The landscape of Stand-up,
Narratives, Ideologies and Utopias.
Ideologies are the landmarks required to navigate the terrain of any meaningful
debate.
I am a little out of the loop; I don’t gig that much
anymore. But the last time I looked The Stand-up Comedy Circuit was being seen
through the lens of, (and in turn morphing its response to;) the polarity’s of
Sachsgate in contrast to the success of McIntyre, in the eternal feed-back loop between audience and performer
that comedy seems to rely on.
The success of making a Stand-up show work on mainstream TV
and how that filled the void left by a perceived offensive/ outrageous strain
of comedy, press-ganged off of the BBC by the tabloids, either resulted in, or
synchronised with a binary bland-ing out of stand-up:
You were either an act talking about Les Dawson-esque
banalities of life- your relations, the place you came from, what happened at
the bus stop, etc.
Or you were banally shocking for the sake of amusing drunk
people in dark rooms, who in turn saw their point of view as more authentic,
gritty, because they could listen to someone talk about fucking disabled people,
or some such. The fact that they then went home had a wank, went to bed, went
to work, then came home and had there tea on their lap whilst watching
Hollyoaks with minimal contact from disabled people, was neither here nor
there.
The result was that presentation out-weighed content. Neither
of the narratives embodied by these comedic archetypes questioned or created
ideologies, they failed to embody any philosophical outlook and represented
nothing.
Art serves two functions:
1.
To embody with-in an artefact an authentic perception
of reality.
2.
To talk about its own function.
Within which is an honest engagement with ones own subjectivity,
and an attempt to address it. If this is overlooked all efforts degenerate into
entertainment; something which merely re-presents or presents the consensus of
reality in order to pass the time rather than raise questions or construct
ideals. This point was lost, so that if on stage you talked about race, or
swore you were one of the outrageous comics no matter the context, or content
of what you said. A vice was placed on creative freedom, not consciously but through
perception, or lack of it.
This phase in comedy was the plateau, the flat line of a
creative high which occurred in the post 9/11 era, where, during the Iraq war,
even an open mic circuit comedian could talk about abstract, ethical subjects
like dictatorships, wrong-full imprisonment (Guantanamo), Religion and the
dubious benefits of natural selection as embodied by George W Bush.
Now, the complexity of the Arab springs up-rising resists
any commentary with-in a 10 min slot in-front of 20 boozed up paying punters
running through an internal debate as to whether they should have just had an
early night or not. Un-like the obvious narrative of something like Iraq, the dialogue
between the Arab nations involved and our own western identity seems to have a
moral detachment where the relationship exists in a grey area which has
transpired over a time span at odds with the rolling-news attention span of Dave
the I.T worker on the front row and his 3rd pint of fosters, on a Tuesday
night in Reigate. Or indeed the opening 20 minute act; Danny McMack “enthusiastic
lines” (chuckle.com).
So, stand-up by fault or design seems to have no ideological
agenda, and by result no meaningful dialogue, merely a set of symbols to play
with. But wait I hear you say, "the bankers, the bankers..."
Yes, the bankers and MP expenses has been where the topical
comedy mine has been digging for the past couple of years. In some ways one of
the best routines I saw about it all was on BBC1 when Jasper Carrott did some
come-back show (which also had episodes done by Lenny Henry and some-one else??)
and with-out any really well constructed jokes –he spent 10/15 minutes saying
how stupid and confusing the whole thing was. Which was just nice to hear an
actual opinion on the TV again, and Carrotts' natural style and delight at the
freedom of being on TV without having the constraints of hosting some hideously
contrived ITV, tea-time, game-show, was what made it work. Perhaps his
performance was a successful combination of the kind of affable-ness of
McIntyre with the light weight polemic that some-one like Russell Kane might
perform about the daily mail.
There are problems with talking about the actual facts of
the banking crisis, it is some-what complicated and stand-up normally resorts
to knee jerk associations/ generalisations and tends to slot buzzwords like
bankers, tax, Gordon Brown, Fat cats into the pre-formed comedy templates that
would otherwise be about Traffic Wardens, Cab Drivers, Clarkson, Darth Vader or
the BNP.
The ideological truth is that we are all complicit in the
consumerist utopia and anyone who has a credit card/ mortgage and who complains
about the bankers is a bit like a Nazi complaining about “everyone having a go
at the Jews”. The fundamental ideology at the heart of the crisis is never even
acknowledged.
The real effect of the bankers is not to affect the
form/substance/the creation of stand-up material itself, but rather is to affect
the function, how it operates in the world, the market place. Comedy is cheap
to set-up, a cash cow, a get rich quick, markets in a state of flux, start-up business
,thing. It’s something like Karaoke, happy hour, speed-dating, new gastro-pub
menu thing, it’s a novelty to draw punters in. A distraction. Entertainment.
If you think, well good, comedy is working as an
entertainment industry and it’s not its job to question things and it should
just continue in the same vain and will continue for ever as long as it
responds to market forces, like any other form of consumerism. We’ve found the
answer, we don’t require new ideologies, and in that respect it is the end of
history- the history of ideologies. The current system functions so well that
99% of people never see it as an ideology, it’s just shopping it’s just jokes,
it’s just acquiring what I need and desire.
If you think that,
then well done you agree with 99% of economists, but then why would they think otherwise,
their jobs are kinda ridding on it. It’s like the head of the sea-life centre
saying 'the only way to protect endangered species is to have a captive breeding
program in the sea life centre and then re-release them into the wild,'- he would
say that, he sees the world from an aquarium perspective. Which is the best metaphor
anyone ever did.
Everything and everyone exists with-in context.
So what I’m saying is that my context supersedes yours and I
am the best.
