A National Joke

Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities

Andy Medhurst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134702558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Comedy is crucial to how the English see themselves. This book considers that proposition through a series of case studies of popular English comedies and comedians in the twentieth century, ranging from the Carry On films to the work of Mike Leigh and contemporary sitcoms such as The Royle Family, and from George Formby to Alan Bennett and Roy 'Chubby' Brown.

Relating comic traditions to questions of class, gender, sexuality and geography, A National Joke looks at how comedy is a cultural thermometer, taking the temperature of its times. It asks why vulgarity has always delighted English audiences, why camp is such a strong thread in English humour, why classinfluences what we laugh at and why comedy has been so neglected in most theoretical writing about cultural identity. Part history and part polemic, it argues that the English urgently need to reflect on who they are, who they have been and who they might become, and insists that comedy offers a particularly illuminating location for undertaking those reflections.

Chapter 1
Introduction

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It is the job of the popular cultural historian to chart a map of pleasure, to discriminate between different types and to show continuities and innovations.

(Harper 1992: 101)

[C]omedy is ideology in motley

(Samuel 1998: 209)

Being English used to be so easy.

(Paxman 1998: ix)

This book is an attempt to negotiate the spaces between and around those three quotations. It aims to draw a map of certain trends and traditions in English popular comedy during the twentieth century, paying as equal attention as is feasible to their pleasures and their politics. The need to draw such a map stems from my conviction that comedy plays an absolutely pivotal role in the construction of cultural identity, and a consequent belief that English comedy widely acclaimed by English audiences contributes significantly to how English culture has imagined its Englishness. Such a statement inevitably raises several fraught and contentious questions, and since they are questions that hover over this book like baleful vultures, it might be as well to air them here and now. Doesn’t analysing comedy destroy its pleasures? Doesn’t most academic writing about comedy occupy a quicksand zone made up of regrettable jargon and solemn pomposity? Can a study of the politics of comedy prevent itself from becoming a humourless harangue? What is at stake in writing about England rather than Britain? How can an account of national identity avoid endorsing nationalistic politics? Don’t accounts of Englishness risk flirting with racism? Haven’t the forces and trajectories of globalisation made the idea of national identity irrelevant? How can anything intelligent or useful be derived from a study of Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown? Feel free, dear reader, to add others to the list.

Answers (including partial, evasive or tendentious ones) to those questions can be found in the chapters that follow. What I want to do in this introduction is to reflect briefly on the book’s sensibility and approach. Three declarations (or warnings) are in order. The first point to stress is that I have not been able, or willing, to stay within the docile parameters of one academic discipline. My arguments draw on a reckless promiscuity of paradigms, poaching shamelessly from cultural studies (itself already a hybrid field), media studies (ditto), film theory, literary criticism, social history, cultural history, sociology, politics, anthropology, art history, cultural geography, theatre studies, linguistics, philosophy, social and even experimental psychology. Not all of those fields are treated respectfully or equitably, and my decision to stir-fry together so many disparately flavoursome ingredients may upset delicate stomachs used to more palatable menus. Needless to say, the rich variety of my ignorances in many of those areas will be all too apparent to specialists in each, but none could be omitted if I had the remotest hope of conveying the complexity of the topic. Secondly, this is not a book that worships at a single, undefiled theoretical altar, it is not in thrall to any one academic or conceptual ‘ism’, for the simple reason that signing up to just one of those clubs seems to me to guarantee a short-sighted tunnel vision. Thirdly, many of the sources I have raided lie outside the parameters of academic writing altogether – journalism, reviews, reportage, autobiographies, memoirs, anecdotes, interviews and other assorted writings that pay no attention to those zealous rubrics of footnoting and citation which we academics are obliged to use to shackle our thoughts. Such texts may be flagrantly unreliable in terms of testable hypotheses or verifiable truth, but they yield wonderful insights in terms of flavour and feel – and if the words ‘flavour’ and ‘feel’ set alarm bells ringing in any readers’ heads, this might be the moment to suggest they put this book back on the shelves and turn instead to something more trustworthy. In short, I have made no special investment in any particular methodology, but then I have often felt that methodology (such a soul-shrivelling word) is the last refuge of the imaginatively challenged. This is a jackdaw book – but fittingly so, I think, because comedy is a jackdaw subject. J.S. Bratton once lamented that the Victorian music hall was a seductive but difficult topic to analyse on account of its ‘kaleidoscopic, self-reflexive, endlessly slippery surfaces’ (1986: xiii), and her words can be extended to refer to the whole comic field. If writing this book has taught me anything, it is the awareness that no single intellectual viewpoint can hope to account for the complexities of comedy, so I have made use of what will seem to some an irresponsibly broad frame of references. Emblematic of this might be the fact that at one time, as I assembled my working bibliography, the serendipities of alphabetisation placed Larry Grayson, once the most (unjustly) disreputable and vilified of English queer comedians, next to Stuart Hall, the individual customarily (and accurately) lauded as the single most influential voice in the development of the field of cultural studies. Sadly, later entries to the bibliography drove Larry and Stuart apart, but in some ways this book remains an attempt to eavesdrop on the conversation they might have had if they had been left side by side.

