Some panel shows put comedians alongside journalists and past or present MPs, and allowed them to directly air their political opinions in an unprecedented way, even if not all proved willing to make their allegiances as clear as leftwing comics such as Alexei Sayle or Ben Elton had in the 1980s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was partly because Tony Blair was open about seeing New Labour as a softer continuation of Thatcherism \u2013 something Thatcher called \u2018her greatest achievement\u2019. This allowed comedians to position themselves to the left of mainstream politics without having to do much more than bemoan that \u2018they\u2019re all the same\u2019 and to present themselves as being more principled than \u2018career politicians\u2019 without having to clarify their own principles, let alone live by them. The new money also made it far easier to \u2018sell out\u2019 \u2013 and the new comedy industry\u2019s gatekeepers tended to reward those who didn\u2019t lean towards oppositional politics to start with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While it was only with Corbyn\u2019s ascent that this mask truly slipped, mainstream comedy had been gradually de-radicalised over the previous two decades. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, one could see Spitting Image<\/em> end with a song titled \u2018Kill an Estate Agent Today\u2019<\/a>, or \u2018national treasures\u2019 Fry and Laurie\u2019s parody of It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/em> in which the guardian angel sees a world without Rupert Murdoch and then shoves Murdoch off the bridge for the sake of humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s hard to pinpoint exactly when such iconoclastic opinions disappeared from British screens, but the end of the Channel 4 series The Mark Thomas (Comedy) Product<\/em> in 2003 felt like a watershed moment. It wasn\u2019t just that Thomas set himself up clearly against the Major and Blair governments but also that his mixture of stand-up and campaigning allowed him to articulate a point of view in greater detail than on panel shows, and gave his comedy more power than if he were sneering from the sidelines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of questioning the policing of dissent during the \u2018war on terror\u2019, many of Thomas\u2019 contemporaries spent the 2000s railing against \u2018political correctness\u2019, amplifying conservative attack lines against anti-racist, anti-feminist and anti-homophobic activism, and helping them to claim the defence of \u2018free speech\u2019 for the reactionary right. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Stewart Lee revived his career by challenging this with considerable insight and wit, but, like Thomas, found the panel shows unamenable to breaking the consensus. Stewart Lee\u2019s Comedy Vehicle became one of the few bright lights in televised humour as the New Labour project faded into the Conservative-Lib Dem government. He focused his anger more on the cruelty of \u2018anti-PC\u2019 comedians than that of the coalition government, but remained aware that both David Cameron and Jimmy Carr were equally guilty of punching down at the poor \u2013 and of not paying their taxes<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet even Lee eventually aligned himself with liberals who blamed Corbyn for the EU referendum result and consequent Brexit \u2013 few of whom stopped to think about how the split it caused in Labour\u2019s vote required careful management, let alone how the EU handled the Greek debt crisis. He named pro-EU heroes Ken Clarke and Jess Phillips alongside Gina Miller and Adbusters copyists Led By Donkeys in his \u2018stars of track and field\u2019<\/a> for 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Comics presented themselves as more principled than politicians without having to clarify their own principles, let alone live by them<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lee\u2019s sometime guest on Comedy Vehicle, Armando Iannucci, wrote The Thick of It<\/em>, the defining satire of the PR-led politics central to New Labour and, later, the coalition, which ran on BBC 4 and then on BBC 2 from 2005 to 2012. At the time, it was hard to tell if we were invited to disdain the whole type of politics presented in the series \u2013 which never differentiated between parties, and whose characters seldom discussed policies as life-or-death issues \u2013 or simply to empathise with Malcolm Tucker\u2019s frustration at how bad his underlings were at playing the media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Knowing the spin doctor was based on him, Alastair Campbell questioned Iannucci\u2019s anti-establishment credentials via Twitter when Iannucci accepted an OBE in 2012. \u2018Three little letters can have more impact than you realise,\u2019 said Campbell<\/a> \u2013 to which Iannucci replied, with lightning wit, \u2018WMD\u2019. Seven years later, Campbell was expelled from Labour after encouraging people to vote Liberal Democrat in the European elections \u2013 and Iannucci, who backed the Lib Dems in 2010, retweeted right-wing Labour MPs supporting Campbell, along with a snarky tweet<\/a> asking if Corbyn had voted for the far-right Brexit Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Thick of It\u2019s<\/em> central proposition \u2013 that both major parties were essentially the same \u2013 wore thin as Cameron and Osborne\u2019s cuts became harsher. It collapsed when Corbyn assumed the Labour leadership on an anti-austerity platform. Suddenly, the \u2018both sides\u2019 framing British comedians had often used no longer rang true, instead implicitly siding them with power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Charlie Brooker, who had long cast himself on Screenwipe<\/em> as