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First printed in the Australian Journal of Comedy - Volume 1 - Number 1 - 1995
Furies of the Guillotine.
Satire in the Age of Political Correctness.
Ian McFadyen
1995
The other day it occurred to me that I could no longer be bothered watching Andrew Denton.
It wasn't the first time the thought had occurred to me, I had been aware of a feeling of mild irritation while watching Denton's show throughout 1994 but it was only the other night that it occurred to me to wonder why. After all, Denton is supposedly one of the leading lights of Australian comedy and something rare on Australian television: an intelligent person. His program is notable for its sharp, incisive, courageous, outrageous humour and yet somehow...
It would be easy to attribute my feelings to the grouchiness of advancing age. As one gets older, the more cocksure and competent young people act, the more annoying they are and when they start making vast sums of money as well it's almost unbearable. But I must confess the same irritation with other comedians who are neither young nor as successful: stand-up comedians in the clubs, established newspaper columnists and political cartoonists. What I find myself reacting to is a type of comedy which I will now attempt to define.
Before I begin, as an aside, allow me to make the observation that intellectuals rarely discourse so ineptly as when they discuss comedy. People who are widely and deeply read, who have opinions on everything seem to founder when it comes to the appreciation and critique of humour. They are lost in its realms without a compass and in desperation resort to espousing myths. There is, for example, the myth that comedy somehow cannot be explained, that the psychology of the joke cannot be analysed, that, like a quantum particle, it disappears with the act of measurement. There is also a myth that humour cannot be reduced to simple techniques, a myth which amuses those people who do precisely that for a living, apply technique to create comedy.
Generally speaking it would be fair to say that because the vast majority of cinema, television and literary reviewers in Australian are comedy illiterate, because they are ignorant of the history, styles, aims, techniques and intentions of comedy, they tend to treat it subjectively on the assumption that is the only way you can. However comedy can be evaluated in terms of its goals and the specific techniques employed.
An assumption is often made that the goal of comedy is to evoke laughter and comedy succeeds or fails insofar as it does this. This is not true. Comedy can evoke, and succeed by evoking, amusement, agreement, amazement, disbelief, recognition, relief, shock and realization.
The truth is that the word "comedy" covers a broad range of forms including but not limited to: satire, parody, farce, slapstick, joke telling, storytelling, mime, vaudeville, clowning, and monologue which are NOT all just variations on the same thing. Comedy can also be imbued with a broad range of qualities. It can, amongst other things, be grim, vicious, whimsical, insightful, sentimental, fond, outrageous, provocative, twee, neurotic, racist, sexist, cruel, cutting, crass, gross, witty, clever, disarming, truthful, esoteric and trite.
Let me now make the first of two broad distinctions between forms of comedy. The first is between comedy which is based primarily on comic creations which have little or nothing to do with anything in the real world, or only represent elements of the real world in an abstract, allegorical or archetypal way, and, on the other hand, comedy which purports to be directly concerned with the real world.
Then there is a second distinction: Comedy can do one of two things, it can reinforce the beliefs and attitudes of its audience, or it can challenge them. Most comedians rely on reinforcement. It's much easier. You simply select targets at which the audience is pre-disposed to laugh, and proceed to press the right buttons. The traditional Leagues Club comedian has thus been able to succeed by working their way through a list of stock comic topics: mothers-in-law, wives, women in general, homosexuals, Poms, Irishmen etc - all safe targets with their audience.
Some comedians however have chosen the harder route of trying to provoke, or even trick, the audience into questioning its own attitudes and assumptions. It is this comedy which accords with the second category in both dichotomies above, comedy which attempts to challenge the audience's beliefs about the real world - commonly referred to as social or political satire - which I wish to consider.
