For a joke to fall flat may be a calamity, as in the old Bob Monkhouse quip: “They laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well they’re not laughing now.” People and things falling flat, however, can be a source of high comedy. A good deal of humor is based on deflation and debunkery. A cohort of legendary British comedians (Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams) trade on sudden swoops from the sublime to the mundane — from the civilized tones of the cultivated middle classes to the blunter idiom of the populace. With their bathetic descent from posh to profane, these performers are a kind of class conflict in their own person. One thinks also of Monty Python’s “Summarise Proust” contest, a television game in which competitors were given two minutes to summarize Proust’s 3,000-odd page novel, first in evening dress and then in a bathing costume.

There’s a rich English tradition of savage debunkery, from Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis. The sudden puncturing of grandiose rhetoric, the urge to demolish and disfigure, are familiar features of English writing, as they are in the literary culture of Ireland. Flann O’Brien’s superb fiction plays off abstruse metaphysical speculation against the threadbare platitudes of pub talk, while James Joyce’s prosaic Leopold Bloom is a counterweight to his philosophically-minded Stephen Dedalus. The United States, a nation which likes to affirm and is nervous of negativity, has a less impressive history of satire.

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The transgressions of Tom Stoppard

By Terry Eagleton

Speaking of Irish writers may remind us of just how little English stage comedy there would be without Irish émigrés. From Congreve, Steele, Macklin and Goldsmith to Sheridan, Shaw, Wilde and Brendan Behan, the London theatre has been dominated by Irishmen who washed up in the metropolis with little but their wits to hawk. Treading a thin line between insiders and outsiders, they could turn this hybrid status to fruitful comic use. They were insiders enough to grasp the manners and conventions of English society, yet distanced enough to have a quick eye for their absurdities. Wilde was an Irish Republican but also a parody of the English gentleman, while Richard Sheridan was a Whig Member of Parliament who secretly fellow-travelled with the revolutionary United Irishmen. Brendan Behan, who once remarked that he was a drinker with a writing problem, used to be hauled on to BBC television after the pubs had closed in order to demonstrate what lovable drunks the Paddies were. Shaw, a less inebriated exile, warned his fellow Irish writers against becoming court jesters to the British. It was, in fact, far too late: the Anglo-Irish Oliver Goldsmith performed precisely this role in 18th-century London literary circles.

Why does swooping from the sublime to the ridiculous make us laugh? The answer for Sigmund Freud in his deeply unfunny study of jokes is that we invest a high amount of unconscious energy in sustaining our noble ideals or social inhibitions. When these are suddenly deflated, we economize on that energy and release it in the form of laughter. Jokes liberate us momentarily from the reality principle, allowing us to indulge the pleasure principle instead. This is one reason why sexuality is a fertile source of humor, involving as it does both high romantic feeling and the lowly genitals. Few human activities are at once so exotic and so banal. How can the question of who copulates with whom lead to such murder and mayhem? Human beings are pitched between flesh and spirit, and humor reminds us of the double act that we are.

Most humor involves some sort of incongruity. We laugh when something seems out of place, when things go off the rails or are thrown out of kilter. Which is to say that a lot of humor springs from the baffling of expectations. Humor returns the kind of response we don’t anticipate, as with: “What do you call the useless bit at the end of the penis? The man.” We invest psychical energy in keeping the world orderly and predictable, and any sudden dissonance allows us to relax the unconscious strain which this involves. Even Charles Darwin, not a man given to giggling, thought that laughter was caused by the incongruous or unaccountable. “You’ve got to stop masturbating,” a doctor tells a patient. “Why?” asks the patient. “Because I’m trying to conduct a medical examination,” replies the doctor testily. This involves slipping from one frame of reference (masturbation in general) to another (masturbation here and now), which is a form of incongruity.

