CANCEL CULTURE IS COMING FOR COMEDY

With the threat of social media outrage seemingly ever-present, what we will laugh at in the future, asks Tristram Fane Saunders

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A comedian walks into a bar. The comedian walks onto a stage at the back of the bar, and tells a joke. Some people in the bar like it, some don’t. One person feels angry about it. They paraphrase the joke on Twitter, to explain why it made them angry. Five hundred people read the paraphrased joke, and also feel angry. Fifty of them tweet about it themselves. After this, the bar might not invite the comedian to tell jokes there again. If they do, next time the jokes might be very different.

Last year Shane Gillis was hired by Saturday Night Live, then fired a few days later following complaints on social media about jokes he made on a podcast in 2018. Kevin Hart was hired to host last year’s Oscars, but quit after complaints on social media about jokes he told on stage in 2010.

In June, sitcom writer Megan Amram (one of Rolling Stone’s “25 funniest people on Twitter”) left an apology before abandoning the site where she’d accrued a million followers over a decade, after complaints (also, inevitably, on Twitter) about jokes she tweeted between 2011 and 2013. In the months since posting that apology, she’s tweeted nothing. Each of the jokes in question was a morally indefensible act of hatred. Or funny. Or both. Or neither. These examples are all the same, or have nothing in common and shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath. It depends who you ask, and which joke you ask them about. But whoever you ask, they’re likely to be angry.

“Social media is the single worst thing that’s happened to the comedy business in, uh …” TV producer Richard Wilson pauses, as he thinks back over his quarter-century of work on British television’s longestrunning topical comedy show, Have I Got News for You? “...well, ever.”

People have always complained about jokes on HIGNFY, but social media has made each complaint louder. “I don’t give a damn what it’s done for democracy, but it’s certainly damaged comedy,” says Wilson. “There’s an audience you’re making the show for, and there’s a secondary audience — the social media audience, which is like a video assistant referee. The joke in the moment, in the room, is funny, but the verdict comes in later when you see how many people on social media complain about it.”

But there’s undeniably a vastly increased sensitivity in the audience. “You can no longer be sure that any joke you tell is just in the room that you’re telling it,” says Australian comedian Alice Fraser.

“The room” matters. Before telling a joke, you “read the room”. In live comedy, “the room” is a space where anything can happen. An audience will usually be willing to give a comic the benefit of the doubt, to take a journey with them down unexpected or uncomfortable lines of thought — so long as it’s all funny.”

And could the Internet ever replace live comedy? “Absolutely not,” says Fraser. “Imagine doing an open mic Zoom gig? My God! Can you imagine anyone wanting to pay for that?

“If you’re doing ‘comedy’ to a camera or to your phone, you’re doing something that looks like comedy, in the same way as a cam girl is doing something that looks like sex,” she says.

When it comes to telling jokes, “the room” is an antidote to “the bubble”— that social media effect whereby we can only hear people who share our opinions, people who laugh at the same things we laugh at. The room puts us shoulder to shoulder with people who might see things differently.

If the room is a small place — and often it’s a small, sweaty, non-social-distancingcomplaint place — then it’s a small place that makes the world larger. If jokes have a future worth paying attention to, it will begin like this: a comedian walks into a room. But stop me if you’ve heard this one before. —