from May 2015
TOPICAL COMEDY
The General Election campaign saw a topical comedy gold rush: Jack Dee, Charlie Brooker, Newzoids, the Now Show gang, busloads of Ballot Monkeys and the climactic cheese-dream team of Jeremy Paxman and David Mitchell, all panning the silt, looking for that definitive description of Ed Miliband’s mouth.
And it wasn’t just the full timers. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook and BumBumBot (a lavatory humour sharing app for six year olds that only exists in my head), broadcast satirists are now in competition with every smartarse with a smartphone. A good Twitter joke can be round the world before a writing room has ordered coffee and found the wifi password. So how to stay ahead?
Topical comedy is less about news and more about shared experience – in this case, an agreed subset of ‘most read’ stories. And when everybody is dropping their bucket down the same well, we all pull up the same thing (usually a dull man on a low chair boring a schoolchild’s face into a table).
Topicals often rely on a recognisable cast too. Writers find themselves shamefully asking, ‘Who’s the drunk one we use now?’ unsure if a boilerplate Oliver Reed gag needs to be hammered to fit Pete Doherty. Sometimes the character we give public figures feels like it was hastily grabbed from the paltry dressing-up box a mediaeval village might use for staging vulgar instructional plays; Eric Pickles clambering aboard the pageant wagon, his ‘Fat Man’ tabard and codpiece still warm from John Prescott. Worryingly, the archetype sometimes obscures the real person; were we blinded to the real nature of Cyril Smith because he was the lardy one, rather than the seedy one?
These limitations of cast and character mean that if you’re cobbling together a belter from the usual shortcuts, the social media thumb-sprinters will always win against a team working to a broadcast timetable, so maybe professionals should use their comparatively leisurely deadlines as a bonus, not a burden, to look for new approaches.
On the ‘Wipe’ shows we do with Charlie Brooker, it’s down to staring. Researchers, loggers, producers, writers, and Charlie, all gawping at the dancing news pixels like an old Magic Eye picture, until the garbled fractal resolves into a hidden layer containing the truth about Ed Balls (at which point we must look away to avoid exploding like Paul Freeman at the end of ‘Raiders of The Lost Ark’.)
It’s fine to say that David Cameron is a Spam Toff, but Weekly Wipe noticed the Tory leader’s habit of walking off while journalists are still talking, like undercranked footage of Michael Howard. Researched and edited into a tight, damning montage, it made a fresh point about the swaggering essence of the man, without resorting to top hats.
It’s important that professional topical comedy aims to do more than quickly snap extant parts together. In the US, John Oliver and Jon Stewart mount regular successful assaults on uncharted faces of the topical mountain. The failure of British satire to land any meaningful punches from the Leveson enquiry – a story that included not only Mr Burns from The Simpsons, but all the journalist pig puppets from Spitting Image – is remarkable. It was covered by most satirists (with the exception of John Finnemore on The Now Show) as a story about what Rebekah Brooks’s hair looks like. (It’s the chap out of The Wonder Stuff, by the way.)
And the beneficiary of that failure was a newspaper empire that used its biggest election front page for a knee-jerk ‘joke’ even the laziest Tweeter might have thought a bit route one: a big photo of Bad Sandwich Eater Ed Miliband eating a sandwich badly. Which proves weak topical satire can still land a surprisingly effective punch, but makes the heart of the comedy writer sink like a stone.
Joel Morris is a writer whose credits include Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, Newzoids, Viz, It’s Kevin, and That Mitchell and Webb Look.
TOPICAL COMEDY
The General Election campaign saw a topical comedy gold rush: Jack Dee, Charlie Brooker, Newzoids, the Now Show gang, busloads of Ballot Monkeys and the climactic cheese-dream team of Jeremy Paxman and David Mitchell, all panning the silt, looking for that definitive description of Ed Miliband’s mouth.
And it wasn’t just the full timers. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook and BumBumBot (a lavatory humour sharing app for six year olds that only exists in my head), broadcast satirists are now in competition with every smartarse with a smartphone. A good Twitter joke can be round the world before a writing room has ordered coffee and found the wifi password. So how to stay ahead?
Topical comedy is less about news and more about shared experience – in this case, an agreed subset of ‘most read’ stories. And when everybody is dropping their bucket down the same well, we all pull up the same thing (usually a dull man on a low chair boring a schoolchild’s face into a table).
Topicals often rely on a recognisable cast too. Writers find themselves shamefully asking, ‘Who’s the drunk one we use now?’ unsure if a boilerplate Oliver Reed gag needs to be hammered to fit Pete Doherty. Sometimes the character we give public figures feels like it was hastily grabbed from the paltry dressing-up box a mediaeval village might use for staging vulgar instructional plays; Eric Pickles clambering aboard the pageant wagon, his ‘Fat Man’ tabard and codpiece still warm from John Prescott. Worryingly, the archetype sometimes obscures the real person; were we blinded to the real nature of Cyril Smith because he was the lardy one, rather than the seedy one?
These limitations of cast and character mean that if you’re cobbling together a belter from the usual shortcuts, the social media thumb-sprinters will always win against a team working to a broadcast timetable, so maybe professionals should use their comparatively leisurely deadlines as a bonus, not a burden, to look for new approaches.
On the ‘Wipe’ shows we do with Charlie Brooker, it’s down to staring. Researchers, loggers, producers, writers, and Charlie, all gawping at the dancing news pixels like an old Magic Eye picture, until the garbled fractal resolves into a hidden layer containing the truth about Ed Balls (at which point we must look away to avoid exploding like Paul Freeman at the end of ‘Raiders of The Lost Ark’.)
It’s fine to say that David Cameron is a Spam Toff, but Weekly Wipe noticed the Tory leader’s habit of walking off while journalists are still talking, like undercranked footage of Michael Howard. Researched and edited into a tight, damning montage, it made a fresh point about the swaggering essence of the man, without resorting to top hats.
It’s important that professional topical comedy aims to do more than quickly snap extant parts together. In the US, John Oliver and Jon Stewart mount regular successful assaults on uncharted faces of the topical mountain. The failure of British satire to land any meaningful punches from the Leveson enquiry – a story that included not only Mr Burns from The Simpsons, but all the journalist pig puppets from Spitting Image – is remarkable. It was covered by most satirists (with the exception of John Finnemore on The Now Show) as a story about what Rebekah Brooks’s hair looks like. (It’s the chap out of The Wonder Stuff, by the way.)
And the beneficiary of that failure was a newspaper empire that used its biggest election front page for a knee-jerk ‘joke’ even the laziest Tweeter might have thought a bit route one: a big photo of Bad Sandwich Eater Ed Miliband eating a sandwich badly. Which proves weak topical satire can still land a surprisingly effective punch, but makes the heart of the comedy writer sink like a stone.
Joel Morris is a writer whose credits include Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, Newzoids, Viz, It’s Kevin, and That Mitchell and Webb Look.