The brave clown who speaks the truth and shames the devil is a showbiz tradition, from Charlie Chaplin to Lenny Bruce. The comedian more than any other creative is best-placed to play the role of the cheeky urchin who points out that the Emperor has no clothes. But in recent years, drolls have ceased to be outlaws – and have become lapdogs of the liberal establishment at best and boot-boy bullies of Jews at their very worst.
The apparent antipathy towards the Jewish people on the comedy circuit is noticeably greater than that in, say, music or acting. Does it stem – as so much anti-Semitism does – from envy, as ‘Jewish humour’ is such a thing, and Jews have been so historically successful in the comedy racket? To the kind of men who are drawn to comedy – often driven by the kind of suppressed rage which comes from being socially awkward (many comedians say that they became clowns to avoid being picked on) and not physically attractive even when young – I imagine this must be very galling.
In comedy as in so many other professions, Gaza has been just the excuse
In comedy as in so many other professions, Gaza has been just the excuse. In February the Soho Theatre banned the comedian Paul Currie after he displayed a Palestinian flag onstage and the venue said that Jews were ‘subjected to verbal abuse’ and alleged that Currie ‘aggressively demanded’ that they leave. (Currie appears to disagree with the theatre’s account of what happened and vehemently denies that his conduct was anti-Semitic.)
In May the comedian Dane Baptiste told an unidentified female ‘Zionist’ on Instagram: ‘I want you to sit down with your husband and kids and imagine what their lives will be without you, because north London is a quick trip to make… Ask about and comedians will tell you I will be at your literal doorstep. Your agent won’t keep you safe. Your act is dumb but don’t be a dumb woman. I will sit in prison while your family sit at the cemetery.’ (Afterwards, Baptiste said he had ‘no ill intention towards the Jewish community and never have’.)
This month at Edinburgh, the Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish wrote under the headline ‘This was the ugliest Fringe moment I’ve ever witnessed’ of a show by Reginald D Hunter:
‘This came down to five minutes midway in when a theatre full of people erupted in vocal animosity at an Israeli couple who had briefly heckled Hunter… where he said a Channel 5 documentary containing a scene about an abusive wife herself accusing her husband of abuse made him think, “It’s like being married to Israel.” There was audience laughter in response, but not from the couple on the front row, who shouted “not funny”. The pair, who said they were from Israel, then endured their fellow audience members shouting expletives (“f— off” among them), and telling them to go – with slow-hand claps, boos and cries of “genocidal maniac”, “you’re not welcome” and “free Palestine” part of the toxic mix. But here he gave an object lesson in how not to pick on people in the front row. Instead of tolerating the couple’s joint heckle, he doubled down with a sinister air of beaming bellicosity: “I’ve been waiting for you all summer, where the f— you been?” He continued: “You can say it’s not funny to you, but if you say it to a room full of people who laughed, you look foolish. Look at you making everyone love Israel even more,” he jeered, after the woman remonstrated with the audience. “That tells me that I still got voltage,” he purred, with satisfaction, after the pair left, slowly (it turned out that the man was disabled, not that this caused a flicker of restraint in the host, who openly laughed at them). He then related a remark that his female partner had made at the time of the Holocaust controversy about accessing the Jewish Chronicle’s website: “Typical f—ing Jews, they won’t tell you anything unless you subscribe.” “It’s just a joke,” he added.’
Afterwards, Hunter commented: ‘There was an unfortunate incident in my new show Fluffy Fluffy Beavers. As a comedian I do push boundaries in creating humour, it’s part of my job. This inevitably creates divided opinions but I am staunchly anti-war and anti-bully. I regret any stress caused to the audience and venue staff members.’
As Cavendish points out, Hunter also was making money from the oldest hatred long before the war in Gaza, having been accused of anti-Semitism at the 2006 Fringe for joking about Holocaust denial (Hunter later defended himself by saying ‘the joke isn’t about the Jews, it is about freedom of thought and freedom of expression.’)
And of course the ugliest – in every way – man in comedy, Frankie Boyle, deserves a dishonourable mention here. Way back in 2010, the BBC Trust was forced to apologise over his hideous 2008 routine in which he compared Palestine to a cake being ‘punched to pieces by a very angry Jew…I’m actually studying that Israeli army martial arts. And I know 16 ways to kick a Palestinian woman in the back.’
This was aired on that bastion of civilisation Radio 4, the comedy output of which in recent years has declined from woefully limp to malign circle jerk. It’s received wisdom that Radio 4 is losing so many listeners because of its political output, but I’d bet that the alleged comedy has a lot to answer for too. The flip side of the virulence displayed by the likes of Boyle and Hunter is the castration of comedy. The Radio 4 panel shows sniggering about Tories and Terfs are very much playing the Bully’s Best Friend role.
It’s fair to say that the most craven and conformist people in entertainment are now comedians – they make actors look like flaming anarchists – as they glide bovinely on that conveyor belt from uni to the Fringe to the BBC, state-sanctioned battery hens laying eggs loudly on hand-outs extorted from the forced licence fee. The women are no better; a bunch of tame Transmaids who never dare comment on the funniest phenomenon of the 21st century – men pretending to be women. I love Radio 4 Extra but when their Comedy Club section starts at 10 p.m., the heart-breaking humourlessness of the modern comics who introduce it makes me think ‘Is this a joke?’ That’s about the only time I do think it.
So it’s a choice the blandness of the panel-show herd or the beastliness of the bully-boys when it comes to comedy these days. It’s telling that Reginald Hunter, like Boyle, isn’t averse to making jokes about women. Hunter has joked, ‘Apparently rape is the worst thing to do to a woman. I disagree. The worst thing to do to a woman is rape her, then call her fat.’ Jews and women are the two groups comedians can vilify with impunity these days, with no fear that they’ll be the subject of death-threats or backdoor blasphemy laws.
Both groups are ceaselessly gaslighted; the Israeli couple at Hunter’s Edinburgh show represented their country perfectly that night, surrounded by hostile enemies attacking them from all sides whilst claiming that they, the Israelis, were the aggressors. The award-winning comic writer Caroline Gold says, ‘This time the hate is just for the Jews, so all of the spite, all of the disgust, is distilled into that. The old Jewish jokes never had the hate; they were stereotypical but not savage. This new breed – it’s bierkeller stuff, not Northern working-men’s club.’
Comedy has become the most smug and authoritarian milieu of all the entertainments; while waving the woke flag, it zeros in on the most perennially persecuted people in history with added relish. I can’t help but think of the terrific, terrifying play by Trevor Griffiths, Comedians, written in 1975, in which a comedian who is ostensibly a decent man turns out to have had a very unpredictable reaction to visiting the site of an extermination camp.
It’s a fact that anti-Semitism some time ago – during the Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn – shook off its dowdy old right-wing duds and became one of the coolest non-binary clubs in town. This, added to the specific envy of the success of Jews in comedy, makes me reflect yet again that a future full of fun and laughter is not coming anytime soon – onstage or off.
