Last week I had the privilege of seeing Bill Baliey performing his current show, "Larks in Transit" at the NIA / Arena Birmingham. The man is one of my absolute favourite comedians, and his ability to draw laughs from music in particular is one of his absolute highlights. From using birdsong in rap music, a downbeat southern bluesey version of "Old McDonald", leading the audience in a rendition of the German version of "You Are My Sunshine", to a Brexit-based version of Cliff Richard's "Summer Holiday".
I mention this bit of the show in particular because the gig had taken place on the day of the 2019 EU "Elections" (something of an oxymoron in itself, as it's not actually possible to vote for any of / against / vote out any of the people that are actually in charge of the EU) and given that comedians are often the guardians of topical satire in this country, Mr Bailey clearly had to start the show with some rather obvious Brexit jokes.
They were side-splittingly funny, especially the one about Jeremy Corbyn, but it got me thinking.
One of the best things about Brexit has been its shattering of anti-establishment pretensions. All the people who for yonks had been getting away with posing as rebels and disruptors and irritants to the status quo have been exposed as utterly allergic to actual radical political change; as 'small-c' conservatives became freaked out by revolt; as the nervous, nodding footsoldiers of political power.
From the trustafarians of Momentum, those laptop Leninists who fantasised that they were revolutionaries, to columnists like Caitlin Moran, the Times’ token rebel who once said she lives ‘like it’s 1969 all over again and my entire life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash’ (cringe much?), virtually every self-styled couterculturalist has gawped in unfiltered horror as a swarm of people, the 17.4m, has done something genuinely revolting. As they said for real, rather than just in a tweet or on a placard that will be binned before dinner, ‘We reject the political order’.
My favourite Brexit-delivered demolition of anti-establishment posing concerns professional nonce Owen Jones. Poor Owen. A few years ago he wrote a book called "The Establishment", (how on earth Hale and Pace didn't sue I don't know) railing against the rotters and bankers and tabloids he thinks are running Britain. Now he finds himself chortling along as bona-fide-establishment-figure-Nick-Clegg-takes-the-mick-out-of-stupid-northerners-who-voted-for-Brexit mouthpiece.
Owen, like so many Fischer-Price revolutionaries, weeps millennial tears over the democratic sucker-punch delivered to the EU, that most establishment of institutions, by the oiks.
But going back to Bill Bailey, and this was something he addressed himself during his performance, right-on funnymen and women, who for decades have been cracking gags about nasty, grasping politicians, have also had a meltdown over Brexit. They’re raging AGAINST the revolting masses and actually pining FOR the EU. They’ve been exposed as court jesters - Juncker’s jesters (until of course he bans them all along with internet memes of his ugly, vulture-like, wine-addled face) - telling jokes designed to flatter power and defame revolt. They are, perversely, satirists for the status quo.
Marcus Brigstocke told Radio 4 this week that his own anti-Brexit schtick is causing him trouble in the north of England: "People have been angry. People have walked out of my shows and people have booed". He reckons Brexit is ‘not just the hideous social and political turn we have taken as a country’ (yawn - change the record Marcus !!) but is also ‘comedic poison’.
Britain’s comics are almost universally anti-Brexit. The conformism is staggering. Aaron Brown, editor of the British Comedy Guide, nailed it this week when he said ‘the comedy world’s reaction [to Brexit] has been exclusively negative’. Too many comics, virtually all of them, ‘rely on lazily branding 52 percent of voters as racist’, he said. There isn’t much comic mileage, he reckons, in ‘lashing out at stupid people making the wrong decision’. Indeed. No wonder the likes of Brigstocke face fury in Brexit country. People don’t like being told they’re disgusting, hateful idiots.
Who knew that a hulking swathe of the populace rejects the EU but hardly a single comic does shows how utterly disconnected the comedic class really is. It confirms the colonisation of British comedy by a breathtakingly narrow strata of society. Tragically, the same is now happening in the pop and acting worlds: they’re being overrun by well-fed toffs or well-connected middle classes who tend to share the same worldview. Hence the cultural elite now thinks one thing, and ordinary people think another.
Considering that Elvis, the Beatles and Cliff Richard were originally considered for being banned lest they might have swayed the minds of impressionable teenagers of the 50's to rebel against their elders and end up vote for revolutionary parties such as Free Love, Old (new, old as it was then) Labour and the Communist Party of Great Britain, this caps an astonishing cultural u-turn that would leave even Jeremy Corbyn gasping for breath.
Having utterly jettisoned self-awareness, many of these fantasy rebels convince themselves they’re still in the business of rebellion. How? By bashing Boris and Farage and Gove and everyone’s favourite 1950s throwback, Jacob Rees-Mogg. They pretend (they must know it’s a pretence?) that these four Brexiteers, being posh and quite wealthy and influential in the government and media, are The Establishment, and that anyone who makes jokes about them or tweets photos of them gurning on Question Time is a radical.
Please. It’s such a farce. A minute or two of serious reflection will confirm it’s the pro-EU side that is establishment, and the anti-EU plebs who are anti-establishment. In the run-up to the referendum, the EU side was backed by most MPs, by big business, by virtually every global institution, by the White House, by almost all of academia. If you’re making jokes or writing columns or taking to the streets on that side, then you’re not anti-establishment. You just aren’t! And that’s okay. You’re nervous and conservative. Fine. Own it.
All of this points to the spectacular failure of the left with regards to Brexit. I’m not sure the left will ever recover from its failure to see in Brexit a good and honest mass yearning for greater democratic accountability and meaningful popular sovereignty. The right’s failures on Brexit are technical - it looks like they’ll make just as much of a dog’s dinner of the negotiations as the left - but the left’s failures are existential.
A movement founded to express the will of the people against the established political order now does the utter opposite. The right might have been exposed as inefficient by the Brexit revolt, but the left has been exposed as kaput, over, reduced from a dreamer of rebellion to the obedient propaganda wing of a clapped-out oligarchy that millions hate. It's like living inside the hokey-cokey, remixed by Fatboy Slim.
Now that’s funny, so some on, comics: this material is rich, mine it.
That is it Thatcher hadn't sacked all the miners … boom, boom, hint, hint, satire, politics, etc …