Vote for the funnyman?
Armando Ianucci, comedy and politics

Tessa Mayes
posted 10 November 2006

Imagine a general election where half the candidates sported plastic red noses, used their party political broadcasts to tell gags highlighting the illogic of Tony Blair-isms, or talked, moustachioed and in an ill-fitting suit, of wanting to be Britain's next dictator and run the country from Kazakhstan?

I'm not just talking about British MPs' desperate attempts to connect with their constituencies. Politicians have always used humour to communicate, sometimes to good effect. What I'm referring to is a potential vision of the future if comedians who think they can help fill a void left by a depoliticised elite have their way. Seriously.

I love Armando Iannucci's work. He picks apart the orthodoxies of our day, strips bare the failings in logic of those who present themselves as rational and, offers a bloody good laugh. But this time he's gone too far. Not as a jokester. It's what Iannucci said with his serious hat on which gave me a rictus. At least I think he wasn't joking.

Last month he delivered a thought-provoking lecture at Tate Britain making claims for the role of funny men in serious society. His argument was along the lines of: 1. Comedians today are popular. 2. Comedians want to tackle serious subjects. 3. When politicians fail to inspire and the media fail to scrutinise politics forensically or offer a narrative, there's a gap in public discourse; 4. Consequently comedians find themselves filling that gap and people turn to them to make some sense of the world.

It's interesting to see the world from the position of the funnyman. He makes some perceptive points. But it's Iannucci's conclusion that's a problem. In a world where taking politics and the media seriously is a laughable proposition, he writes that we can start to take things seriously again 'by turning to those who do offer narratives, even if they are fictional ones. Because they are better than no narrative at all'.

On the face of it, he seems to have a point. We can't take politicians seriously because there is so little ideological content to their personality-led and technocratic brand of politics. Meanwhile the media do a poor job at holding politicians to account and providing proper information about and analysis of the world. So we tune in to comedy programmes like The Daily Show for more reflection, which happens to come with amusing punchlines. At least we're getting some some of coherent take on things amid our daily diet of junk news.

However a big, fat flaw screams out from Iannucci's lecture. We may live in a society which lacks political ideas, but that doesn't mean 'narratives' from comedic sources are always better than nothing. The celebration of comedy reveals the weakness of contemporary public discourse. True enough. But it also reveals a naïve faith in comedy, as if its combination of miscellaneous facts and entertaining narratives is a means of finding answers to big, serious problems, or the truth about the world. Frequently comedians fail to get their facts right or are not precise enough about current debates. They can get so wrapped up in the joke format that the reality being lampooned is artificially made - the 'straw man' construct as philosophers call it - which can confuse issues, even if it does make us laugh.

Still, this is not to say that it's not good to laugh at the logical inconsistencies of leaders in the western world. Bush-isms! Enough said. Ha, ha, ha! But the spectre of a Comedy Cult as better than nothing has a humourless aspect. It's not that we should lose our sense of humour - heaven forbid. It's that treating comedy as some kind of intellectual saviour can be a barrier to developing serious ideas. If we end up laughing at everything, it can feed a cynicism that turns people off from the difficult enterprise of changing society for the better.

Comedians might use their imaginations and stimulate others to alter the way we look at the world… for a night. But where is the follow-up commitment to ideas and real-world narratives, the communal pooling of new insights for intellectual battle and, the organisation of action to demand social change when the laughter dies? Yes, comedians donate their time for charitable causes like Red Nose Day and join anti-war demonstrations in Hyde Park. However these are cases of comedians using their talents to highlight pre-existing campaigns; it's not they who have discovered these areas of concern about the world even in this age of de-politicisation.

A Comedy Cult is danger of endowing the work of comedians with too much importance. They may be more trusted than politicians and journalists these days. But comedians aren't the only ones who watch political speeches and television news, get despondent and think of something funny or serious to say about it. Other people do that too without the help of comedians, just not on a prime-time BBC comedy show.

While Iannucci's work pinpricks the pomposity and pinpoints the inadequacies of public figures and contemporary culture, this is rare. Overall contemporary satire reflects the diminished thinking of our times too, failing to challenge taboos to do with paedophilia and children, Muslims or risk culture for instance (2). The clever comedy that exists has been around for a while now. If it was so helpful to generate serious ideas, why hasn't it stopped the degradation of political and journalism standards in any way? Hilarious though it was, The Day Today - Iannucci's surreal parody of contemporary news values shown on television in 1994 - and other similar spoofs haven't stopped the growth of emotionally-led news reports and bonkers moments in TV interviewing styles. If anything, as Iannucci points out, these features of the news have got worse.

To be fair, Iannucci acknowledges that comedians shouldn't have to fill an intellectual gap left by politicians and journalists, and argues that they are because nothing else is. The thing is though, comedians can't play this role even if they want to. To fill the gap of serious, progressive thinking about society requires more ideas about politics not comedy masquerading as politics. Still, Iannucci is really talking about the more fluid problem of imagination. Who knows what could spark off a revolution? A gag, a novel about the invasion of Poland by Al-Quaeda, a campaign by a radical blogger or, the interaction of all three? The funny side of our imagination isn't separate from the serious side; each can inspire the other.

In the end though, a brilliant, comedic imagination is not enough. Somewhere it has to have as its direction the pursuit of political ends. The imagination needs to be steered towards something politically useful such as explanations and solutions about the world, not just narratives. Otherwise how can we spot and make use of comedic inventions for anything beyond the comedy circuit? I'm not talking about the political intentions comedians have for their jokes (many of them intend their comedy to shake-up the world) or the fact they make jokes about politics. The crucial issue is the role of the comedic imagination in a depoliticised, non-analytical culture.

Comedy has its place in cultural life. It is a sad day when those with elastic imaginations can't develop lines of thought that make us laugh, and along the way, re-think life a bit. Yet too much comedy can be a sign of intellectual weakness too. The idea that comedy offers a fictional narrative that is the starting point for seriousness is not without pitfalls. All praise the Comedy Cult? Don't make me laugh.

Tessa Mayes is a London-based journalist and author.