an angry outsider, alone on his sofa venting his frustrations about politics and its mediation, did a typically cynical vignette on his 2016 end-of-year show on Corbyn\u2019s argument with Richard Branson over whether seats were available on a Virgin train. Coming right after a gag about Corbyn failing to \u2018recognise\u2019 anti-Semitism, with no mention of his record of standing up for Jewish and anti-fascist causes, Brooker spent far more time attacking Corbyn than Branson. <\/p>\n\n\n\n He did so with no consideration of why Branson might cast doubt on Corbyn\u2019s story, nor why Sky News would side with Branson, let alone giving any idea of why his willingness to confront corporate interests appealed enough to Labour\u2019s members for them to re-elect him by a landslide that summer. Brooker\u2019s sister-in-law, incidentally, is a Labour MP who supported Owen Smith<\/a> in that leadership contest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another trend that made it harder for satirists to land meaningful blows on the Labour leader was that the media attacked Corbyn from every possible angle, often in mutually contradictory ways, making it almost impossible for comedians to differentiate themselves from the establishment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The only way for them to do so would have been to come from an anarchist or communist position, but this required more work than saying \u2018I\u2019m actually to the left of Corbyn, but\u2026\u2019 And as they would have known if they had ever held such political convictions, they would not have been given much space to articulate them on the panel shows, and it was unlikely that they would be invited to expand on them on Live at the Apollo<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Comedians have struggled with Twitter for a while \u2013 few can meet the inevitable pressure of being witty all the time, and some are surprisingly thin-skinned when criticised. But in recent years, they and the weekly panel shows they front have been made to look redundant. Not so much by Corbyn himself \u2013 whose bone-dry, self-deprecating humour was never seen enough in his television appearances \u2013 but by a fast-paced, collaborative humour that revelled in the apparent collapse of the political order after 2015, the year not just of the hysterical media reaction to Corbyn\u2019s leadership but also the \u2018Edstone\u2019<\/a> and #piggate<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This Twitter comedy was often niche, heavy on in-jokes that relied on a shared political position, usually rendering its opponents\u2019 arguments only slightly more absurd, or seeking to embarrass those opponents. Its crowning achievement was probably during the 2019 election, when left-wing Twitter users made up an absurd but just-about-believable story about Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson killing squirrels, which got shared so widely that Swinson had to deny it on LBC<\/a>. A clampdown on Twitter \u2018shitposters\u2019 followed, which lasted until the end of the campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mainstream comedy came out of the last election very badly. Russell Howard, with a net worth of \u00a35 million, told his audience that Corbyn and Boris Johnson were politically indistinguishable<\/a>. Have I Got News for You<\/em> \u2013 and the satirical paper Private Eye<\/em>, edited by regular HIGNFY<\/em> panellist Ian Hislop \u2013 blamed Corbyn for Johnson\u2019s victory without taking responsibility for helping Johnson establish his \u2018harmless clown\u2019 persona through repeated appearances on the programme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this sense, Johnson stands alongside Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Volodymyr Zelensky as right-wing populists who built up a supportive base through mass entertainment. Like them, Johnson is impervious to satire \u2013 he doesn\u2019t care how he comes across to \u2018respectable\u2019 people. Starmer clearly does and is better at presentational politics than Owen Smith (whose campaign he supported<\/a>) but it\u2019s too late to save centrism, and too late for comedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Satirists can mock Starmer all they want, and they will doubtless continue to find an audience. But just as Starmer will not be able to restore \u2018normality\u2019 to British politics in a time of constant flux, nor will mainstream comedians be able to pretend that they didn\u2019t respond to Corbyn\u2019s challenge to the status quo with the same sneering hostility as the Murdoch press, the Blairite establishment or the Conservative government. Whatever their response to the end of \u2018the Corbyn project\u2019, it will be gutless, mirthless and ultimately worthless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Juliet Jacques argues that the way comedians treated Jeremy Corbyn demolished their anti-establishment credentials<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":40328,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[315,685,2543],"tags":[2636],"class_list":["post-27794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-labour-party","category-media","category-stage-screen","tag-juliet-jacques"],"yoast_head":"\nCorbyn’s impact on comedy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Comedic Centre Could Not Hold<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.redpepper.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/The-thick-of-it.jpg\")
Social Media<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
This article first appeared in issue #228, Summer 2020, Climate Revolutions<\/em> . Subscribe<\/a> today to get your magazine delivered hot off the press!
<\/strong><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"