In today’s Daily Telegraph, the columnist I love to hate, Simon Heffer, has once again voyaged into a subject of which he knows nothing: humour. Here is the link:
http://bit.ly/k4klbX
I shall now make Mr Heffer chuckle uncontrollably (given his susceptible funny bone) by revealing that my own name for him is Siphon Effluent. Did you see what I did there, Simon? Good, isn’t it.
The occasion of Mr Effluent’s latest outpouring was the wonderfully witty and hilarious wisecrack delivered in the house at Prime Minister’s Questions when the PM advised shadow minister Angela Eagle to “calm down, dear”. He and his backbenchers thought this so much funnier than the complete works of Oscar Wilde, SJ Perelman, PG Wodehouse and Stephen Fry rolled into one that Mr Cameron felt called upon to repeat the joke a further six times. Laugh? I thought I’d have to bite the television remote.
Laughter in the house is not like laughter anywhere else (except probably the Bullingdon Club and the Oxford Union). It is a mirthless howl, the kind of har-har-har braying, accompanied by forced slapping of fat hams, that speaks not at all of appreciative and judicious admiration for a finely-turned phrase but entirely of bullies putting in the boot after their loudest mouth (whom they fear, or at least require to impress with “loyalty”) has played to the lowest common denominator by landing on an opponent a blow to the solar plexus. This kind of knee-jerk oinking is certainly not the prerogative of Flashmanesque Tories. All the other party cannon-fodder do it too, even (I shouldn’t wonder) the Greens. It was noticeable though that, while George Osborne hooted like a hairdresser at a Cher concert, Nick Clegg sat stony-faced throughout the entire episode.
Politicians as a breed are not all that amusing. Even some quite smooth orators, while skilled at rousing an audience, cannot deliver a funny line. Those politicos who are able to reveal a responsive sense of humour in a general way can indeed be funny themselves, regardless of political inclination: Heseltine, Kinnock, Kennedy, Hattersley, Portillo, Skinner, Widdecombe (the latter, perhaps, unintentionally). Ed Miliband shows encouraging signs of being able to mock thoughtfully, helped by some evidence that he doesn’t take himself too seriously all of the time. John Smith had a charmingly deprecating sense of humour.
In earlier generations, Harold Macmillan had a dry clubman’s wit, often quite lethal. Harold Wilson could be witheringly funny. Jo Grimond and Jeremy Thorpe were both quick-witted and smart Liberal Party leaders. I remember an edition of Any Questions? celebrating some early anniversary, during which Thorpe astonished all by his pitch-perfect and brilliantly “scripted” impersonations of some of the programme’s stalwarts not present in that edition: Ralph Whiteman, Ted Leather, Gerald Nabarro.
Winston Churchill’s many witticisms have gone down in legend, though some of them would fail modern tests of acceptability. No PM since has matched Churchill’s style, timing and sheer sense of mischief – “Bossom?” he sniffed at the surname of a new member. “Neither one thing nor the other”. But at least one contemporary statesman can deliver a witty speech with perfect timing and aplomb. Go to
http://bit.ly/jDop1g
to laugh out loud at Barack Obama's speech to yesterday's White House correspondents' dinner.
Typically, politicians have ‘jokes’ written for them, which they proceed to mangle in delivery, yet the faithful roar with simulated delight anyway. Tony Blair thought himself jolly good-humoured but the kind of thing that made him weep with laughter was that singing fish novelty that was all the rage among people with no taste for a day and half some time in the late ‘90s. Gordon Brown’s delivery of a joke was as leaden as John Major’s or Edward Heath’s. And Siphon Effluent’s great heroine, Margaret Thatcher, had no sense of humour whatsoever. The antediluvian playwright Sir Ronald Millar – don’t hold your breath for a revival of his plays – wrote the “you turn if you want to – the lady’s not for turning” shtik, a desperately laborious conceit even in skilled hands, but it brought a Tory conference to its knees weeping with uncontrollable mirth, despite that the dear leader had performed it with considerably less panache than Neville Chamberlain announcing “consequently this country is at war with Germany”.
Siphon Effluent himself does make me laugh, mostly because he contrives to present the appearance of a sugar pig with marmalade smeared on his head. But his writing is dominated by his desire to be disobliging and, if he ever threatens to try for humour, it never ventures further than peevish scorn. He always refers to Mr Cameron as “Dave” – this is known in the trade as a “running gag” – presumably because he disdains a Tory leader who is not Thatcher and because some of the PM’s intimates appear to refer to him by this builder’s-mate moniker. (Not least of these intimates is the first lady, Samantha Cameron. There again, her sense of humour was revealed yesterday when she appeared to think it a jolly jape to roll up at a formal state occasion dressed for a constituency coffee morning; gratifyingly, she was comprehensively outshone by the effortlessly chic Miriam Clegg).
