Comedy is under scrutiny as never before. So when is a joke not a joke? Context, intent and expectations are all key, say leading exponents of the art

Comedy is such a simple thing. One person tells a joke. Another person laughs. The end. Simple.

Except, as every comedian knows, simple doesn’t mean easy. Not only do you have to make someone laugh (which is hard), if you’re a comedian, you have to make them laugh in the right way. At the right thing. For the right reason. We can all make a gag about Trump’s hairdo, but that won’t get us very far.

And because of this, comics are constantly asking themselves questions. What’s the truth I’m telling? What is the power I’m tilting at? Who or what am I mocking? And, more recently: who is going to take offence?

On 11 June, the long-established comedian Jo Brand made a one-liner on a Radio 4 programme, Heresy. She cracked a slightly slack gag about the recent trend of throwing milkshakes over rightwing politicians. Brand said: “Why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?” The audience laughed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Sun decries Jo Brand’s joke on its front page.

Nigel Farage took offence (which is odd, because he does like a chuckle). He called Brand’s joke “an incitement to violence” and demanded that the police investigate. They did so, and decided, legally, it wasn’t. In fact, it was a joke. But, after two days of media furore, Brand apologised.

Jokes are under scrutiny. Though the fundamentals of comedy haven’t altered – comedians are employed to make people laugh – where those jokes go is changing. No longer does a gag stay in the room where it was told. If it’s filmed on a phone and put online, it spreads to an audience for which it was never intended. If it’s repeated on social media – clipped short, removed from the atmosphere around it, ripped from the buildup created by the comedian and sent out to people who don’t even want to hear it – then it travels further; but also something is different. The words are the same, but it’s not the same joke.

To be clear – it’s important to be clear – this article is not a “whither free speech” article. It’s not a piece that asks: “What can comedians make jokes about these days?” Because the answer is, of course, anything they like. If you’re a comedian, that’s your job (and your moral compass). But is it possible to be a comedian when you don’t know who you’re making jokes for? When you’re unsure who’s listening and what kind of mood they’re in? How can comedians tell the jokes they want in a world where the butt of those jokes – from powerful politicians to powerless constituents – don’t just get upset but turn a community against you or threaten legal action? Can comedy survive in this age of outrage?

I call up comedians: Daliso Chaponda, the Malawian comic; American satirist Jena Friedman; Tiff Stevenson, the English standup; Wacky Racists comedy club host Sophie Duker; and Josie Long, who are all taking one-person shows to Edinburgh. I also talk to Geoff Norcott, Katy Brand and Brian Logan, the Guardian’s comedy critic. Frankie Boyle, outrage-iste extraordinaire, links me to his recent Instagram post about free speech; Stewart Lee writes me a long email.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘There’s a bond of trust’: Katy Brand. Photograph: Karla Gowlett

Everyone I speak to insists that there is a difference between being in the room when a joke is told and receiving a truncated gag a few days later. “The more distant you are from the origin of a joke, the less funny it is,” says Katy Brand, who has written a book about Dirty Dancing, out in October. “The joke goes out in rings, like a pebble in water, out and out and out, until it’s a headline and people read it and get offended. The bigger the potential audience, the higher the risk of offence.”

It’s not just the size of the audience, though; it’s whether that audience wants to hear the joke. When standups perform live, the people in the room really want to be there. They’ve paid to be in on the joke, to be part of that particular comedy moment. In the past, Lee has called audiences “complicit”: involved as soon as a comedian says something and they laugh. Brand points out that at a comedy gig two contracts are operating. One is between the comedian and the venue. This one’s a literal contract that hires the comedian to try and make people laugh for a specified amount of time, for a specified amount of money. And then there’s another, virtual, contract, between the comedian and the audience. It says: “This is a space where we are going to have fun.” This contract is a licence to play.

“So you can enjoy yourself,” says Brand. “There’s a bond of trust and you’re naturally freer. You’re cut some slack about what you’re doing, because the audience understand your intent.”