A quick slide of meaning or shift of perspective may be enough to be comic, as with Oscar Wilde’s “I live in constant fear of not being misunderstood”, or Dorothy Parker’s response to being told that people at Halloween duck for apples: “There, but for a single consonant, is the story of my life.” She also remarked that “the transatlantic crossing was so rough that the only thing I could keep on my stomach was the First Mate.” The decadent fin-de-siècle poet Ernest Dowson once declared that “absinthe makes the tart grow fonder”. With such deft changes of single words we are in the realm of wit, as with Wilde’s “The young people of today have no respect for dyed hair”. Even punctuation can make a difference. “The batsman’s Holding, the bowler’s Willey,” announced a cricket commentator, a phrase in which everything turns on a comma. Sexual jokes are funny because they allow us for a moment to lift our repressions and indulge in the unspeakable, while knowing that no real harm is likely to result from this.

“I’ve got them down to ten,” bawls Moses to his people as he descends Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, “but adultery’s still in.” A lot of humor depends on laws and prohibitions, since without them we would have nothing to transgress, and transgression is usually pleasurable. Deviating from a norm can take the form of eccentricity, especially in England. The English love what they call “a character”, like the Oxford don I once knew who used to stand in a pub with a cavalier air and a parrot on his shoulder. (His cavalier air was shaken only by his obvious fear that the bird might crap on his shoulder.) People who stick ferrets down their trousers or ride to work on a baby rhino are likely to be honored by Buckingham Palace. The upper class in particular are transgressive, since they regard themselves as superior to codes and conventions, even though they often set them themselves. Brian Howard, one of the louche Evelyn Waugh set, was once arrested by the police in an illicit drinking den in Soho. When asked for his name and address, he replied: “My name is Brian Howard, I live in Berkeley Square, and you, Inspector, I suppose, come from some dreary little suburb.”

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While the middle classes cling timorously to the rules, the upper classes proclaim their privilege by kicking over the traces, combining the glamour of rank with the effrontery of not giving a damn. In this sense they have something in common with the criminal, as we have recently witnessed. The British admire devil-may-care aristocrats, which is why they’re so fond of the second-rate poet Lord Byron; but they also champion those curmudgeonly types who thwart the government’s plans for a new airport by clinging stubbornly to their two acres of land. Individualism in the United States means the boldly enterprising spirit; in Britain it’s more a matter of idiosyncrasy.

It’s surprising that politicians don’t use humor more often, given that it’s one of the most superbly effective means of communication. Not many comedians are politicians, though Eddie Izzard has revealed ambitions in that respect. Some politicians are comedians, however — not in the sense of inspiring laughter but in being the object of it. Keir Starmer wouldn’t even make a decent straight man, let alone a comic. Harold Macmillan could throw off the odd witticism, as when he remarked that every man should go to bed with a Trollope. Those of us who remember the Labour MP Denis Healey know that he was good for a knees-up. Boris Johnson, by contrast, is that rare member of the human species, a man who is fundamentally frivolous. Most frivolity is skin-deep, but Johnson’s is a massively serious affair which goes all the way down. There’s nothing more profound about him than his superficiality.

Jokes are political in the sense that they prefigure an alternative form of life. Like art but unlike capitalism, they aren’t primarily concerned with profit and power. Instead, they represent a sharing of life purely for its own sake. It’s true that some of them can be more functional — breaking the ice, mocking an adversary, abusing an immigrant, showing what a clever guy you are — but the finest jokes have no more point than a kiss or a wave. They represent a small piece of utopia in a darkening world.

In particular, the puerility of Gwynne’s imaginary letter to a constituent raised a chuckle: “Dear resident, fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.” And I also enjoyed the Alan Partridge-like specificity of his death wish towards Nick the irritating cyclist: “I had positive visions of him getting mown down by an Elsa Waste HGV while he’s cycling to the Fallowfield Loop. We couldn’t be that lucky!” Most of the other stuff wasn’t up to much, though there was a passable riff on Black History Month involving Justin Trudeau.

As others in the press queue up to pass pained judgment on all the racism, sexism, homophobia, and ageism, I find myself at a loss. It seems a kind of amnesia has collectively infected nearly everybody, and I am one of the few remaining people with immunity. For I still remember the existence of a human activity called “joking”, and a particularly mordant variety of it called dark comedy. As I recall, it used to be quite popular in the olden days, but has since gone the way of VHS and spangles. Quite possibly, everybody now thinks the name is racist.