Those who have lived through the era, or read the comprehensive work "From Fringe to Flying Circus" will know that the Sixties produced what was known as The Satire Boom. It began with young university-educated comedians like Peter Cook and Alan Bennet using satire to expose what they saw as the absurdities of their society. Satire works on the principle of taking individuals, institutions, practices and ideas which most people take seriously and making them look foolish, neurotic or venal. It highlights irrationality, hypocrisy, lies and inconsistencies in people's attitudes and behaviour and as such, is a powerful tool in that it can, if successful, make people question the infallibility of its targets and in some cases, lose respect for them altogether.
Two things are necessary for successful satire. First the target must have to have some sense of respectability, sanctity, inviolability or infallibility and then the satire must reveal some truth about the target which contradicts that sense. The notion of truth is important for satire cannot make false accusations. It may exaggerate certain matters but it may not falsify. If it does, it ceases to be satire and moves into the realms of absurdism, propaganda or simply lies.
Reactions to satire differ widely because different individuals are willing to accept to widely different degrees the assertions made by the satirist about the topic. When a television comedy team portrays old Anzacs as a beer drinking racists the people who will laugh at this are people who can accept this as an accurate portrayal. People who believe this to be untrue will find the sketch offensive. It will not depend on how well the performer plays the role or how well the jokes are constructed (though sheer technique can often carry an audience along for some distance). In the end the success of the piece will depend on whether the audience thinks the piece is truthful.
This might seem to support the view of comedy as being inescapably subjective, but this is not true. What it means is that satirical statements can be subjected to the same empirical tests that any other proposition can. If satire involves exposing the truth, or showing another side, of an issue it can be judged by what extent that truth, or that other side, can be legitimately held to exist. If a comedian depicts a politician as being a criminal and the person in question demonstrably not a criminal, then the comedian is not doing satire. They may be being iconoclastic or absurdist, but their comedy, apart from probably being defamatory, fails because does not satisfy the criterion of truth. Needless to say all the other laws of logic such as rules relating to unfalsifiable propositions etc. also apply.
There is however a further consideration beyond the test of truth and falsehood. The truth which satire reveals is not just any truth, nor is it any form of absolute truth. It is simply a truth that is not commonly seen. Comedians are, at their best, individuals who have a different "take" on things, that is to say they are capable of perceiving social phenomena in a different Gestalt. Given that any event or situation can be interpreted in a great number of ways, the comedian, ideally, presents an interpretation other than the one commonly held by the audience. A comedian who simply reinforces the prevailing view of an issue is just a form of cheerleader. Satire, if done properly, should strike the audience as a revelation. Thus, great comedy consists of moments where a truth is simply and powerfully stated. "The emperor has no clothes. My God, you're right. He has no clothes. Why didn't we see it before?". The supreme ruler clad in the magic, transparent, raiment of wisdom is suddenly a naked, stupid, paunchy king. Liz and Phil are suddenly not the titular heads of the British Commonwealth but just an ordinary, saggy, aging couple. Good humour snaps the Gestalt and situations jump into another perspective just as the Necker cube or the drawn staircase flips front to back.
The British satirists of the Sixties had their work cut out for them and comedians like Peter Cook mercilessly lampooned a British establishment grimly determined to believe that Britain still had economic military and political power presence on the world stage, at a time when it was rapidly and obviously becoming irrelevant.
Tony Hancock - with his writing team, Galton and Simpson -generated, before the term satire was commonly used, one of the great satiric creations of Britain in the Fifties. Anthony A. Hancock Esq. of Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, in his homburg and overcoat with an Astrakan collar, was a relic of Edwardian aspirations, a microcosm of British pomposity confronted by a changing world. Forced because of impecuniousness to share accommodation with the devious working-class Syd James, yet trying to keep up appearances, he was the symbol of a post-war English middle-class forced into a reluctant detente with the working class.
When Galton and Simpson were fired by Hancock they went on to create the other great illustration of the British class system. Steptoe and Son. Significantly, this series based on two rag and bone men hopelessly imprisoned in the lower class, appeared at a time when England was presenting itself to the world as a "swinging" middle class country of dolly birds in miniskirts and mop-topped teenagers on scooters. Steptoe and Son reminded the world that, in the post-war era of middle class affluence, people were still alive and not so well in the basement of British society. Coronation Street went on to tell the same story without the humour.
