Different Times: A History Of British Comedy – David Stubbs (2023)

philshanklin

Dec 19

The British love their comedy. In an uneasy but fascinating opening to his book this author and music journalist uses this to explain the rise of Boris Johnson, that people liked him because he was deemed to be funny with his media-friendly adoption of a blustering amusingly inept persona which some had seen and enjoyed on "Have I Got News For You" or who just thought made a welcome change to the usual guise of a politician. The reality is this was an elaborate conceit hiding a man who lacks a sense of humour or pretty much any of the empathy that we Brits like in our humourists.

This is all an introduction to what follows on- a chronological examination of comedy in Britain beginning with two massive exports – Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, two men who started as friends and flatmates but then weren't and whose paths to unprecedented fame (much earlier for Chaplin than Laurel) removed any Britishness. It could be seen that here is the first of many splits in the comedy route as nowadays it is easy to deem one of these as funny and one as not, so that's why we need a perspective on the times they lived.

With comedy so much a personal taste thing linked to the times, Stubbs, the same age as me, tries to explain the appeal of Ealing Comedies (which I do get) and The Goons (which I never have) to those of us who weren't there at the time. I do remember the 70s and a Britain awash with situation comedies, most now forgotten but which in the TV-always-on households living in a 2-3 channel world (we didn't get BBC 2 until the mid 70s) were just often watched whether anyone actually enjoyed them or not. These were the comedies that drew huge audiences at the time but are pretty much forgotten ("Oh No, It's Selwyn Frogett", "And Mother Makes Five", "My Good Woman", "In Loving Memory"- just four examples of rating toppers). These have just dwindled in our collective memories but some have gone because of thankfully changing attitudes, including "Love Thy Neighbour" and "Mind Your Language" but these too are problematical, the author recognises, because as well as promoting stereotypes and tension these shows were sometimes huge hits in the households where the individuals watching would have been the butt of the jokes, which perhaps could be put down to any representation is better than no representation even if it meant people were being fed wrong ideas.

Watching comedy from a different era, even just a few years ago, will bring about the odd shudder or discomforting sense that this was the distant part and that things would probably be done differently nowadays. Stubbs does attempt to put this into context but often acknowledges those who made the programmes should have known better- for most of the time it wasn't funny then so certainly wouldn't be now.

Although controversy is a central theme and is embodied within the title of the book this is also a celebration of comedy and will probably be the most over-riding reason people will seek out this book. (Stubbs acknowledges "Fawlty Towers" as the greatest TV sitcom). It moves from the satire of the 60s to the hugely popular workhorses Morecambe and Wise, Ken Dodd, Tommy Cooper of whole family entertainment; to our love of smut and innuendo; the offbeat "Monty Python"; then onto the "fresh start" alternative comedy embodied from "The Young Ones"; through the Thatcher years; the cruelty of some 90s comedies onto the laughter-track free observational humour of "The Royle Family" and "The Office" to our gentler more inclusive comedies such as "Outnumbered", "The Detectorists", "Motherland"and "This Country" also exploring stand-up and the odd comedy film.

Comedy is always going to get people talking as it's so embedded in the national psyche and bound up in political and social views class and age. Stubbs concludes; "They don't make comedy like they used to, which is at once a good thing, given that back then not everyone got to be in on the laugh, and another reason to seek out and cherish it all the more." A statement which reflects the double-edged approach which is probably the right one to take with his subject.

I've seen mixed reviews for this book, some taking the author to task probably without having read much of the book, some saying his arguments are muddled which they frankly are going to be because a lot of this isn't straightforward but I really enjoyed it as a guide to an important part of our British cultural history with a valiant attempt to place into some context to a point and all presented in a thought-provoking way.