The landscape of Stand-up, Narratives, Ideologies and Utopias.

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 3^rd 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.