By the late Sixties authority figures in Britain and elsewhere in the West had been so thoroughly ridiculed by satirists that they had lost much of their credibility. A major contribution to America's disenchantment with the Vietnam War came from the wholesale lampooning of the military in works like "Catch 22", "MA.S.H." and "Doctor Strangelove". Even "Sergeant Bilko" was a far cry from the nostalgic John Wayne movies of the Forties and Fifties, portraying American's peace-time army as a dumping ground for the unemployable, the lazy and the opportunistic.(1)
However as the youth culture of the Sixties and Seventies grew into the Youth Revolution, the targets of satire spread beyond the political and the powerful. As the baby boomers reached late adolescence and with it, adolescent rebellion, they tended to endorse negative views of the older generation in toto. The targets of satire now widened to include all older people. Movies like "Taking Off" portrayed all middle aged people as stuffy, sexually repressed and politically right wing. That great paradigm of American family life "Father Knows Best" was replaced by "All In The Family" which may as well have been titled "Father Knows Nothing."
By the time we got to the Seventies, the power of satire to win minds and hearts had been recognised by almost every group with an attitude. Unions and political movements sponsored street theatre groups and "alternative" theatre groups saw their primary aim as transmitting social and political messages. However, far from exploring social realities and political complexities in the tradition of Miller, O'Neill, Williams, Behan or Wilder these theatrical companies traded almost exclusively in broad simplistic "satire". Australian males were bandy legged, stubby-clutching, pot-bellied morons; returned soldiers were drunks; the U.S.A. was collectively represent by a fast-talking shyster or a red, white and blue military machine; industrialists were depicted as cigar-chomping top hatted monsters and politicians were invariably bloated, two faced puppets in double breasted pin stripe suits.
In the mid Seventies when I was writing and performing Theatre in Education I saw several TIE productions presented by other companies. I vividly remember a show devised for secondary school students about the history of trade unions in Australia where the workers were portrayed as passive nice-guys brutally oppressed by a Dickensian factory owner who literally wore a high top hat and strode around with his thumbs hooked under his braces. It was a production which would have been quite at home in Stalin's Russia - the history of industrial relations reduced to East Lynne - yet it was being presented to Year 10 Students as a serious social document. In this play the techniques of the Soviet poster painters and the State-controlled theatre were used unashamedly yet if you questioned the legitimacy of these techniques you were met by the response, "But it's true. Businessmen are all bastards."
The street-theatre groups and theatre co-ops gradually vanished as their members died, failed, drifted off into other jobs, or entered the entertainment and arts establishment, often the same establishment which they had mercilessly sent up for years. This led to one of those delightful social ironies which all eras of change produce: anti-establishment people in establishment jobs and it was ultimately to have a profound effect on the mainstream.
Throughout the Seventies, the commercial media regarded political satire as too much of a hot potato and concentrated instead on parodies of Australian society as a whole. The focus was on Australian character - or characters. The Paul Hogan Show presented a selection of Australian stereotypes: a greasy Italian, a devious Pakistani, a staggering derelict, a brain-dead surfer. Nothing really new, though the program did, commendably, contain some blisteringly funny send-ups of media personalities.
At the same time "Kingswood Country" adapted "All In The Family" (which had in turn been adapted from "Till Death Us Do Part") to Australian conditions. Here we saw a brain damaged father, an apparently heavily sedated mother, a "normal" daughter and a controversial son - in - law, in this case an Italian played by a Greek actor.
By the Eighties, the age of revolution has passed, but a generation of writers and actors whose value system had been forged in the tepid flames of the youth revolution continued to maintain their rage, even though they were now pretty much members of the establishment. Thus 1985 saw "The Gillies Report": the cleverest, best produced and probably least funny political satire ever produced in Australia. This program exploited Max Gillies phenomenal capacity for mimicry, Paddy Opwald's genius for makeup and the skills of two of Australia's most perceptive and intelligent political comedy writers - Patrick Cook and John Clarke. The program was technically excellent, dazzlingly satirical and blatantly left - wing. It was also bafflingly esoteric, virtually requiring a manual to understand many of the jokes.
