Why shouldn’t comedy be offensive?

Pol Pot walks into a bar…

Or, perhaps, it’s not Pol Pot but Kim Jong-un, and it’s not a bar but a cheese shop…

Should we stop there lest we risk offending the North Korean dictator who loves the fromage Suisse almost as much as he loves slaying relatives in barbaric ways?

The question isn’t a naïve one. We know the answer is “no” but let’s assume the answer is “yes”. That, after all, is the strawman being challenged by John Cleese in his new Channel 4 documentary. Titled “Cancel me”, the show gives the former star of Monty Python (and co-creator with Graham Chapman of the original cheese shop sketch) a chance to explore the “cancel culture” that is said to exist around modern comedy.

The show is hardly a puzzling development given that Cleese has been quite vocal on the subject for several years. Yet that doesn’t mean that comedy is experiencing a moment of profound self-censorship. It just means that one high-profile comedian has found himself uniquely placed to make a show based around his own specific “cancellation”. Fawlty Towers was, you might remember, briefly pulled from streaming services because of its use of racial slurs. Cleese subsequently made a strong case about Major Gowen’s use of racial epithets, arguing it ridiculed a generation that used those terms, in the same way as “The Germans” mocked Basil’s obsession with the Second World War. The show returned to screens with warnings about language and that, frankly, is where this rather silly debate should have ended. Instead, we now have a situation developing in which the most famous advocate for the Liberal Democrats is being described by The Guardian’s George Monbiot as “another right-winger […] offered yet another platform to explain how he has been oppressed and de-platformed”.

Stone me, but without my having to shout “Jehovah!” [Other Monty Python in-jokes are inevitable.]

Sean Lock died this past week, giving everybody ample opportunity to savour his comedic brilliance. Yet watching the many clips, can anybody say that they were particularly struck by the way he deftly avoided saying things that would have got him cancelled? Nor, for that matter, has anybody noticed comedians properly getting into trouble for the jokes they make? Comedy seems to be doing rather well, thank you very much, with a few of its performers saying precisely what they shouldn’t and being lauded for that. In this culture of supposedly cancelled comedy, there is still room for Jimmy Carr, Frankie Boyle, and, for that matter, Mrs Brown’s Boys, as well as a whole spectrum of voices in the wider online media. We’ve never had this much comedy, either highbrow or lowbrow, good or Michael McIntyre.

Cleese spends a good deal of his time outside the UK so it’s not clear how in touch he is with British comedy beyond the deceptive reality created by online media. There have been shifts, certainly, and some are particularly acute around material that’s being broadcast. Broadcasters have been left somewhat paralysed by the ongoing culture war in which the Right has the material they like; the Left have the material they like. Each wishes to cancel the other, leaving broadcasters with the problem of deciding which half of their audience they wish to alienate. Yet underpinning this are broader matters of taste, no more profound than those which occurred around the Alternative Comedy scene of the 1980s, when a new generation of comedians decided they’d create a new comedy that didn’t exploit the old stereotypes of the 1970s. Back then it was jokes about big-breasted women and immigrants that were deemed offensive. This new “awakening” means we feel queasy about Little Britain that made jokes about the disabled and the working classes. If that amounts to “cancelling” comedy, then we might as well complain about “cancelling” freakshows, flogging, slavery, Polio, inquisitions, and emptying bedpans in the street.

In defence of Cleese, reactions to the show announcement seem disproportionate given what he has to say. Cleese has thus far expressed the entirely reasonable point that whilst “the main thing is to try to be kind” that should not mean “indulgence of the most over-sensitive people in your culture, the people who are most easily upset … I don’t think we should organise a society around the sensibilities of the most easily upset people because then you have a very neurotic society.”

That, indeed, is the point. We should try to be kind but that shouldn’t discount the need to be cruel when we feel it necessary. The old saying – attributable to either Hegel – is that “all comedy is cruel” is often interpreted as meaning that it’s an ugly business out to harm and, by that logic, needs to be cancelled. That’s a gross mischaracterisation. Humour exposes the fine line between our pretensions and our true nature. It takes delight in the cruel universe, in which our lives are rendered glaringly meaningless. The crudest comedy often involves sudden and unexpected nudity but what is that other than a shocking reminder of our naked selves? Even the oldest joke about a chicken crossing the road mocks the presumption that life has meaning. “Why” did the chicken cross the road? Because life is a meandering path filled with false illusions of purpose when entropy is the only constant, and the universe is set on its eventual heat death. As Chaplin said: what a sad business is being funny.

Humour challenges us to face our fears, ridicules the things we hold most sacred, and pricks the pomposity of those that hold themselves above us. Comedy that isn’t on some level transgressively offensive isn’t doing the job of reminding us of what it means to be human.

Which takes us back to the problem of what to do with Kim Jong-un, who we left standing in a cheese shop…