber-lynched for the following tweet in December 2013: 

In each of the firestorms Ronson describes, the joke which sparked the rumpus was taken out of context.[i] This is an obvious diagnosis of why people became so furiously indignant at Sacco’s tweet, and exulted in her demise. But it also suggests certain features about context, and how the internet changes in the context in which humour is produced and, more importantly, received.

Perhaps the most obvious aspect of context is the audience’s personal knowledge of the person telling the joke. If we are acquainted with them, or are with them when they crack wise, we know that they are joking and we will usually have a pretty good idea of the spirit in which their remark is intended. One of the frequently-remarked aspects of internet communication is the degree to which subtleties of tone are lost, so what is intended as ironic (Sacco’s tweet) comes across (to her persecutors) as gleefully mocking those less fortunate than her. This isn’t primarily a matter of anonymity (although this is certainly relevant, particularly when considering the often-hateful nature of much of what passes for internet commentary) – it is primarily a matter of not personally knowing the person telling the joke, rather than not knowing who they are. People who knew Sacco would presumably have known she was joking, even if they might have disapproved. They wouldn’t have taken her to be expressing a racist view, just trying to make a shocking joke.

A second aspect of context is a shared experience or common background knowledge. A huge number of jokes, from cliches about airplane food to political satire, depend on the joke teller and their audience having enough in common to be able to pick up on certain cues and make certain judgements without having to think too hard. This is one of the reasons why so much comedy is relatively parochial – it relies on quite specific references and assumptions, and transplanted to another culture or society, it ceases to function as comedy. Of course, the internet is particularly well suited to bring about such cultural transplantation. But I don’t think this is what happened in the case of Sacco, or the other cases Ronson mentions – or at any rate, what happened is not as simple as a piece of parochial comedy failing to travel well abroad.

What happened here concerned background knowledge of a quite specific kind: it included the understanding that conventions for joking exist, and that people who are making jokes should not be held to other standards (similarly, understanding what people say often requires knowing that they have said something metaphorical, and that what they have said should not – indeed, must not – be understood literally). At least some of the responses to Sacco’s tweet which Ronson quotes (e.g., ‘Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!’) seem to have overlooked or deliberately ignored the fact that she was making a joke.[ii] A related convention is that certain people, in certain circumstances, are licenced to say things which would otherwise offend. Sacco acknowledged that part of the problem was that she was not perceived as benefiting from this convention: “Unfortunately, I am not a character on South Park, or a comedian, so I had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on a public platform”.

The conventions governing when someone is joking, and when it is appropriate to joke, have not disappeared with the coming of the internet – arguably, they have not changed at all. What has changed is the degree of complicity or shared knowledge between a person tweeting a joke and the potential audience of strangers, who may neither share this knowledge nor be terribly interested in its relevance. Not only do people online not know you – worse still, they might not even know whether or not you are joking.

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[i] As Ronson put it concerning another case, a photo taken by a woman as part of a running joke of pictures disobeying signs, “shorn of this context, her picture appeared to be a joke not about a sign but about the war dead”.

[ii] Without knowing more about the respondents in question, it’s impossible to be sure. But the response quoted in the main text certainly seems to be accusing her, not of making a tasteless joke, but of making a non-jocular statement predicated on a factual inaccuracy. Put another way: if one felt that Sacco was making a tasteless joke, it would seem peculiar to respond by pointing out that white people can also be victims of AIDS.

Offensive Charm

(Note: this post contains a couple of jokes which are offensive (and one which might be construed as such – see below for further details). Obviously I don’t endorse the thinking behind said jokes.)

Rape jokes – I know, they’re so 2012 – are back in the news after Ray Badran’s unpleasant encounter with a protester at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Apart from its specific details, this incident raises some general questions: when are jokes offensive? Can offensive jokes be funny? Is it ever legitimate to laugh at such a joke?