The assumption underlying the entire program was that the conservative parties were racist, greedy, corrupt and stupid. The Labor Party, insofar as they had come to power and were now obliged to start implementing the same policies as the conservative parties, were also portrayed as venal, self - seeking and stupid especially. Much of it was probably true (I didn't have a manual, so the greater part of the show went over my head) but in the telling of those truths, an aura began to grow around the creators. It was an aura redolent of a certain power, a certain elan emanating from the satirists themselves. It was also, significantly, an aura which had previously been associated with people who had been targets of satire rather than purveyors of it. It was an aura of confidence, and self-assurance, even self-righteousness; an aura of infallibility, of immense power, indeed it was the aura of sanctimony.
The satirists of the Gillies Report did not simply send up - they summarily executed. Unlike previous satirists who tended to lampoon classes of people, this program lambasted individuals. It mocked the powerful for being uncaring, it mocked the well-intentioned as being weak, it mocked the rich as being blatantly criminal and it did so with an enormous sense of authority. The viewer of The Gillies Report always felt that the writers of this show had some enormous inside knowledge about the people they satirised, a knowledge which was profound and accurate. The jokes in the show were little short of indictments, the portraits denunciations. It was even high-minded enough to be able, while taking a basically left-wing stance, to attack both sides of politics equally, thereby placing itself above all parties and all political persuasions.
This sudden elevation of comedy to the moral high ground reflected another recent change in the media - the meteoric(2) rise of the journalist.
If you will allow another digression: up until the late Sixties, journalists were read but not seen. Radio and TV news was read by professional announcers with no journalistic qualifications (indeed, why would they need them?) and newspapers rarely carried by-lines. In the late Sixties the first current affairs program "This Day Tonight" appeared and with it, the first star journalists. By the late Seventies journalists, a species which had not even been SEEN on television ten years earlier, had become television's highest paid personalities. Even today, the stars of the most popular drama or comedy shows, cannot hope to make the money which a Willisee, a Martin or a Wendt can command.
But the emergence of the journalist as superstar was not purely due to hair styles and a wide selection of suits. It was catalysed by a new tone in journalism, a tone of Judgement. For, with the disappearance of journalistic anonymity, went journalistic impartiality. The journalist now became a social commentator, an investigator, even a prosecutor. Journalists led crusades against pederasts, the Queensland government, John Kerin, corrupt politicians, shonky tradespeople, failed businessmen. Their weapons ranged from the leaked document, the tear-stained witness and the vox pop to the hidden camera, the creative editing of footage and the raised eye-brow. All this was infused with a feeling of social conscience, of a modest but determined dedication to public well-being plus courage, morality and being egregiously, almost supernaturally, well informed. The role of the journalist was no longer to simply report (remember when they were called "reporters") but to expose, bring to justice, reveal, incriminate, deplore and lay bare.
What's this got to do with comedy you ask? Well simply this. If journalists are the most influential people in the media, and comedians wish to command the same sort of respect, then it's natural for comedians to start to think like journalists.
A short time after I commenced writing this piece Andrew Denton (remember Andrew Denton) launched an appeal to have Christopher Skase captured by an American bounty hunter. The bounty hunter subsequently confirmed that he would bring Skase back to Australia. This was truly an extraordinary development from a TV comedian. Was it just a joke; an elaborate stunt to boost the ratings of a flagging show? Or was he serious?
Whatever the intention, the sentiments underlying the stunt are clear. Denton has no hesitation in designating Skase as a target for opprobrium. He is, as a tonight show host, donning the armour and helmet of the brigade of television crusaders and indeed outdoing them. If the journalists have become the Committee of Public Safety, summarily convicting whomsoever they deem to be enemies of the State, then comedians like Denton (or should he be called Danton) are the Tricoteuses -the Furies of the Guillotine - cheering the tumbrels on their way and applauding each drop of the blade.