In that room, there’s an acknowledgement that jokes take time to develop. To get an Edinburgh show, comedians need to hone their act in front of a live audience. Lee writes: “I don’t know how I would have developed some of the initially unwieldy and apparently tasteless ideas I have had over the years, that went on to become beloved bits, under the scrutiny of the online era. Things that you have maybe only done once in a little club, and which could still be ill formed and thoughtlessly worded in their infant state.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Onstage is a protected space’: comedian Josie Long. Photograph: David Bebber/The Guardian

So the comedian’s best, most solid defence to a joke being misinterpreted is this: you had to be there. You had to be in the room. “Ninety per cent of people would probably laugh if they were in the room,” says Katy Brand. “Onstage is a protected space,” says Josie Long, who is changing her subject matter at Edinburgh from politics to parenthood. Logan agrees. “There’s a fluidity of communication on a comedy stage,” he says. “A lot of a joke might be gestural, or playing a game with truth and fiction.”

But that defence doesn’t always work. After all, Jo Brand felt duty-bound to apologise, despite doing what she was paid for. And “I was only joking, you had to be there” is the refuge of scoundrels, surely? Isn’t that what Ukip candidate Carl Benjamin said recently about a 2016 video remark he made about Jess Phillips: “I wouldn’t even rape you”?

“The difference is, he’s a politician, and she’s a comedian,” says Tiff Stevenson. Britain’s Got Talent veteran Chaponda makes this point, too. If you’re in a job where your words are supposed to be taken seriously (a politician), then you should expect people to do just that. If you’re in a job where your words are supposed to be taken unseriously (a comedian), then, surely, you should expect people to understand that too. “In comedy, you say things you don’t necessarily mean,” says Chaponda, a sentiment echoed by Katy Brand: “When someone says something as a joke, this doesn’t mean it actually happened.” It’s that contract, again. If you pay for comedy, then you expect to hear jokes. Sometimes it can seem like people don’t know what jokes are. Jokes aren’t journalism.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘In comedy, you say things you don’t necessarily mean’: Daliso Chaponda. Photograph: SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Expectations are part of this, of course, and even within comedy there are different expectations as to what you’re going to be laughing at. If you book tickets to see Michael McIntyre and take your 12-year-old child, you would be justified in being shocked if McIntyre came on stage and did a Chris Rock set. If you listen to Radio 4, you’d be right to take offence if Miles Jupp started swearing. But, other than that, strap yourself in. Comedians push your buttons. That’s what they do.

Geoff Norcott, who had a documentary on BBC Two last week about the middle classes, is billed as a rightwing comedian because he voted for Brexit and got a lot of stick when he went on Mock the Week. “I fired a few shots at remainers and they were upset. Because Mock the Week has an established leftwing audience, so it shook them up a bit. But with The Mash Report I don’t, because I was set up as who I am from the start.”

Sophie Duker thinks about audience expectations all the time. She’s not so well known, so audiences can’t predict where her comedy might go. “The way people receive me in different settings is so different,” she says. “Super young, super cosmopolitan people, or older dudes in the sticks – I want both sets of people to like me and have a good time.”

Intent matters too. If a comedian says something outrageous, they may well be intending to make a point. Intent means that the best comedians can use offence as part of a complicated journey – via jokes – to get to an underlying truth. (If you’re outraged, maybe you should wonder why.) Boyle, in his Instagram post, points out that jokes, in their simplest form, rely on outrage. There’s a set-up and then, pow! The punchline is extreme, not ordinary. A joke is meant to shake you up. Jokes rely a lot on fear, and you laugh because you’re a little bit scared of your reaction. Comedians know and love this. “If there’s a joke where someone might be offended, I have to do it in front of them,” says Duker. “Not to offend them, but because I need to know that the material can work, even when I’m scared of doing it.”

