Hudd and Quantick's new offering on Radio 2 was very good sketch comedy.
Current radio comedy Page 48
Quote: Griff @ January 7 2011, 10:57 AM GMTThis is a big subject that comes up over and over again. Why is modern comedy the preserve of the left - are Jeremy Clarkson, Boris Johnson and Richard Littlejohn really the best the Right can offer? Or is it self-selecting in that any comic with right-wing views would just never ever get any gigs and other comics/writers/producers wouldn't work with them?
There are loads of right wing comics. Bernard Manning would often break off from his material to whip his crowd into a Paki-hating frenzy. But generally they keep their views to themselves. It's about audience. Comedy audiences are generally - generally Aaron, I'm making a sweeping generalisation here - lefty/liberal. People who control the world don't care whether you hate them or not. And the people who are controlled take comfort in humour, or use it as a weapon, for all the good it does.
Even when Labour were in power most of the jokes against them were about Blair being a Tory and the Iraq war. Guardian-bashing occasionally gets a laugh but route one to gagsville on stage usually involves quoting the Mail, Telegraph or Express.
Incidentally Griff, a few years back Fox News asked the same sort of questions as you. They created a right-wing topical show to try and bring some balance to comedy. It tanked. Could have been that the performers and script were rubbish, but more likely the US public were still laughing at George W, they weren't ready to laugh with him.
And, just to bring me back on-topic, most people who work in public services (including the BBC) are lefty/liberals, and do so partly out of a sense of public duty. I promise you, no one works for the BBC to get rich...
I think that's just how it is. I know it's a long time since I trawled up and down the country performing in colleges, but my recollection is that the people who came to gigs were youngish, and trendyish and mostly leftyish. The right wing ones tended to stay in their rooms, work at their exams and end up in charge of the ones who wasted their lives laughing at our polemical anti-Fatcha rants. (This was in the days before everyone sat in their rooms playing video games or answering forum threads on comedy websites.)
Honestly, if a funny right-winger came along now they'd clean up. The Beeb are so anxious not to be seen as lefties that they'd give him or her a prime time slot. I'm working up my right-wing persona as we speak. Victory to the Bankers, my name's Dave Cohen goodnight.
How about this for a catchphrase:
You couldn't make it up!
HE'S ALL YOU'VE GOT
Funny although Waugh was as right wing as they come I don't get that from his novels. (only read four or five so not an expert) I've read quite a lot of Wodehouse but nothing that comes across as pointedly anti-left wing. You could say something like 'The History Man', which is a brilliant pisstake of lefty student campuses, is funny and right-wing, but really it's just anti-authority. There was that short period in the early 70s when authority in universities was left-wing.
So to go back to your original post about this, you're right, it isn't so much left and right, as authority and anti-authority. And authority, most of the time, happens to be right wing.
One area where left wing comedians fail is their moral blindness over Islam. They'll fall over themselves to lambast Catholics and the Pope (quite rightly), yet won't make a peep about Islam or some of it's more questionable aspects, such as it's deplorable treatment of women.
Context. As I said earlier, comedians generally tend to produce what audiences want or understand. There's a lot of lapsed Catholics and people brought up as Christian in comedy (and Jews), and a lot of their anger against religion is personal. I guess you don't go to many comedy gigs (which is where most radio performers start out): much that I applaud your enthusiasm for feminist comedy, I think any comedian who slagged off Islam for being sexist would be mocked heartily by most stand-up audiences.
Quote: Anorak @ January 9 2011, 11:22 PM GMTContext. As I said earlier, comedians generally tend to produce what audiences want or understand. There's a lot of lapsed Catholics and people brought up as Christian in comedy (and Jews), and a lot of their anger against religion is personal. I guess you don't go to many comedy gigs (which is where most radio performers start out): much that I applaud your enthusiasm for feminist comedy, I think any comedian who slagged off Islam for being sexist would be mocked heartily by most stand-up audiences.
I'd happily be mocked by an audience that thinks it's "feminist" to believe a rape victim shouldn't be stoned to death.
Quote: Griff @ January 9 2011, 11:41 PM GMTI'm looking forward to hearing your uplifting routine on the subject. "When Iranians talk about hardcore pornography they mean naked women covered in rubble"
(You edited, but the first was better despite not quite making sense)
There were jokes against the left when we had an old labour government, on prime time TV (Mike Yarwood) but we've not had a left-wing government for over 30 years now. Perhaps there's a link.
Quote: Nogget @ January 10 2011, 7:00 AM GMTThere were jokes against the left when we had an old labour government, on prime time TV (Mike Yarwood) but we've not had a left-wing government for over 30 years now. Perhaps there's a link.
The left-right divide is more than just party political, though.
Quote: Griff @ January 9 2011, 7:57 PM GMTI <3 Ed Reardon.
I'd like, if I may, to interrupt your earnest discussion for a second to express my unfettered joy that Ed Reardon returned yesterday on storming form.
Ah bliss it was on that late morning to be alive ... and screw being young, quite frankly.
And where is my photo, by the way? Were all the 12 year olds you have running your website too busy twitterbooking to put it up - or whatever it is they do these days?
Quote: Griff @ January 9 2011, 11:41 PM GMTI'm looking forward to hearing your uplifting routine on the subject. "When Iranians talk about 'hardcore' pornography they mean naked women covered in rubble"
excelent gag I may be doing some standup can I pinch it?
Quote: Griff @ January 11 2011, 7:23 PM GMTGood news for pessimists, your worldview is confirmed. My Teenage Diary was even worse this week. Meera Syal just did comedy buzzword bingo ("I laughed so much... a little bit of wee came out!!!" - OH FUCK OFF) but the moment my soul died was when, after laboriously battling the subject of "An ice cream van driver, who's also a maths teacher" for two minutes, Rufus Hound abandoned his final vestige of dignity and did the bleeding-obvious joke that had been the unfunny elephant in the room throughout. "And all the answers come to... '99'!!!". At which point the audience whooped like they were being let off the death penalty. Humanity has failed and it is time to replace us.
Gonna be the first Radio4 inspired spree killer?
Beat the customers at Ottakars to death with a cricket bat? Push the cast of the Archers off a roof>
[quote name="Anorak" post="712618" date="January 9 2011, 9:04 PM GMT"They created a right-wing topical show to try and bring some balance to comedy. It tanked. Could have been that the performers and script were rubbish, but more likely the US public were still laughing at George W, they weren't ready to laugh with him.
[/quote]
The half hour news hour.
It was terrible I'll post some clips
It had Anne Coulter as a presenter?
The policy suggestions on last nights Mark Thomas seemed scraped from the bottom of the big barrel of banality. Perhaps it's like Heresy, and all the best subjects were used in early series.
Quote: Griff @ January 11 2011, 7:23 PM GMTGood news for pessimists, your worldview is confirmed. My Teenage Diary was even worse this week. Meera Syal just did comedy buzzword bingo ("I laughed so much... a little bit of wee came out!!!" - OH FUCK OFF) but the moment my soul died was when, after laboriously battling the subject of "An ice cream van driver, who's also a maths teacher" for two minutes, Rufus Hound abandoned his final vestige of dignity and did the bleeding-obvious joke that had been the unfunny elephant in the room throughout. "And all the answers come to... '99'!!!". At which point the audience whooped like they were being let off the death penalty. Humanity has failed and it is time to replace us.
That was possibly the worst half hour of radio ever. But like torture-porn, I couldn't turn it off.