Now this business of occupying the high moral ground is inseparable from the concept of political correctness. There has been a lot discussion about political correctness, some people saying it is to be deplored, others saying, that it is an expression of social morality. Deploring is correct.
Political correctness is just a modern word - a politically correct word if you will - for dogma. It refers to those rules imposed from time to time by the usually self appointed guardians of public morality, which by breaking an individual risks vilification or ostracism. In past ages dogma was set down by a central religious authority. Today it is imposed by a network of committees, working parties, advisers, lobby groups, academics, think tanks, authors and of course journalists and it has produced some remarkable and bizarre edicts
It has for example become politically incorrect to refer to the Australian aborigines prior to British settlement as "a stone-age people" even though this description is well within the bounds of accuracy. (3) It has nevertheless been decided by someone - God knows who - that the term "stone-age" has a demeaning component, which it does not have at all for anyone who is aware of the considerable skills possessed by people who were able to craft fine tools and artefacts out of quartz. The same fate has befallen perfectly useful words like "handicapped" which has been replaced by the inaccurate "disabled." People with some missing or malfunctioning body part are not "disabled" which means "rendered incapable" all but merely impeded, i.e. handicapped.
Political correctness, which is no more than the faddish morality of the age now extends to a wide range of issues. Recently a judge presiding over a sexual harassment case remarked to counsel that, "...it is not unknown for a woman to sleep her way to the top." This statement is clearly, in a literal sense, true, yet it brought down a hail of outrage from people who suggested it was time that judges were "re-educated". Shades of Mao. Ironically, at the same time Jeff Kennett was being criticized for allegedly attempting to interfere with the independence of the judiciary.
This new conformity of opinion has now extended to all sorts of topics. It is now the officially sanctioned view that Bob Hawke is a pathetic figure and his relationship with for Blanche d'Alpuget some sad menopausal last fling, though we're all glad for Hazel. Mabo is of course a great step towards Reconciliation and to suggest that ten years of labyrinthine court cases is an unnecessarily slow and expensive way of giving some people back some land is to be immediately labelled Racist. (4) I could work my way through such edicts as the sanctity of parks and trees and native fauna, the intrinsic evil of cars and the inherent violence of men but I will concentrate simply on the attitudes to failed business people.
To set the scene, allow me one last digression. In the Eighties, Alan Bond and Christopher Skase were heroes. They ran large corporations with hundreds of employees and investors. Banks fell over themselves to lend them money. People bought and sold their stocks furiously as they rose on the exchanges. When the overseas stock market crash precipitated a recession and brought these people undone their hero status was promptly revoked and they were immediately recast as major villains. There was an immediate investigation into their working methods followed by cries to "bring them to justice". Skase was smart enough to leave the country, Bond was silly or brave enough to stay and ended up going to jail.
On any analysis the persecution of Bond and Skase represents perhaps the most massive hypocrisy of recent years. Not only were they merely the most visible of the wheelers and dealers of the Eighties but the people who invested in their ventures and lost are now not seen as greedy opportunists who got their fingers burnt but as victims. The fact that most of their "creditors" are major international finance houses who trampled each other in the rush to lend money to these people in the first place is overlooked. As to the legality of their operations, suffice it to say that, had Bond and Skase continued to prosper, no one would be clamouring for inquiries as to the legitimacy of their methods. No one worries about bending the rules when it's making them money, but if they lose money they immediately look for someone to take the blame.
