Lockdown comedy: What should we laugh at now?

Boris Johnson’s admission to hospital presented a particular challenge to comedians. Here was a figure who had based their appeal on irreverence and the creation of a carnival reality brought into a situation of genuine peril — it was if a popular sitcom had unexpectedly taken a swerve into the bleak. It threatened to cap the joke of Boris Johnson with the darkest of punchlines — ‘he died, you know’ — in a sort of symbolic marker of our age’s transition from irresponsible grossness to earthbound reality. Luckily for both him and comics across the country, both Boris Johnson and mockery of him will survive a while yet. Indeed over time it may well add to his image as a ‘lucky general’.

But this perhaps speaks to a wider problem for the comic in this crisis; many of those currently in power are profoundly unserious people. There’s Johnson, Trump and, in Brazil, Javier Bolsonaro, the political equivalent of a schoolboy obssessed with the TA. These are deeply unserious people in charge at the most serious time. What, then, is the role of comedy for those living with their decisions? It seems utterly superfluous to mock a President like Bolsonaro who claims that Brazilians will survive coronavirus as they can jump into sewage and be fine; all a satirist can do in response to this is incredulously repeat the statement. In such instance it can seem comedy is there to provide the moral seriousness and sense of decorum that these leaders lack; comedy is in the sense a form of nostalgia for a more competent world, or hope for its advent.

In that context of such unserious leaders it seems telling that the clearest comic success of the pandemic, the parodies of that celebrity ‘Imagine’ video, came in response to a clear incidence of people taking themselves too seriously. There was something positively medieval in the way the internet revelled in taking those housebound famous down to size — ‘You’ll get the plague like the rest of us peasants’. Beyond this humour on the social networks currently seems to alternate between dance routines or the construction of Heath Robinson machines in closed spaces, or the opportunity to watch funny people playing computer games. Striking throughout is the lack of the black humour which has characterized the human response other tragedies, such as the cheerily absurd First World War song ‘We’re here/Because we’re here’ or the jokes some Jews made in response to their persecution by the Nazis. Perhaps the humour will darken as the crisis proceeds and more contract the virus, but up until now most of it is wholesome and inoffensive in nature. Why is this?

In part because of the unique nature of what we’re being asked to do. In contrast to the intensely social nature of other catastrophes, we are being asked to isolate ourselves in small units or alone. That means that we may have less use than usual of the ironic, distancing humour of previous conflicts; we are looking to laugh in a way which makes us feel together. And just as crucially, the virus is a strange target — it is much easier to caricature a humourless German or block-headed war general than an invisible pathogen. You can almost hear a Hollywood producer saying, ‘The character of Covid-19, well, we think it needs more work.’ We can’t mock an invisible virus for doing what invisible viruses do, and deriding the Chinese political context it originated in is still too sensitive an area. Add to this that many of us are limited in our comic possibilities by being trapped within our homes; we are all sitcom stars now.

It’s also to do with the kind of comedy we entered the crisis with. Many stand-up comedians are, I suspect, currently going through their recent sets and finding them laughably inadequate to the present moment. Indeed so much recent comedy seems so. The humour of shows like ‘The Good Place’, a show so gentle it couldn’t even bear to make demons in Hell truly evil, seems too mild for thousands dead each day. That of ‘Fleabag’ too petty in its hatreds. Watching ‘The Thick of It’ makes one only nostalgic for a time people got so worked up about so little. Live comedy’s debate between ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ audiences now seems sweetly presumptive of there being an audience at all — and so on. All this comedy seems like a relic of an age which has suddenly gone.

Covid-19 will change our world and it will change what we laugh about. Predicting the nature of that change is currently the occasion for everybody to argue their existing position, from globalism’s end/revival to an abiding fear of public transport. But it seems telling that one of what seems the simple certainties of the world emerging from the crisis is going largely unmentioned; namely that people will want to gather together and have a good time. They will want to feast, to drink and to make merry. The humour of that time is likely to be — particularly for those emerging from their houses after months cooped-up — more transgressive, more outrageous and less cautious than that before. It will be a time when, to quote the Roman comic playwright Terence, ‘Nothing which is human is alien.’ And just maybe our revels will be accompanied by a contradictory desire to restore a greater seriousness and moral purpose in our leaders, now that we no longer presume our systems and lifestyles stable enough to withstand the election of clowns. In the meantime, there’s no time like the present to resume taking the piss out of Boris Johnson; right now, ‘too soon’ can’t come soon enough.

Thanks for reading. This article is part of the publication ‘A Lockdown Miscellany’, a space for reflection on the obsessions provoked by this strange period of lockdown. Would you like to share yours? If so, get in touch.