Political correctness hasn’t spoilt comedy. It’s opened rich seams of comic gold, writes David Stubbs in this extract from his history of British comedy, from Chaplin to the present day

“Alternative comedy”, which was inaugurated circa 1979, was a dismal label (if punk had been called “alternative rock” we might still all be wearing flares to this day), a millstone around those who practised and were associated it. No alternative comedian, however alternative, would describe themselves as “alternative comedian” on their calling card.

And yet, amid the roll call of heroes celebrated in this volume, political correctness, which in reality means common decency and consideration for the feelings of all rather than liberal tyranny, may be the biggest hero of them all. Political correctness didn’t stifle or gag comedy, impose on it a straitjacket of leftist conformity. Political correctness liberated comedy, forced it to resort to its creative imagination, helped create a new self-consciousness about what it meant to make comedy, to be more inclusive and open to new forms, new avenues of social exploration rather than fall back on lazy, reactionary types and tropes. In 2020, John Cleese, who ossified into a bit of a reactionary himself in old age, asked: “Can you tell me a woke joke?” But that’s missing the point. That’s to regard political correctness as mere virtue signalling in lieu of comedy, like John Thompson of The Fast Show’s character Bernard Righton (“An Englishman, an Irishman and a Pakistani walk into a bar. What a perfect example of racial integration.”) Political correctness was in many ways about absence – the absence of material which, intentionally or unintentionally, was exclusionary or insulting to the LGBT+ community, ethnic minorities, women, the disabled. Alternative comedy held such kick-down mockery in contempt, refused to resort to it. All of which left younger comedians with a clean slate on which to inscribe fresh ideas, new approaches, invite the experiences and talents of people who were previously marginalised, routinely, institutionally, if not always consciously.

As for the “political” bit, well, certainly there was a shift from pre-to post 1979. There was the odd Socialist such as Clive Dunn, for example, but generally, from Morecambe & Wise to Ken Dodd, comedians inclined towards the Conservative. Post-alternative comedy, it was a given that the new vanguard of comedians would be left-leaning. Bob Monkhouse, himself a Conservative once remarked that in his day, politics was considered taboo, whereas sexual innuendo was more than fair game. From the 80s onwards, it was the other way round, with sex taboo, a disapproving “ism” attached to it, and politics more openly discussed. In fairness, the number of out-and-out political comedians has always been exaggerated. Those few that were had to contend with the accusation that politics and comedy were a poor mix, as on a daytime TV show in which Jim Bowen, in discussion with Mark Steel, was astonished to learn that Steel was a comedian since so far as he was concerned, he didn’t have a funny bone in his body. Unfair, since one of Steel’s best jokes is both political and among my most cherished. He describes his perfect day as comprising “a worker’s uprising in the morning followed by a quiet drink with friends in the evening.”

That said, the “politics” of British comedy, before and after its 1979 renaissance, wasn’t so much party political, as subtly ingrained, inclined towards a sense of national superiority. This, paradoxically, is down to the English in particular being miserably monolingual, the English language being the international one, as well as the language of the last global superpower. One of the joys of English comedy is its love of the English language, its idioms, its soaring elegance, its playful turns of phrase, its thudding bathos, its profanity, its puncturing and pisstaking. However, concomitant with this is a sense that foreigners, being less able than us to pick up much more than the basics of the English language, missing its nuances, innuendo, insinuations are dim and humourless by comparison with ourselves.

From Fawlty Towers’ Manuel to Mind Your Language, from a long parade of sternly unfunny Europeans and ’Allo ’Allo Frenchies, to ingratiating Pakistanis, this assumption went remarkably unquestioned for a long time. It didn’t occur to generations of English comedians that being able to speak passably in a second language was a mark of superior linguistic skills, a greater degree of sophistication. No – foreigners’ muddled English was evidence of their muddled minds. Only we, the English especially, were privy to the arcane secrets of the highest comedy of which human beings are capable. Or, as the great Al Murray, as the Pub Landlord, put it, the problem with the French is that “they’ve got a town called Brest – and none of them think it’s funny.”

Maybe we are more disposed to comedy than other nations. But that’s not necessarily proof that we are less inhibited, less staid, more inclined to give authority a kick up the backside. The imperative that you have to laugh is displaced energy, energy that perhaps other nations devoted towards converting themselves from monarchies to republics – the French, for example.

Different Times is a celebration of British comedy in the 20th and 21st century, in cinema and on TV, which explores the role of so-called “political correctness” in banishing its lazier, more offensive stereotypes and giving rise to the richer, more nuanced comedy of our own times.

This is an extract from Different Times: A History of British Comedy by David Stubbs (Faber & Faber, £20). Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

David Stubbs is a journalist and author who started working life at Melody Maker before going on to contribute to The Guardian, Record Collector, The Quietus, The Times and Sunday Times among others. He has written several books on music, including Future Days, a study of the “Krautrock” movement, Mars By 1980, a history of electronic music and Fear Of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen, a comparative study of avant garde visual art and experimental music, as well a number of comic volumes including The Prince Charles Letters, a spoof collection of the monarch in waiting’s correspondence.

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