The category of ‘offensive jokes’ isn’t a particularly clear-cut one. Here is Badran’s, as quoted verbatim by ABC:

If you've been to a comedy night before then you might know that there's a bit of an unspoken rule in comedy right... gay people can tell jokes about being gay... black people can tell jokes about being black... so I don't know if you can tell, just from looking at me, but I... can... tell rape jokes.[i]

This is our old friend, metacomedy: this isn’t so much a joke about rape (although the punchline is meant to imply that Badran is himself a rapist) but about rape jokes, and more generally about the comic convention that members of a minority group can tell jokes about that group which would otherwise be unacceptable. That said, Badran has chosen to use the r-word, presumably deliberately. This might be a piece of metacomedy, but its intended effect is one of shock.

This joke is edgy, and it might reasonably be said that a comedian who uses edgy material can hardly complain if some audience members find it a little too close to the bone. But not all comedy which might be classed as edgy is offensive, at least not beyond the fairly trivial sense that some people might be inclined to take offense at it. Badran’s joke doesn’t work on the assumption that rape is ever ok, or that rape isn’t something we should be concerned about. A joke which carried such a message would be offensive, in the sense that it would be predicated on repugnant values. Someone may object that Badran’s joke makes light of the real trauma suffered by victims of rape, and that this is what makes it offensive. But there is an important difference, in my opinion, between a joke about rape or one which refers to that topic without minimising the seriousness of the crime, and one which does.[ii]

It doesn’t follow from this that Badran’s joke is not objectionable. It might be better if comedians were not so quick to reach for rape gags to make all matter of points. On the other hand, jokes with shock value are an important weapon in the arsenal of comedians (quite why is itself an interesting question – but it seems to be a fact that people, or enough of them at any rate, appreciate jokes intended to shock them). There is no straightforward answer to this question, because there is no straightforward way of deciding when a point is best made in a shocking fashion, or when a comedian is reaching for shock in lieu of inspiration.

If Badran’s joke is not offensive, that leaves another question: can a joke predicated on distasteful assumptions about people ever be enjoyable, even if one does not share the assumptions? Here is an example from an unlikely source, President Sebastian Pinera of Chile, who was quoted as telling guests at a conference the following:

Do you know what the difference between a politician and a lady is? When a politician says ‘Yes’, he means ‘maybe’, when he says ‘maybe’ he means ‘No’, and if he says ‘No’, he’s not a politician. When a lady says ‘No’ she means ‘maybe’, when she says ‘maybe’ she means ‘Yes’, and if she says ‘Yes’, she’s not a lady.

There’s no doubt that this is a sexist joke: it is predicated on tiresome stereotypes of female behaviour and (worse than that) an extremely worrying view of female consent (you’ll notice there is no way for the ‘lady’ to say ‘No’ and to mean it). But I would suggest that it is a joke which can be enjoyed even by those who do not share these views. For one thing, it is genuinely well constructed without being horribly contrived; for another, it is a joke which very obviously is comparing stereotypes, and so can work as a comment on them rather than just endorsing them. To enjoy this joke, you must be familiar with the stereotypes and accept them for the sake of the joke (a sort of jocular suspension of disbelief), but the very archness of the comparison allows you to step back from them as soon as the joke is finished.

Post scriptum: the best piece on l'affaire Badran (apart from the above, of course), is by Greg Larsen, who runs the night where the whole debacle took place.

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[i] The joke was reported in a shorter version in other outlets: “So you know how gay people can make jokes about being gay, and black people can make jokes about being black, well I can make jokes about rape.”

[ii] For examples of rape jokes which are, to my mind, genuinely offensive (and fully intended as such), click here. To take one example from there, ‘9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape’ only works as a joke on the jocular assumption that the enjoyment of the rapists is to be treated as in some way on a level with the suffering of the victim. In saying this, I am not overlooking the fact that this is a joke, and that the person telling it will not (or at least need not) accept that assumption. But that assumption is still required for the joke to work.