For those who were involved with Bond and Skase in their hey-days, clamouring after their scalps is a way of distancing themselves. For those who weren't, it is the catharsis of seeing someone once envied being debased. It is also a great unifier at a time when Australians have little in the way of common enemies to unite against. In the absence of a Yellow Peril or a Communist threat - the entrepreneurs of the Eighties make a convenient focus point for disapproval and therefore create a sense of social cohesion. By condemning Bond and Skase we can all pretend we're glad we we're not them, deny we were ever sick with envy at their wealth, absolve ourselves from the whole yuppie greed-is-good Zeitgeist of the Eighties which is now disgraced, but damn it, deep down is still so bloody attractive.
So, in this case, the hypocrisy, the humbug, the self-serving morality, the unquestioning conformity, i.e. things which are the classic targets for satire - reside not with Skase and Bond (who always quite openly declared that they were out to make money) but in the press, the electronic media, the public and politicians on both ends of the spectrum. Yet the satirists: the columnists, the stand-up comedians and Denton still target Skase and Bond for humour.
What is important to understand is that it doesn't matter whether Bond and Skase did anything wrong or not. The point is that it is the job of the satirist to look beyond the prevailing attitudes of the day and probe a bit more deeply or widely. What we have in the Nineties is not comedians snapping Gestalts, but comedians endorsing and augmenting the established cant of the day.
Why this happens can be explained by pure economics. Comedians work to defined demographic groups. Denton, for example, aims at a young, usually tertiary educated audience and it's bad business to attack the beliefs of your audience. For most young comedians, and Denton, the safe targets are all, as in the Sixties, middle aged authority figures. Jeff Kennett has, for example, has become as obligatory a target for this audience as Joh Bjelke Petersen and Ronald Reagan was in the Seventies. There is no insight associated with these token jibes. They are simply the young, radical equivalent of jokes about poofters, lezzos, Abos, Irishmen and Jews made by the old pub comics. They are simply one group of people making fun of another group whom they find threatening or vulnerable.
Nor is this predilection for easy targets confined to younger comedians. We still have aging hippies working in the establishment but trying to maintain a spark of protest against business, capitalism and government. Bruce Petty still produces cartoons which seem to have been recycled from the McMahon era and Leunig, one of the world's greatest cartoonists, is capable of such odd lapses as producing as a series of cartoons deriding people who wear suits - something which would be unremarkable in a student but is odd in a mature adult.
If satire is a response to irrationality then Australia abounds in topics for satire. This is a country where a Prime Minister (5) who specialises in combative politics and highlighting social divisions campaigns on a platform of reconciliation; where people who don't own cars object to freeways; where everyone acknowledges that we have to become more competitive but refuses to give up a couple of totally gratuitous holidays, where people get paid more to be on holidays than to be at work; where a state premier who has three senior women cabinet ministers is portrayed as a member of the "old boys network" while the Prime Minister with a front bench full of overweight males is seen as a champion of women's rights; where there are people who inexplicably think that aborigines and homosexuals are being given preferential treatment; where people object to the unemployed being paid the dole but don't seem to mind many public servants being paid a full salary to do virtually nothing; where grand opera is subsidised by the government while homeless kids starve; where a university official's life is ruined because he touched a breast; where people build roads, houses, swimming pools and garages out in the bush and then lock their cats up because they're a threat to wildlife; where Elle McPherson is pronounced to be a feminist; where Elle McFeast is regarded as a comedian.
Where we might ask is the satire on Mabo, the anti-loggers, Greenpeace, the unfair dismissal laws, the affirmative action regulations, the social vilification legislation, the government's craven toadying to S.E.Asia, the GATT agreement, the failure of Aboriginal health services, the Gay Mardi Gras, the Albert Park protesters, Pay TV, the superunions and, most of all, the aspirations and attitudes of Australian people in the Nineties? All these issues have gigantic implications for the future and yet what do we get joke about? Alan Bond, whose fortunes have no implications for anything at all.
One comedian, John Clarke, and one television series "Frontline" have recently succeeded in challenging the official views on contemporary people, practices and policies but we are still devoid of any program or satirist which looks humorously at the attitudes of Australians overall. Galton and Simpson, where are you? We are desperately in need of Hancock of the Nineties, to show us who we really are.
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