Hinterland

Our deranged modern horror of causing offence has left us without a national sense of humour

Since this column aims to highlight aspects of culture of which readers may be unaware, it tends to avoid becoming too philosophical. However, having just read David Stubbs’s recent study Different Times: A History of British Comedy, I feel a little philosophy is required on the subject of British humour.

Stubbs’s survey starts with the films of Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, and culminates in the largely tedious sitcoms of current times. The latter’s function appears to be to present to viewers a righton, offence-free world in which many of us simply do not live.

Stubbs’s book is so earnest in its virtue-signalling that I found it shocking whenever he said something with which I agreed – such as about the magnificence of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), or the terrible sadness of Tony Hancock, or the clever role of class in Dad’s Army (1968-77): though Stubbs’s use of the last as a means of voicing his obsession with Brexit is one of several reasons why one struggles to take his book seriously. It is another exercise in arguing that much of the British past merits disapproval, not least because of our penchant until well into the television age to make jokes about black people, brown people, Irish people, Scottish people, Welsh people, disabled people, unintelligent people and homosexual people. If there is a national sense of humour, was it really once based so much on mockery and cruelty?

We forget that it is part of our character to seek weakness, not to deride it cruelly, but to tease people, often as a perverse form of comradeship. There are many white, heterosexual, ablebodied men who have been the target of jokes because they are fat, bald, coarse, refined, have ginger hair, a peculiar voice, or beards. Stubbs believes political correctness “saved” our comedy because it stopped it relying on giving offence and forced it to be more inventive. Perhaps he is right, though we have all heard offensive jokes that are cripplingly funny. I remember first watching the Fawlty Towers episode “The Germans” (1975) and laughing so hard, I almost had to go to

A&E. (Perhaps that makes me monstrous.)

Stubbs rules out large areas of potential amusement because of the terror of causing offence; I don’t, because we all get offended in life, and that is human nature. I know it will upset many black people that a character in the dire sitcom On the Buses (196973) was called Chalkie, so named because he was black. Yet he did not appear disliked in any way: there is quite a road from giving someone a nickname to persecuting them, but the wokerati don’t do degree.

We probably now lack a national sense of humour, not least because we are so deeply divided about what, or whom, to laugh about. Perhaps it takes a war to change that; if so, I hope we remain without an agreed target for a while yet. But we must conquer this deranged hatred of causing offence. If you try hard enough, you can find someone who is offended by almost anything: but I really wouldn’t bother.

g ‘I laughed so hard I almost had to go to A&E’: John Cleese and Andrew Sachs in Fawlty Towers