In his piece on humour, Effluent makes a strenuous joke in calling Angela Eagle “a harridan”. He was so pleased with this that he repeated it. Now, Effluent is very keen on the correct use of English. Indeed, he is the in-house English monitor at The Telegraph, apt to send stinging emails to hapless journalists who have offended his sensibilities. So I find myself surprised that he should use the term “harridan”, which is defined by the OED as “a haggard old woman”, of a personable female of just 50.
Effluent writes further: “I suspect even Dave has the manners not to address a woman with whom he is not well acquainted as ‘dear’ except in jest” and later, on a different matter, “This column prides itself on its gallantry towards the ladies”. Yet he himself has the ungallant lack of breeding to write of a woman with whom he is not well acquainted in such an insulting manner. I think he should stand in the corner.
With brilliant skill and dazzling wit, Effluent turns what his admirers might have feared was a mortal thrust at “Dave” into an all-guns-blazing assault on Labour and “lefties” in general: “His [Cameron’s] mistake, however, was to think that these people are easy-going types who like a laugh. He has, at least, now admitted he realises that the Left doesn't have a sense of humour”.
Ah yes, the age-old canard that “lefties” have “no sense of humour”. It is of course fair and just to observe that there are individuals who are earnest and single-minded about their politics, but I never found that this degree of dedication was confined to the left. Had it been, we might now live in a more enlightened world. But the myth persists: on Any Questions? this weekend, UKIP leader Nigel Farage spoke of “po-faced Republicans”.
It can be argued – I have argued it myself – that comedy is fundamentally reactionary because it requires a reliable and enduring establishment, status quo, conventional wisdom against which to bounce. So, while pretending to subvert and mock, comedy really reinforces and humanises. It’s Lear’s Fool syndrome – the absolute monarch permits an all-licensed jester precisely because he is absolute and therefore the jester cannot draw blood, only wry smiles.
But there are many conventional wisdoms. Changes of government do not signal the end of satire. Effluent seems to imagine that only reactionary people are capable of being funny. “Comedians who are not Leftists” essays Effluent “have more or less been driven out of business. Bernard Manning was martyred in this cause. Jim Davidson is in the process of following him, not because he isn't funny, but because he was a strong supporter of Mrs Thatcher. Long after she left office, the spiteful little creeps who form the ‘comedy’ establishment of this country would get laughs from their bovine audiences simply by mentioning her name”.
If Effluent sees himself as a comedian, this is certainly his most laughable passage. The idea that Manning was “martyred” is preposterous. He may have fallen out of television fashion – many entertainers do and politics has nothing to do with it – but his club work (including at his own club) continued to bring him a handsome income. And I can’t help wondering how often Effluent was to be seen knocking back pints with hoi polloi at Manning’s place, roaring with delight and slapping his hams at “fookin’ Paki” so-called “gags”. If nothing else, the vulgarity of it all seems extremely unlikely to have appealed to Mr & Mrs Effluent as an alternative to their beloved Wagner, any more than one can picture them tripping to the end of a pier to rock with joy at Jim Davidson’s version of fun.
Perhaps Effluent is thinking of Ben Elton when he writes of “the spiteful little creeps” mentioning Thatcher’s name for a laugh. Elton certainly used to do stuff about the woman he called Thatch but that was back in the ‘80s in his spangly-suited phase. I would gently suggest that if Effluent were to take tea with Elton at the Ritz and probe him for his present political views, he might find that they have more in common than he imagines.
There have been plenty of intelligent, thoughtful and far from spiteful comics who are not reactionaries. In Effluent’s youth, he might have been aware of the American Tom Lehrer, a finely witty, talented and scrupulous social satirist who announced his retirement when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, on the grounds that the award rendered satire obsolete.
But even staunchly committed left-wingers have sprightly senses of humour. Tariq Ali, whom I knew a bit at one time, is a warmly funny and witty man. My old chum Roy Battersby would certainly fill the bill for Effluent when looking for a fully paid-up leftie. Roy was a key member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party in the 1970s and ‘80s, took five years out of his directing career to work full-time for the party as its chief representative on the Palestinian question (he made a moving documentary called The Palestinian, fronted by Vanessa Redgrave), stood for parliament and was involved in the supposedly notorious Red House centre which was a constant target for MI6. Yet my abiding image of him is of a man wreathed in a beatific smile, relishing the pleasures of life and laughing uproariously at its manifold absurdities.
There is an unbridgeable gulf between, on the one hand, Roy, Tariq and Tom Lehrer and, on the other, a Simon Heffer whose idea of a comedian is Manning or Davidson and a David Cameron who thinks he’s being witty by quoting someone as repellent as Michael Winner in something as low class as a television advertisement and claims that anyone who cannot see such rubbish as meritorious lacks a sense of humour. I can’t imagine finding anything in common (humorous or otherwise) with anyone who would rather reside on the Heffer/Cameron/Manning side.
