Where were you when you heard the exit poll? I was at a comedy show: Matt Forde’s Election Party Lock-In at Soho theatre in London, to be precise. The satirist, self-proclaimed Blairite and host of Dave TV’s Unspun had just canvassed his (all-white, all-male) politician panel for predictions, which ranged between a 45- and 75-seat Tory majority. Cut to David Dimbleby on the BBC live feed, the dropping of a political bombshell – and raucous delight and disbelief in this subterranean room. Comedy is about surprise, right? Here was a bigger shock than anyone present anticipated.
I spent the final week of the election campaign seeking out live political comedy. Away from the TV screens, able to be as current, candid and non-partisan as they pleased, what were comedians saying about May v Corbyn? One of the country’s most venerable political jokers is Andy Zaltzman, whose Bugle podcast enjoyed a rare live outing, also at Soho. The guest co-host when I attended was Nish Kumar: another fine social commentator, whose leftwing sympathies are usually clear – although at the Bugle I attended, no one was pinning colours to masts.
It was a loose, fun hour: I liked Zaltzman’s gag about the Lib Dems’ transformation into “the British Notional Party”, and another branding the prospect of a Corbyn win “the biggest ‘if’ since Rudyard Kipling projected the titles of his poems on to the buildings of Gotham City”. But it defaulted too readily to the old idea that British politics is lifeless and the parties are all bad as each other. One gag claimed May and Corbyn weren’t debating one another because they were both socially awkward, which was pointedly not the case. Another claimed that “the losers [in the BBC leaders’ debate] were all of us, democracy and the concept of hope”, which was an odd comment on an election that offered the starkest – and to many on the left, the most optimistic – choice many of us can remember.
What struck me about the Bugle event, and more so when I listened to David Schneider’s Strong & Stable podcast – on which he commentated weekly on the election – was how firmly the rightwing press set the terms of the debate. Jokes about Corbyn’s supposed sympathy for terrorists were mandatory. The panel at Forde’s show featured a Tory, a Lib Dem and a disillusioned former Labour MP opposed to the party’s leadership. The Corbyn insurgency – the night’s big story – was not represented.
On the Strong & Stable podcast, Simon Evans compared the Labour leader’s supposed extremism to Enoch Powell’s. The statement went unchallenged. But elsewhere, the jokes were droll (I liked one quoted tweet likening Theresa May to “a silent movie star unable to cope with the advent of the talkies”) and well balanced, with thoughtful analysis. While laughs were low in the mix, Forde’s Lock-In had its moments, too: I loved his opening question to the gay Lib Dem former mayoral candidate Brian Paddick. “Firstly, Brian, is it a sin…?”
On Strong & Stable, two of the three panellists (Armando Iannucci and Ayesha Hazarika) were out-and-proud lefties. At Soho, Kumar joked about the tribal nature of the Bugle event, where he doubted there was a single leave voter in the crowd. At the Backyard Comedy Club in east London on election eve, the opposite was true – and luridly so. The event, Standup for Democracy, was a fundraiser for Invoke Democracy Now, a pro-Brexit campaign group. You couldn’t hope for a louder and more clear corrective to all those inane protests against comedy’s leftwing bias. This gig was raucously chauvinist, as the EU, feminism and political correctness were loudly booed, and compere Dominic Frisby sang a comic (but seemingly sincere) love song to Nigel Farage.
The election barely registered here: with Brexit seemingly secured, perhaps it was irrelevant to this crowd. Islam was the burning issue: both Miriam Elia and Will Franken joked repeatedly and apparently without irony about the conspiracy of silence surrounding Muslim involvement in terrorism. That’s right – apparently no one ever links terrorism to Islam. “You’re racist!”, a heckler shouted as he and his friends quit the gig. And Franken spat four-letter words back at them. The Backyard gig, in essence, offered the Daily Mail in standup form, the worldview that looks at Corbyn-style empathy and basic decency and calls them treachery.
“I’d like to thank the prime minister and the British public,” tweeted Forde on the morning after the vote, “for delivering the result that comedy required.” Judging by the handful of gigs I saw, satirists had no more insight than anyone else into the real story of #GE2017, nor were they – contrary to those perennial accusations of bias – putting their shoulders anywhere near Corbyn’s wheel. More campaigning acts – Josie Long, say, or Bridget Christie – might have expressed their commitment more explicitly. But at this election, it turned out to be the Labour leader, not comedy, who had the last laugh.
