The endless hypocrisy of the comedy class
Personally I find TV panel shows pretty unbearable. They’re like being at a student party full of lairy smartarses you don’t know, and probably wouldn’t want to. But now a clip from one has, in the journalistic parlance of our time, ‘resurfaced on social media’. It is never a good thing for the people involved when a clip resurfaces on social media. It’s the kind of resurfacing that Jaws did in his heyday.
This particular eruption from the deep comes from the Big Fat Quiz Of The Year 2008, the fourth edition of the annual Channel 4 institution. (Its twentieth anniversary edition is due this December. It’s still going because of course it is – long running TV brands used to be like hens’ teeth, but now they linger on and on. The Big Fat Quiz will always be with us, like the poor or herpes or Ken Barlow.) Jimmy Carr is the host, and the three teams consist of a variety of comedians and presenters: Michael McIntyre and Claudia Winkleman, Sean Lock and James Corden, and Dara Ó Briain and Davina McCall.
2008 may seem like ancient history to the young, but all of these people – with the obvious exception of the late Sean Lock – are still around and still working. If anything, they are more prominent now. Interestingly, there are few visual clues, apart from the comparative youth of those featured, to suggest that this was filmed any time other than yesterday. A TV clip from 1972 would’ve seemed like an archaeological wonder in 1987, but everything on the cultural surface has seized up in this century. Under the surface it’s a very different story.
Because my, this clip demonstrates how the tunes of these people have changed. The question is about a man who ‘announced he was going to have a baby – but what was unusual about the whole affair?’ Ó Briain is first up, saying that he and McCall’s answer is that this person ‘was a pregnant male transsexual, it was him having the baby’. You might almost think Ó Briain would get away from this clip unscathed, but stay tuned.
Next is Lock and Corden, and up the balloon goes. ‘We wrote: it was an abomination’ Lock deadpans, to an outburst of laughter from all sides and the studio audience. Ó Briain adds, ‘Our team will accept that answer as being the same as ours, that’s fine’. Corden, giggling, next, ‘You said what was different about it, and we’ve decided it was an abomination, and we’re sticking by it’. Finally, over to McIntyre and Winkleman, pulling amused, confused faces; ‘He is a woman / she is a man… he had a baby, but he is a bloke, with a womb?’ ‘A womb-man’ ventures Carr, before cracking jokes about portmanteau words for transsexual genitalia that I can’t repeat here. McIntyre goes on, ‘When the baby was born, and he or she said to the doctor “is it a boy or a girl?”, do you think the doctor just went “How dare you”.’ More big laughs, and on the show goes.
What’s astonishing about this clip is that it’s proof that these people knew exactly what a woman was about five cultural minutes ago, and found the idea of pretending not to know hilarious.
Dara Ó Briain has been quite the empty space to his former friend Graham Linehan in this regard. James Corden (full disclosure, the guest star in two episodes I wrote for Doctor Who shortly after this) has been conspicuously compliant with every new and fashionable ideological wheeze, as we can see demonstrated here.
At times in the last ten years, I have felt like I am going mad. People I knew or worked with in this milieu, who were far more un-PC than me, suddenly changed lanes, leaving me where I’d always been but somehow a pariah. Ironically, I was mocked in the noughties by colleagues for being a bit humourless about identity-based banter that I considered ‘nasty’ and bad form.
Now some might point out that times have changed. Oh indeed they have, and don’t we know it. But there are still two sexes, and no man can get pregnant. It is ludicrous to pretend otherwise, and ludicrous ideas are funny.
Of course, these people know this now, as they knew then. Everybody does. And this is the crux of this matter. Because fair enough, you might well think that the ‘abomination’ joke was unkind and cruel to transsexuals and the real people involved. I suspect if I’d seen this in 2008 I might well have thought that. I do now – though I don’t think people telling cruel and tasteless jokes should be cancelled because I’m not a lunatic.
But some of these same people hooting and howling in this clip have gone far further than that. They swallowed the big bitter pill of genderism – sex is a spectrum, it’s fine to medicalise kids who don’t fit into the cultural stereotypes of their sex, trans-identifying men have the right to enter women’s private spaces – whole, in one gulp. Either they celebrated it, or they pretended not to see it.
This is because a few years after this particular Big Fat Quiz, a small cadre of well-placed cranks, empowered by Californian tech giants, did a quick sprint through the institutions, public and private. The comedy ‘industry’ – supposedly so daring and edgy and outspoken – said nothing. Almost to a man, they merrily complied.
We often see modern people looking at clips from very old TV – The Black And White Minstrel Show or Are You Being Served?, for example – and looking horrified. Imagine the reverse; showing these people in December 2008 the gender world of 2023. Heck, even the world of 2016 – where stating that there are two sexes or that kids should be left to grow up gay is described as ‘utterly abhorrent’. They’d be appalled. And then you would have to explain to them that they went along with it.
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