Because of all this, comedians are constantly listening to their audience. Which bit worked better? Why didn’t that joke land? Are they laughing because they got the irony, or because they like the bigotry? Standups accept that they don’t always get things right. Every comedian I speak to mentions that they have cut or rewritten jokes. Chaponda took out a gag that relied on a punchline about domestic violence. When Friedman released the DVD of her show American C*nt, she removed a gag about Caitlyn Jenner. “Even if she’s an OK target, now I’ve met more trans people I don’t want to attack this vulnerable population,” she says. Josie Long used the word psychopathic, and was challenged, “and I thought, I don’t need to cling on to this”. Often, comedians change jokes because of a conversation with an audience member who had experienced what they were joking about. Is the joke worth the hurt it’s causing?

Other times, though, comedians double down on their gags. Katy Brand had a routine about Christianity and she felt “utterly confident” in defending it because she was herself a teenage Christian, plus she had a theology degree. Stevenson put up a gag on Twitter about the difference between how depression is viewed in men and women. When some men objected, she pointed to examples like Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, but also to her own experience.

When comedians assess jokes, cast aside quips, try out and test new gags, they’re aware of the audience. But they also know that much of the joy of comedy is to be found along the fault lines of offence and etiquette. Where comedy functions is in those areas that need to be explored, where society is trying to work out what it thinks. The shifting of what society finds acceptable and what it doesn’t is precisely where comedians operate. And being offended, of course, is a choice.

So what do audiences find offensive? It depends on who’s telling the joke. If you’re a comedian with an established following, you can probably guess at your audience’s sensibilities. With Jimmy Carr, for instance, everything appears to be a target. (But even he doesn’t tell race jokes.) Long’s audience has a different sensibility. Sometimes, though, people get upset in ways you can’t predict. When Norcott appeared on Live at the Apollo, he says: “I made jokes about Tories, concentration camps. But the bit that got everyone upset was when I said my wife likes shoes. But she does!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I had to reassure the audience … I could feel their panic’: Tiff Stevenson. Photograph: Carla Speight/Getty Images

Sometimes audiences get upset on behalf of others. Chaponda was attacked for saying he wasn’t offended by Alan Sugar comparing the Senegal national football team to Marbella beach sellers. “It’s paternalistic,” he says. “There’s an assumption that all black people should feel the same. That’s ignorant.”

He also takes issue with the idea that being offended is a bad thing. “Some people have said that being offended is like being punched in the face,” he says. “I went to see Book of Mormon, and I loved a lot of it, but I was offended by some of the jokes about Africa and religion, because I’m very religious. That offence was interesting, it made me look at my own prejudices. But it wasn’t like being punched in the face.”

Not many people are as reasonable as Chaponda. Long reports that the general feeling of her audience is “anxious”, and Brand says: “No one’s very relaxed about anything at all at the moment.”

“If you feel genuinely besieged by some prevailing culture or mood that you don’t feel comfortable in,” she says, “then if you can put that general feeling of frustration and powerlessness into a vessel, that’s a relief. It’s exciting to be whipped up and join a group of people who all seem very angry. And there’s a general feeling of besiegement on both sides.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Meaning and intent have to be evident right through a piece’: Stewart Lee. Photograph: Steve Ullathorne/Awkward Fims/BBC/Steve Ullathorne

So comedians are becoming more vigilant about interpretation. Stevenson tells me about a time she made an off-the-cuff gag that could have been understood in a way she didn’t want it to be. It bothered her so much that she returned to it during her set, explaining it to the audience. At another gig, where the audience was very PC, she could feel their discomfort when they laughed at a joke: “I had to reassure them that I knew they weren’t cheering for anti-abortionists. I could feel their panic.”

Stewart Lee says: “I feel meaning and intent have to be evident right through a piece, like writing in a stick of rock, so it can’t be snapped in two at any point by critics and repurposed.”