One reason for reaching, where appropriate, past the parched soil of academic writing to the lusher territories beyond is that the longer I looked at popular comedy, the importance of performance loomed ever larger. Treating a joke or a larger comic exchange purely as a verbal text, which is how the vast majority of academic studies of humour tend to proceed, can only ever tell some of the story. Consider this exchange between Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough, in drag in their Cissie and Ada personas, two Northern housewives whose friendship survives the nuanced class differences between them. They are on holiday in Greece, and the pretentiously pseudo-refined Cissie (Barraclough) is asking the robustly corporeal Ada (Dawson) about her culinary and cultural consumption during the trip:

Cissie: Have you had the shish kebabs?

Ada: Since the moment we arrived.

Cissie: Have you been to the Acropolis?

Ada: I’ve never been off it.

An account of this based purely on its words would undeniably be able to point out the drift of the humour – the linguistic play that relishes turning respectable conversation into mischievous innuendo, the marking out of cultural difference between English and Greek cultures (and between class fractions within Englishness), the carnivalesque cunning that takes an iconic edifice of Western high culture and recasts it as a receptacle for excrement, and so on. Yet to see and hear the sketch rather than just read its dialogue is to uncover so much more, from the governing ridiculousness of the sight of two portly men in chain-store drag, via the outlandish facial contortions and bodily adjustments that accompany every syllable, to the brilliant rapidity of the delivery (there is only a fragment of a second between Cissie’s questions and Ada’s answers). Performative skill can weave spells from even smaller units of ‘text’, mining comic gold from the tiniest of territories, so that an unexceptional single word, or even part of a word, can become a memorable comic moment if the performance is bold, crafty and precise enough. Listen to how the simple syllable ‘Dave’ becomes drenched in daringly sinister comic menace when uttered by the character Papa Lazarou in that most extraordinary of recent English television comedies, The League of Gentlemen, note how Maggie Smith, that peerless comic actress, can detonate comic explosions with nothing more than what one critic astutely called her ‘loaded coloration of vowel sounds’ (Coveney 1992: 159), and remember how, for decades, Frankie Howerd’s whole career rested on the inflections wrung from non-words, half-words, stranded words, noises, interjections and pauses – ‘ooh … ah … no … listen …’.

Clearly, comedy on film, stage, television or radio is never merely a matter of words on a page, a fact which poses huge problems for any attempt (this book included) to pin down comic meaning in a purely written medium. Michael Mulkay’s book On Humour is a fascinating study of certain philosophical aspects of comedy, yet it contains the following words in its chapter on television sitcoms:

I have at my disposal the scripts of the twenty-one episodes of Yes, Minister which have been revised and published in the form of a ‘political diary’… This text is particularly helpful because, in transferring Yes, Minister from the screen to the printed page, the authors have been led to describe explicitly much that was left implicit in the television presentation or that was conveyed indirectly through the mannerisms, phrasing and deportment of the actors

(Mulkay 1988: 187).

What is so notable here is Mulkay’s misplaced faith that after-the-event annotations can account for indispensable elements in the comedic achievement of the series, elements which he dismisses, with a rather touching quaintness, as ‘the television presentation’ or the ‘mannerisms, phrasing and deportment of the actors’. He goes on to produce a plausible and stimulating reading of the text at his disposal, but that text is not Yes, Minister, only a reduced, partial offshoot from it, partial for the simple reason that Yes, Minister, like all performed comedy, is a text where ‘presentation’ and ‘deportment’ are vital threads in the overall web of meanings. Comedy is never only textual – it is performed, enacted, an event, a transaction, lived out in a shared moment by its producers and consumers. J.S. Bratton is once again helpful here, in her account of the comic songs of music hall:

Since humour…is a powerful element in the music-hall style, nothing was fixed or inevitable in any performance or response. Tone, and therefore meaning, would depend not only on the song, the rest of the act, the previous turn and those expected to appear later, but also on the status and customs of the hall, the day of the week, and the mix and mood of each individual audience.