Even weirder, the same affliction also seems to have obliterated a meaningful difference between “public” and “private”. Reading the press coverage with half an eye, you’d be forgiven for thinking Gwynne had hired Stockport Town Hall to try out a bold new stand-up routine. “Public” has now become synonymous with “potentially leakable” — which in practice means anything written down at all. You can question participants’ wisdom in committing their gags to a group chat — and, even more so, placing trust in whichever snake in their midst eventually grassed them up —but clearly they never intended the bantz to go mainstream.

An essential element of black or dark humor is the breaking of taboos. There are flagrant transgressions of morality codes; incongruent switches between earnest and bawdy registers; knowing double meanings, referring to things that can’t otherwise easily be said. Jonathan Swift did a lot of the latter — see a poem of his called “Oyster” (“No Colchester oyster/ Is sweeter and moister/ Your stomach they settle/ And rouse up your mettle.”) In the 20th century, this style of humor became especially literary: think of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert calling the teenage Lolita, perfectly accurately, his “aging mistress”; or Evelyn Waugh’s Basil Seal inadvertently eating his lover Prudence in a cannibal feast in the appropriately named Black Mischief.

But dark comedy was in the street, playground, and pub first. In the 17th century, there were hundreds of iterations of a song called “The Black Joke”, where “joke” also stood for what one contemporary explainer called “the monosyllable” or “a woman’s commodity”. Under communism, Poles would tell gags about starvation and Jews would jokingly remember Auschwitz with fondness. Eighties America had Challenger disaster jokes, while Eastern Europeans found comedy in the aftermath of Chernobyl.

In the Nineties, the UK had the Diana version (sample: “Why is Di like a mobile phone? They both die in tunnels.”) These lines were barely about Diana the woman at all — or, indeed, about poor mobile phone reception — and much more to do with the public mood at the time. They were the privately anarchic counterpoint to the oppressively monolithic tide of grief washing over the nation, the equivalent to getting a fit of the giggles at a funeral. The more unseemly it was, the funnier it became.

Since social media is the new street corner, it’s only fitting that the fun would have migrated there. Giving a group chat a silly title is the new version of naming your pub quiz team “Gossip Girls” or “Breaking Bald”. And since moral codes are everywhere these days, the world should — in theory, anyway — be our oyster, as it were. Surrounded as we so often are by the earnest, the pinch-lipped, the fanatical and the hypocritical, verbal transgressions beckon temptingly from every angle. Yet most feel constrained from taking them up.

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Part of the problem is that our age is simultaneously blighted with tedious people who want to make the whole practice of joking a taboo as well. Academics — not a demographic well-known for their airy badinage — have been doing their best on this front for ages. A joke, we are told with a stern face, creates an ingroup and an outgroup. Now, you might have thought this was superfluous information, since quite obviously it does. The outgroup is the person looking puzzled and saying “I don’t get it”, while the ingroup laughs uproariously at your lines. On the other hand, if the joke is poor, the outgroup is the odd person smirking, and the ingroup are the silent and bemused ones. That is part of the glorious jeopardy of joke-telling — will you bring these people into your world for a shared moment of laughter, or place yourself on the other side of theirs?

But it’s commonly supposed to be much worse than this. Many jokes don’t so much create outgroups as bully existing ones; they “dehumanize” and are part of “delegitimization strategies“. They trade in racist, sexist and homophobic stereotypes; they mask aggression and contempt; they “punch down”. In vain might you point to distinguished satirical forebears. For now Swift is a misogynist, Waugh is a racist, and Nabokov is either a pedophile apologist or a kink-shamer, depending on who you are talking to.

In fact, two different things are going on here. Forty years ago, as I remember things anyway, there was no particular taboo about making jokes based on racist, sexist, or homophobic stereotypes. In my Scottish school playground, your currency as a funnyman was cemented by the number of terrible anti-Irish or anti-English jokes you could tell. Saturday-night TV lived for jokes about the ditziness of blondes, the bossiness of mothers-in-law, and the campness of gay men. Equally, though, as no taboos were being broken, these jokes didn’t count as especially “black”. Some of them were blue, but that’s different.

