Did You Hear the One About the Comedy Critic With No Sense of Humour or Valid Arguments?

Recently, in that perennially glass-half-full publication The Daily Mail, critic Quentin Letts used the death of Sir Norman Wisdom to call out current British comedy in its entirety. He described it as “smug, scornful and obsessed with sex and flatulence” before launching into an article using a few choice examples to illustrate how everything in British comedy since the Two Ronnies has been awful (with the possible exception of, quite unbelievably, Mr. Bean).

Now, please don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a lot of what the Two Ronnies and Letts’ other main example, Morecambe & Wise, did through their illustrious careers. But how can any kind of art or entertainment ever progress if it merely replicates what has gone before? Certainly, inspiration can be taken from British comedy of the past but just mindlessly copying it would lead us to a worse place than Mr Letts suggests we are in at the moment.

And now we are back to the author and the article that this blog entry is all about. There are numerous problems with what was written, firstly the idea that because Morecambe & Wise and the Two Ronnies were excellent and the 4 or 5 modern acts that are highlighted in the article aren’t (in Letts’ opinion) then old British comedy is better than the new. This is idiocy - as comedian Matt Kirshen observed on Twitter “I checked the first 3 albums I randomly saw in HMV and none of them were a patch on Revolver or Blood on the Tracks”. Morecambe & Wise and The Two Ronnies are remembered because they were the most popular and (arguably) best comedians of their time but there would have been many comedians around at the same time who were not very popular, not very original or just not very good who have been forgotten. It will be the same for this generation of British comedy – in 30 years time a few will be remembered but most will have been forgotten. Your guess is as good as mine as to which performers will fall into which category.

The pinnacle of modern British comedy, apparently.

Next is the bizarre assumption made in the article that all modern British comedy is the same (aside from the laudable slapstick of Mr. Bean of course). This is such utter toss that it makes my mind boggle somewhat and means I can only assume that Quentin Letts has not been paying much attention to today’s British comedy, aside from watching Mock the Week, the main target for his ire against contemporary comedy in this country. He mentions he attended this year’s Edinburgh Fringe festival, and even throws out the name of a performer he saw to prove it, but then dismisses all the comedy at this year’s fringe as “ok” at most, and more often than not “stale” and “predictable”. Whilst, given the huge number of acts performing at the Fringe, it can obviously not all be comedy gold a quick glance over the Foster Comedy Awards (previously the If.Com and Perrier Awards) shows a great deal of quality and variety.

Nominees for the main award included the lovably earnest Josie Long, the surreal Greg Davies and the buoyant yet self-deprecating Sarah Millican. The nominations for the newcomer award are even more diverse – sketch troupe The Late Night Gimp Fight, musical comedian Gareth Richards and the utterly charming silent comic The Boy with Tape on His Face. There is variety and laughter aplenty in the lists of nominees and they certainly don’t point to British comedy having been dead long before Sir Norman Wisdom was, as Letts asserts.

The Boy With Tape On His Face, proving Quentin Letts wrong by being brilliant

Letts also bemoans the fact that British comedy is not exporting so well any more, that we are lagging behind America on the global comedy stage. Personally I think, as is the case with pretty much every form of media, the internet is making national boundaries less and less relevant – people are finding comics they enjoy from all over the world that are linked by style rather than nationality. That British comedy as a whole is no longer widely recognised as the ‘market leader’ globally is not that important as plenty of British comics and comedies are still being enjoyed by fans all around the world.

So Quentin Letts, why don’t you cross the road? And fuck off.