Lee might seem paranoid, but deliberate misunderstanding and social media pile-ons are common these days. Long was attacked on Twitter by Graham Linehan (writer of Father Ted) because they have differing views on trans rights. She didn’t change her mind, but the ensuing furore led to her deleting her account for a while. “I quite often do that,” she says. “It’s fine. I’ve been doing comedy since 2006 and there have been hate sites set up that talk about raping and murdering me. I’ve had a far-right YouTuber decide to let his millions of fans attack me. I’m not scared.”

Jena Friedman had a situation in a London comedy club where she confronted a heckler, but they sorted it out. He was a Bernie Sanders fan (Friedman is American), and when she tweeted about it using the pejorative epithet “Bernie bro”, she was attacked by both left- and rightwingers. An American comedian, “successful in the alt-right Pizzagate space, with a huge following”, retweeted Friedman’s tweet. “Fourteen thousand people liked it,” she says. “Thousands commented. It felt like a coordinated attack. I approached him and said: ‘As a fellow comedian, why are you doing this?’ But he has a YouTube show, a whole economy centred around this, he’s making money, there’s an entire ecosystem.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I don’t want to attack a vulnerable population’: Jena Friedman. Photograph: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

Lee has noticed that some of his jokes that gently poke fun at his audience – “my own liberal constituency” – have been stripped of context and weaponised online “by alt-right types”. “Things I said as a joke 10 years ago, making fun of the sort of ‘sensitive’ standups whose shows I usually actually like, have been repurposed online,” he writes. “I made some jokes during the era of ‘dead dad’ one-man shows and they were repurposed as if they were intended to criticise Hannah Gadsby, who probably wasn’t born when they were written.”

So now he goes to great lengths not to be misinterpreted. He has no Facebook or Twitter accounts. He actively tries not to put his act in places where people will stumble across it accidentally, “and I try to ringfence it with bad reviews from the Telegraph and the Daily Mail in big letters, so as no one can say this stuff was forced on them. Also, I perform in such a way that the act is not immediately attractive to the sort of people who would be annoyed by it. I do not appear to be a ‘proper comedian’.” He’s aware, however, that this is a luxury that new comedians don’t have.

And if you think he’s oversensitive, consider this. You don’t have to actually tell the joke that people think you told. You could be saying something completely different. So what? We live in an attention-based economy, after all; who cares whether you said that thing, or if you meant it? It’s the outrage that gets clicks.

Farage furious over Jo Brand's 'throw battery acid not milkshake' joke Read more

So, let’s have another look at Jo Brand’s joke, shall we?

Brand made the joke on a programme called Heresy, a show where comedians are specifically asked to make close-to-the-bone jokes. She didn’t name Farage. Immediately after saying, “Why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?”, she added: “That’s just me, I’m not going to do it. It’s purely a fantasy, but I think milkshakes are pathetic, I honestly do.” At the end of the programme, the presenter, Victoria Coren Mitchell, said she hoped Brand’s comments hadn’t offended. When the programme went out on Radio 4, three people tweeted that they hadn’t liked Brand’s joke. One tweeted that he’d thought it was funny.

Then Media Guido, the website of Guido Fawkes, a rightwing provocateur, took a clip of Brand’s joke and wrote a short piece. He asked Farage for a quote. Farage called Brand’s joke “an incitement to violence” and demanded that the police investigate. (Farage didn’t hear it live, he was presenting his own radio show, on LBC.) Guido put the piece up on Twitter under the headline: “Jo Brand’s Hate Speech”, where it was picked up by Piers Morgan and others, including Leave.EU, Ukip, RT UK, and newspapers. Brand’s joke, as the saying goes, went viral. There were radio phone-ins, Twitter shouting matches, police.

Amazing, really. It was a joke. You have to wonder, sometimes, who’s actually laughing.



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Edinburgh festival fringe runs 2-26 August 2019. Shows include Daliso Chaponda: Blah Blah Blacklist, Jena Friedman: Miscarriage of Justice, Tiff Stevenson: Mother, Sophie Duker: Venus, Josie Long: Tender, and Geoff Norcott: Work in Progress. See tickets.edfringe.com for dates, times and venues