Jennifer Saunders and James Buckley are the latest public figures to claim comedy is being stifled thanks to PC culture, or as Buckley refers to them “the joke police.”
Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival Jennifer Saunders said: “There is always someone tutting in the back of your mind every time you write a joke that is on the edge, ‘Don’t you think someone might be offended?'” While Buckley lamented on DigitalSpy: “Nowadays, it feels very black and white with comedy. There’s no in-between, it’s just, ‘This person said this on television – isn’t that terrible?’ and it’s killing comedy, because you’re not allowed to joke about anything, it seems. There seems to be a joke police, nowadays.”
Who are the joke police? The frightening truth for Saunders and Buckley is that that’s their audience. Far from killing it, it seems to me that a dose of call-out culture has comedy rather in the pink. Material that might be considered offensive is also usually dismissed on the circuit as hack, which should inspire the old guard to either look at these subjects from a new angle or find new subjects. Simply put: let your material evolve or die.
Arguably, that is how it’s always been in comedy. Which is why it’s surprising that Saunders, a comedian who emerged during the 1980s alternative comedy movement, should be so agitated by updated comic attitudes and new trends. Buckley, who it’s worth noting is not a comedy writer, believes it to be a fad: “It seems to be cool at the moment to be offended by stuff, and that’s a shame. It seems to be in vogue at the moment, and I’m hoping it will pass, because I do think that possibly people would maybe be more offended by The Inbetweeners if it was to be made today. Which is really weird, because it’s only 10 years. It’s only four years since we finished.”
For the record, when The Inbetweeners first aired I liked it, I thought it was funny and gross and a horrifically accurate portrayal of teenage millennials. It wouldn’t work today simply because Generation Z behaves differently from that (my) generation. There is nothing wrong with a project being ‘of its time’. Just as long as you accept that.
Buckley isn’t alone in airing concern that the show that made him famous wouldn’t be made (the same) today. Earlier this month Only Fools and Horses actor Sue Holderness said many of the show’s gags, such as the hilarious punchline of getting her bottom pinched by David Jason, couldn’t be used today, saying “It’s a problem for writers.
“Would gentleman be allowed to pinch ladies’ bottoms without being slapped in the face and have a writ put on them? I don’t know.”
Could men be referred to as gentleman if they pinched people’s bottoms today? I don’t know.
But, ultimately when I think of all the shows that wouldn’t be made today all I can think is good. Good, I don’t want to see the same ideas and set-ups and casts over and over again until I die for the sake of some TV exec’s nostalgia-trip or a writer’s In-My-Day rant.
If we took this theory, that for things to remain good they must stay the same and not respond to new thinking, and applied it to music then we’d all still be listening to white boys playing lutes and singing about sleeve colours. If we applied it to politics then we wouldn’t publicly frown upon the slave trade quite so much and if we applied it to science… well we’d all be dead.
You can have the Dave channel. Let me have my new comedy.