(Bratton 1986: xi–xii)

Little wonder, then, that conventional textual analysis, let alone philosophical musing over the printed word, has a hard time trying to explicate ‘tone, and therefore meaning’ in comic performance (audience response is a further can of even more wriggling worms). Raphael Samuel once noted how reluctant historians were to let go of the familiarity of the written word as a trustworthy source, remaining fearful of taking the risky plunge into analysing images, pictures, the spoken word, symbols of various kinds: ‘Books from an early age are our bosom companions … giving a talismanic importance to manuscripts’ (1994: 269). Yet until we wean ourselves off the comforting bosom of the printed word, the teat of conventional text, we can never hope to make sense of comedy’s multi-faceted operations. Sizeable, and often crucial, amounts of comedic meanings reside in inflection, timing, nuance, gesture, the balance of sound and silence, the unexpected or wilful pronunciation of key words, the raising of eyebrows or the flipping of wrists. Consequently, it is often necessary to turn to first-hand accounts of such performances, to journalistic accounts unencumbered by that academic baggage which manifests itself as the rigmarole of protocol. To read Kenneth Tynan (1990: 12–15) on Sid Field or Michael Billington (1977 passim) on Ken Dodd is to find not just invaluable clues as to how performance skills strengthen comic impact but also flesh-and- blood testaments to the power of comedy which have no parallel in the worthier, more desiccated zones of officially intellectual analysis. Thus I have attempted where appropriate to supply my own detailed accounts of particular performances, since in many of the comedies I am concerned with here, the content and implication of the humour is utterly inseparable from its mode of delivery.

Evocations of performance are also important inasmuch as they allow the pleasure of comedy to retain its rightful centrality. Popular comedy matters as much as it does because it delights as much as it does – if it did not thrill large audiences into grateful devotion its ideological implications would be of little concern to those of us who study popular culture – but that delight can be the first casualty once comedy undergoes analysis. To many people, any critical study of popular texts risks ruining their pleasure, but comedy is seen as both especially undeserving of such treatment and especially unlikely to survive the attack. The analyst of comedy is the definitive killjoy, literally so: the assassin of enjoyment, who takes what was life-affirming and renders it inert, or the slaughterer of laughter, hauling the still-warm body of comedy into the analytical abattoir before felling it with the deadening blows of uber-scrutiny and eviscerating it with the scalpels of hyper-analysis. ‘Humour can be dissected’, wrote E.B. White, ‘as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind’ (quoted in Bergan 1989: 35). While it should be painfully clear by now that I am not the owner of a pure scientific mind (not that any kind of pure mind has much hope of grasping the essential impurity of comedy), White’s barb is one I have tried to keep in my head as a warning. I love comedy too much to want to nullify its joyfulness, but at the same time I am too aware of its cultural power to absolve it from exploratory inspection, so I have tried to use only local anaesthetic on my frogs while subjecting them to some fairly stringent keyhole surgery. Sometimes, however, the frog still fails to recover. This may be a cause not for regret but for celebration. Some jokes and comic scenarios are so freighted with reprehensible attitudes that destroying their efficacy through analysis seems like a mercy killing. To say that, however, is not to claim that comedy analysis is some sort of ideological purifying agent, scouring away dodgy gags in the service of the greater good. Comedy is too devious, too multiple, too wily ever to be susceptible to such a naive approach. Plenty of racist, sexist, homophobic and otherwise despicable jokes are, in formal terms, brilliantly successful. What comedy analysis can expose, however, is the weakness of thin, inadequate, poorly structured comedy. If frogs of that ilk expire on the operating table, it suggests that they were pretty feeble frogs to begin with, however much the laughter of their fans attempts continual resuscitation. I have grown increasingly convinced that knowing how comedy works, understanding its internal conventions, its performative dimensions and its ideological implications, causes no harm to its pleasurability unless the comedy under scrutiny was flawed from the outset. Though I don’t have the space to develop this speculation fully, it seems to me that one key index of the power of any comic text, performance or moment is its ability to withstand analysis and emerge not only still funny, but actually funnier for being better understood. Weak comedy, lazy comedy, over-hyped and merely modish comedy (Absolutely Fabulous, say, or anything involving Steve Coogan or Armando Iannucci) may buckle and crumble under sustained study. Yet if I think of some of the funniest things studied during the process of writing this book – a list which might include the third series of Round the Horne, the first series of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? and the second series of dinnerladies, the way Brenda Blethyn says ‘Mind my kidneys, Mandy’ in Grown-Ups and the soldiers’ dance at the beginning of Demobbed, Maggie Smith’s interweaving of primness and steel in A Private Function and Kathy Burke’s greedy pursuit of ghastliness in Gimme Gimme Gimme, Sid Field’s golfer and photographer sketches and Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough’s Cissie and Ada routines, Ken Dodd’s relentlessness and ‘Chubby’ Brown’s ruthlessness, Frankie Howerd’s emphases and Eric Morecambe’s pauses, Charles Hawtrey’s ‘oh hello’ and Julian Clary’s stickiest moments – then their ability to leave me helpless with laughter has survived unscathed, despite years of fretting over their meanings. If anything, the lustre of great comedy glows even brighter after emerging from a squeezing through the analytical mangle, since a deepened knowledge of how complex comedy truly is can only increase an admiration for those who succeed in making it work so well.

