Comedy helping us through the bad times
COMEDY seems to be the new rock and roll.
Top UK comedians, including South Tyneside’s very own Sarah Millican, are raking in the dough as the country goes mad for stand-up stars.
Is this desire for a good laugh connected with the economic bad times, I wonder?
Certainly, daily reports on the parlous state of the Eurozone, riots against the cuts in Greece, and attempts by the International Monetary Fund to save the fragile world economy are not exactly the recipe for belly laughs and chuckles.
But I have to admit I haven’t been bitten by the stand-up bug.
Unlike millions of Britons, I have no desire to rush out and buy the latest Michael McIntyre DVD, recorded before an adoring audience in some cavernous arena.
The new brand of British comedy just seems too slick and packaged for the download generation.
And there’s just too much of it.
Maybe my irritation is fuelled by the boom in the stand-up industry, complemented by comedy clubs in seemingly every city centre.
It’s made comedy not more subversive and cutting-edge, simply another money-spinning commodity, which is almost impossible to avoid.
I went to a concert at the Hammersmith Apollo, London, before Christmas, and the venue was not dominated by posters for rock acts – but yet another stand-up comedy star enjoying his 15 minutes of commercial fame.
Back in the 1980s, a new wave of comedians swept away the British comedy old guard, who were considered sexist and out-of-touch.
There was a lot of truth in this charge, since the same comedians used to populate our TV screens week in and week out.
But some of the old comedy boys – and nearly all of our top UK comedians were male back then – used to retort that while they may not have been hip and relevant, they were actually funnier than the young comedy pretenders.
A quarter of a century later, Jimmy Tarbuck and his ilk may have been consigned to the comedy dustbin of history.
But what’s this? Haven’t we replaced the old boys’ network of British comedy with another bunch of comics who are never off the telly?
The UK’s most popular stand-up comedians seem to spend most of their time appearing on programmes fronted by other stand-up stars.
You scratch my back ...
A newspaper reported at the weekend that comedian Peter Kay grossed more than £20m from his stand-up tour in 2011.
Now, Kay may be a funny guy, but there must be something else the great British public wants to spends its hard-earned cash on?
Even Tarbie and Brucie in their prime could never have dreamed of making that kind of dosh.
It just strikes me that too many money-spinning new comedians is actually no laughing matter.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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