The Tragedy of British Comedy

Britain used to be famous for its sense of humour. When immigrant outsiders came here wanting to become immigrant insiders, one of the first things they learned to do to fit in was to make jokes about everything. Today, by contrast, the first thing an immigrant has to learn to do to fit in – with the ruling class, at least – is to lose their sense of humour.

British comedy is in crisis. Even industry insiders say so. Comedy campaign groups CRAFT (Comedy Representation Art-Form Trust) and LCA (Live Comedy Association) have just written open letters (here and here) to the Government, begging for assistance for comedy clubs, which members say are undergoing financial collapse – particularly due to “heatwaves” which supposedly stop the public from attending them (ironically, they are quite serious in this claim). Writing from one bunch of comedians to another, the campaigners want special Treasury tax breaks for the industry, as well as formal “recognition of comedy as a distinct art form” by Arts Council England – unsubtle code for “give us free money from the taxpayer.”

As regards that final claim, I would have thought the true, most associated word was now “shit”.

For the petitioners, “comedy is everywhere in British culture and nowhere in British policy”. That is precisely how it should be, you Big-State clowns! Such penurious comics should be careful. If comedy does become the business of government, then they may soon find their work being censored on the grounds that certain of their jokes are deemed to be ‘officially unfunny’; which, in practice, would simply be a euphemism for ‘politically incorrect’.

Joke policies

In the very same week these letters were publicised, the UK Green Party did actually launch its own internal in-depth report on what was and was not funny, with party activists receiving training informing them they should maintain detailed records of any jokes fellow members had told to them, “including dates, times [and] locations”, in case anyone later found them to be offensive – particularly if they touched upon sensitive issues like race, religion, sexuality or class. Even if the particular big fat black lesbian affected made a joke about themselves, this was still to be noted down and eliminated, as it nonetheless created “an environment in this space where derogatory jokes are allowed to happen.”

To prevent such jocular genocide occurring again in future, Greens were advised to perform an “audit” of their friendship groups to ensure they were diverse enough so that this simply would not happen: an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman all walk into a pub, and nobody says anything even remotely untoward whatsoever, as diversity is clearly our strength.

For a preview of what a future Green-led Ministry of Laughter might one day look like, we should look towards a current controversy involving the quasi-state-run BBC (Bowdlerising British Comedy), which in September decided to mark 20 years since the first broadcast of award-winning sketch-show That Mitchell and Webb Look – by cutting out several sketches, and deeming the show to be “racist”. The now samizdat sketches involved scenarios like English Civil War re-enactors getting bored and deciding to black up and recreate modern-day conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a brownface Amazonian tribe found secretly living behind flower-pots in a garden centre and a woman wearing a burka being an unsuccessful participant in a TV makeover programme.

Even more primly, the BBC also wiped or butchered entire episodes of popular children’s comedy history series Horrible Histories, as they featured jokes about sensitive topics like slavery – despite the fact they pretty obviously were not of a “Let’s bring it back!”-type perspective, but attempting to satirise the practice’s brutality.

One horrified reaction came from Graham Linehan, the cancelled Anglo-Irish comedy writer who today lives in exile in America, as nobody in the UK industry will now touch his work with a bargepole. Not only does it commit the cardinal post-2010s sin of actually being funny, Linehan’s writing is also deemed to be “transphobic”; Channel 4 refuses to re-show an old episode of his sitcom the IT Crowd, as it features a joke about a cross-dresser (see my review of his 2023 autobiography).

Writing in the Telegraph, Linehan observes that most British comedians who get their back-catalogues politically ruined these days, like Mitchell and Webb, either keep silent and go along with it for an easy life, or else actively denounce themselves in classic Soviet show-trial fashion, so as to keep raking in the cash on the panel-show circuit. Because of this cowardice, he says, “somewhere out there, the next generation of comedy writers and performers, the ones who might have pushed the form further, taken bigger risks, made the joke nobody else would touch, will quietly decide it isn’t worth it, and nobody will have to ban anything ever again.” Sounds a bit like how Islam operates in such matters, too…

Islam is a religion of Cleese

Linehan says his trans-joke episode was banned by Channel 4’s woke “religious police”; at least it wasn’t banned by any actual religious police. Another famously expatriate comedian of yore, John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, was also critical of the BBC’s recent censoring of its past output, calling it “social engineering” in action; in the Life of Brian, he had essentially once made an adult version of Horrible Histories himself. He may not find it so easy to create a Muslim sequel to his classic 1970s satire of Christian history about Muhammad, however – not given the current demographics of Great Britain.

Lately, Cleese has somewhat reinvented himself as an online political commentator, frequently of an anti-Islamic nature.

He has also several times said “London is no longer an English city” and made non-PC jokes like asking Arab TV host Waleed Aly whether his name was “an anagram”. Predictably accused of racism and ‘Islamophobia’, whatever that is, Cleese denied it, saying he is in fact a “culturalist”, not a racist – in that he thinks traditional British culture is innately superior to its traditional Islamic equivalent, with skin colour per se appearing irrelevant to him.