Given what this book is about, the role of popular comedy in the construction of English identities, its potential cast list was gigantic, so some difficult choices needed to be made about who to put in and who to leave out. To begin with, let me sketch what I have included. The three chapters that follow this introduction aim to survey the three broad frameworks within which the more specific analyses take place: firstly the question of how comedy might usefully be thought about as a distinctive cultural mode, secondly the debates over whether national identity remains a viable concept in an increasingly globalised world, and thirdly the complexities of the terms ‘English’ and ‘Englishness’ in the contemporary social and political climate. Chapter 5 considers the meanings and the legacy of the comic sensibilities first forged in the Victorian music hall, sensibilities that might exceedingly crudely be summarised as attempts to find humour in the raw material of English working-class lives, and subsequently carried into later decades by key performers such as George Formby, Frank Randle, Hylda Baker, Les Dawson and Ken Dodd. Chapters 6 and 7 centre on two aspects of the sexual politics of English popular comedy, taking as their respective case studies the history of comic effeminacy and the gendered dynamics of the male double act. Chapter 8 traces the seemingly endless appeal of the Carry On films, while Chapter 9 zooms in on one particularly important television sitcom, The Royle Family. Chapters 10 and 11 return to the focus on pivotal practitioners; firstly by examining how Englishness figures in the comic work of Alan Bennett, Mike Leigh and Victoria Wood, and secondly by focusing on English comedy’s most scandalous success story, Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown.

Some of the absences from the book may seem even stranger than some of the inclusions, but I was keen to avoid two traps. Firstly, I saw no point in retreading well-covered ground – the post-war Ealing comedies, for example, merit attention in any full account of constructions of comedic Englishness, but Charles Barr’s study of them (Barr 1977 and later editions) is so astute and remains so definitive that I could add little to it. My preference here has been to look for some less well travelled roads, some performers, styles and texts that exemplify important trends but have received relatively little academic coverage. Secondly, I spared myself the masochistic chore of grappling with comedy that makes no substantial inroads into my own laughter, which is a rather pretentious way of saying that everything studied closely here is something that still makes me laugh (even after the analytical butchery). Thus you will look in vain for extended considerations of The Goon Show, Monty Python, or the ‘alternative comedy’ of the 1980s. (Although the Pythons’ dead parrot makes a special guest appearance in graphic form on the book’s cover.) All three are hugely important, but all three make me laugh far less than the things this book looks at in detail. More regrettably, considerations of space have also compelled me to leave out some of the funniest comedy I know, so there are no detailed accounts of Al Read, Tony Hancock, the St Trinians films, Spike Milligan’s Q series, Fawlty Towers, Harry Hill, Jo Brand, that mystifyingly maligned sitcom Barbara, Peter Kay, Catherine Tate, The League of Gentlemen, and Little Britain. They will have to wait their turn – and in any case the last four more properly belong in a study of English comedy in the present century, not the previous one. Another difficulty I have encountered stems from the fact that many of the case studies concern performers in mid-career and texts that might not be finished – having completed the chapter on The Royle Family, for example, this apparently deceased text returned in late 2006 for a one-off episode, while the stage and film success of Alan Bennett‘s The History Boys has added yet further depth to his concern with the English question. Such are the perils of analysing contemporary popular culture – any attempts to be definitive can come distressingly unstuck.

A final point about choices, and about personal investment: deciding to focus on examples of English comedy that work for me is one way of ensuring that my own involvements with Englishness don’t escape scrutiny. This is important, because far too much writing about comedy sets itself the stern, intrusive, pseudo-objective task of studying what Other People laugh at and why Other People laugh. This has the damaging consequence of letting the critic’s own sense of humour off the hook, and that lack of self-reflexivity both prevents a full exploration of com...