Critics aren’t comedy snobs – I like Lee Mack as much…

Critics aren’t comedy snobs – I like Lee Mack as much as Stewart Lee

Similarly entertaining … Lee Mack and Stewart Lee

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us,” as my national poet once said, “to see oorsels as ithers see us!” There was me thinking I was an underpaid, under-appreciated hack: a comedy critic, of all things, plankton-low down the cultural food chain. But then I read the chapter on critics in sociologist Sam Friedman’s new book Comedy and Distinction: the Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour, and – lo! – it turns out I have “social power”. I am a taste-maker, no less, on whose every word intelligent people hang when deciding what they should or shouldn’t be laughing at.

I first wrote about Friedman’s research after a talk he gave at this year’s Edinburgh fringe. I’ve read the book since, and last week spoke at its launch at LSE. Crudely put, the book charts the rise of comedy snobbery, and the degree to which people signal their social status according to which comedians they like. Chapter 8 of the book traces comedy critics’ role in this process, and, despite Friedman’s own work as a critic, it’s not pretty. Critics, he writes, “attempt to definitively assign value to some forms of comedy over others”. We “tell people’s what’s funny”. Or not: I am pegged in the book – with reference to this review of the Dutch comic Hans Teeuwen – as a critic who prefers comedians not to be funny at all.

I think there are misconceptions here about comedy critics, and I’m not talking about my po-facedness alone. It’s true that critics are more likely than your casual comedy-goer to prefer formally inventive or not-just-funny comedy. That’s an obvious consequence of seeing lots of comedy. But that tendency can be overstated – as per comic Spencer Brown’s recent piece for Chortle, which diagnoses “the desperation of the comedy critic to elevate comedy (and thus their own standing) to the position of high art”. In the same vein, Friedman quotes one interviewee in his critics chapter who asserts: “There are very few things that are both popular and good.” But it’s not a critic who says that. No critic I know would: we’re not that snooty. (Our editors wouldn’t allow it.)

I wonder, too, whether Friedman exaggerates our intention, and our capacity, to “taste-make”. Clearly critics on newspapers such as the Guardian have some taste-making effect: our preferences are given legitimacy, status even, by being regularly expressed here. But that effect is limited, especially if the artform is in flux and not yet wholly in thrall to the usual highbrow/lowbrow hierarchies, as Friedman acknowledges with comedy. I’ve enthused as much about Lee Mack as Stewart Lee. But, even when I go ape for arty comedy, my taste-making effect is strictly circumscribed. Michael McIntyre, John Bishop et al are Britain’s most popular comedians: moneyed, well-loved and overexposed. Hans Teeuwen, meanwhile, languishes in obscurity – or the Netherlands, which in UK comedy terms is much the same thing.

And that’s fine. I’m not trying to “definitively assign value” or trying to “tell people what’s funny”. I say what I find funny and why, and I try my best not to criticise anyone else’s sense of humour in the process.

Ah, but I have no control over that, Friedman would say – and did say, repeatedly, over a pint in the pub about a month ago. I’m being buffeted in the wind of sociological forces I can’t control. Resistance is futile: as the Guardian’s comedy critic, my effect is to shore up highbrow values, and I’ve got to lump it. Well, I pig-headedly disagree: what’s the use of having “social power” if you can’t use it for good?

I recommend you read Sam’s book to work out if he’s right, while I soldier on, in hopeless defiance of his research, trying to champion the comedy that excites me – without sponsoring snobbery while I do so.