But some people do like marrying children and torturing animals, don’t they? And maybe even sometimes torturing children and marrying animals. Here is a recent Daily Sceptic headline:

Well, there’d be no point in a mosque condoning throwing them off short buildings, would there? That’s the kind of joke John Cleese would make about it, anyhow, and for that Muslims would try to cancel him. Mirthless Muslim street-activists are campaigning – thus far unsuccessfully – to get Cleese’s current UK comedy-speaking tour, John Cleese and the Holy Grail, banned from various of its intended venues, as its content could be regarded as “spreading dangerous misinformation and creating hostility towards Muslims.” (Footage here.) One bearded young gentleman advised that “saying things like Islam is all about killing… isn’t comedy”. Indeed not, it’s just the truth.

Without a single shred of comic irony, the street-enforcers told Cleese his work was just “hate-speech and you’re just a hate-preacher” – unlike Hilarious Abu Hamza. Furthermore, it was explained, in the hands of infidels like Cleese, “free speech has become a convenient shield for anti-Muslim hostility and vilification with no consequences”. I’m pretty sure there have been “consequences” for making jokes about Islam in the past, though, haven’t there? Wasn’t there once some slight kerfuffle involving cartoons over in Denmark or other?

The Scary Whitehouse Experience

Further proving there were absolutely no consequences for ever joking about Islam, apart from sometimes being brutally killed, Roshan Muhammed Saleh, editor of hardline UK Muslim news-site 5Pillars, rather tactlessly typed that “If John Cleese, 86, had died a year ago, he would have been remembered as a national treasure.” What a shame someone didn’t chop John’s head off last year, then, because now, says Saleh, “if he were to die tomorrow” John’s alleged “hate-mongering would form a significant part of his legacy.” And if only the Prophet Muhammad had died a year prior to writing the Koran, he wouldn’t have been remembered as being such an incorrigible hate-monger himself, maybe?

Amusingly deeming Islam to be “a relatively safe target”, Saleh called for Cleese’s “deplatforming”; don’t you need a platform to publicly hang someone upon, though? No, because, the editor assured his readers, Islam was a religion of cheese, and so blessed are its cheesemakers:

There have been suggestions online that 5Pillars’ criticism of Cleese, and my personal criticism of him, somehow amount to a threat, with some even insinuating the possibility of violence. That is complete nonsense. So let me state this unequivocally: we are not threatening John Cleese, nor do we want any physical harm to come to him. But we are advocating peaceful, lawful and democratic opposition to his rhetoric. Cleese speaks, we answer. Cleese campaigns against our religion, we expose what he says. Cleese appears at venues, and we are entitled to contact those venues, complain, protest peacefully and ask them why they are providing him with a platform. That is not intimidation; that is free speech. And free speech works in both directions. John Cleese does not possess some special right to speak without being criticised because he created brilliant comedy 50 years ago [back when he was mocking Christ, not Mo, presumably]. Nor does he have a right to appear in every theatre that will have him.

Yes he does. He literally does have that right, because that is the law of our land, and the law of our land is not yet shariah. If any given theatre “will have him” then Muslims can’t stop him. Unless, of course, they decide to take matters into their own hands and implicitly intimidate the theatres concerned by loudly protesting outside of it in the name of ‘peace’. Saleh continued:

What we are saying is that respectable institutions should decide if sustained anti-Muslim hate-mongering is compatible with their values. That is particularly relevant as Cleese tours cities and towns with significant Muslim communities [i.e., all of them now]. His September tour includes Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Bedford, among other places. Muslims live, work, pay taxes and contribute to the cultural and economic life of those communities. So those venues should ask themselves a simple question: what message are they sending to their Muslim neighbours when they provide a prestigious stage to somebody who routinely portrays their religion as violent, backward and threatening?

White people also “live, work, pay taxes and contribute to the cultural and economic life of those communities” too, and have done for considerably longer than Islam has ever even existed in these islands. Who the hell do you think you are to be able to tell Monty Python fans what they can and can’t watch on-stage now? If you don’t like the sound of his act, stay at home and watch dire, public-subsidised Muslim BBC trash like Muzlamics or Hajj and Seek, or even some old footage of Dave Allen mocking Catholicism on YouTube, perhaps it would be more to your taste? 

There is considerable comic irony in the prospect of the inventor of the Ministry of Silly Walks one day having his output monitored by a putative Islamo-Leftist Ministry of Silly Talks, but Cleese himself may not find it all too funny. 

What he may also find distinctly unamusing is that, if you look at the Live Comedy Association letter begging for ‘free’ taxpayer cash from Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy – the woman with the most mirthful and laughter-loving face on the entire planet – you will find that, alongside comedians, there is also a long list of signatories who are currently MPs in the House of Commons. Amongst these are names like Shockat Adam and Iqbal Mohamed, both on record as desiring the implementation of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’-type neo-blasphemy laws in this country. Neo-blasphemy laws which could, as part of their natural remit, involve the banning of anyone like Cleese making future tasteless jokes about, say, Muhammad being a paedo or a neck-chopper, possibly?

If the letter signatories get their way in both respects, what will stand-ups in the state-subsidised comedy clubs of tomorrow still be free to tell mocking jokes about? Only evil, far-Right white racists and Islamophobes like John Cleese, I suppose. Either that, or bland, PC non-gags, like those of Bernard Righton. Writing this article, as an experiment I asked Google’s woke onboard AI to tell me a “Muslim walks into a bar joke”. This is, genuinely, what the apparently Green Party-neutered bot came up with: 

Admittedly, this did make me laugh, but not, perhaps, in the precise way intended. I strongly suspect that thoroughly humourless trends like the above are the true reason Britain’s comedy clubs are now closing down, not “heatwaves”, as industry letter-writers delusionally complain. 

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.