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Yet now in the overreaching present, whole swathes of discourse have become effectively off-limits. These include not just unambiguously bigoted jokes, but any joke at all that vaguely references an ethnic minority or a woman or a gay person. If you want to be funny, you are best sticking to anodyne puns or Christmas cracker fodder, and even then the whole process can feel dangerously freighted with risk. To some, it is a time for repressing any intrusive comic thought at all for fear of what comes next. But for other more anarchic souls, it’s exactly the right time to start a WhatsApp group called “Trigger Me Timbers”.

That’s because making jokes the target of modern morality codes has enabled a whole new variety of black humor, where it didn’t previously exist. Now you can deliberately transgress those codes for shock value and the amusement of your mates. The more ponderously sanctimonious, humorless, and offense-seeking your conspecifics become, the greater the urge to puncture the mood by making a joke about some sacred totem of theirs: pensioners, say, or gay men, or Diane Abbott. And that was what Gwynne and co. were clearly doing in their group chat, at least partly. They were in the Labour Party, for God’s sake.

When the context is Stalinist Russia, black jokes against the regime, muttered on street corners to trusted confidantes, are viewed as a noble assertion of the indomitability of the human spirit. When you are in a Labour group chat slagging off Angela Rayner, it seems they most definitely are not. Gwynne’s edgelord schtick may not be to your personal taste, and you may be enjoying his demise for political reasons. Still, I suggest you don’t get too relaxed with the heavy-handed presence of the public censor. For all you know, it could be Breaking Bald next.

Humour has long been a magic ingredient in unlocking political change. In the medieval court, jesters had an almost unique privilege in being able to tell the monarch what he didn’t want to hear, and were often tasked with presenting bad news. In totalitarian regimes humour was a daily act of undermining the regime, to the extent that on Stalin’s death 200,000 of the Gulag’s 2.5m population were there for telling jokes.

In recent years, unpalatable political ideas have often been presented under the cover of humour. Nigel Farage, Britain’s most successful politician of the early 21st century, has always employed a particularly English jocularity to sell what was a controversial platform, laughing us out of the EU eventually. But he’s not alone – in Italy and the Ukraine, comedians have risen to very highest office, and France may be next.

Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals that “through humour much is accepted that would have been rejected if presented seriously”. Or as comedian Andrew Doyle put it: “You’re far more likely to remember a joke than an argument.” But perhaps because we live in such a serious and pious climate, the authorities have never been more scared of jokes.

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The West's cultural revolution is over

By Ed West

Earlier this year an EU report warned that online memes were a menace to society, potentially dangerous to social peace. These memes, it said, are being used “to rebrand extremist positions in an ironic guise, blurring the lines between mischief and potentially radicalising messaging. The result is a nihilistic form of humour that is directed against ethnic and sexual minorities and deemed to inspire violent fantasies — and eventually action.”

The document identified a number of popular Right-wing memes, including Pepe the Frog and Wojak, the former symbolising “a kind of superior nonchalance toward others, helping to normalise hostile attitudes toward minorities and political opponents” and “anti-elite arrogance and condescension”.

Pepe the Frog became a household name about five years ago during an election that involved humour to an unusual degree. At the start of September 2016, after Hilary Clinton had made a speech attacking her opponents as a “basket of deplorables”, Donald Trump Jr posted on Instagram a doctored photo of the Sylvester Stallone film The Expendables replaced with The Deplorables, with a line-up of Trumpians, including the Donald, his even more repellent son, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and… Pepe the Frog.

Pepe was originally a harmless cartoon amphibian who occasionally peed himself, so old in internet terms that he first appeared on MySpace, back in 2005, and it was only in 2015 that it begun to be adopted by users of the notorious 4chan website.

When Trump announced his candidacy in June that year countless images of Pepe wearing a Make America Great Again cap began appearing on the site, seen as a veritable womb of trolling. Clinton then denounced Pepe as a symbol of white supremacism, joining a long list of often arcane supposed white nationalist signals, from milk to the okay sign.

The frog came to represent an online movement of meme-creating, often involving quite creative pranks. During that election, countless online comment pieces and reports focused on the influence of 4chan, written with the horror of a strait-laced reporter investigating the dangerous phenomenon of Mods or hippies (and continuing a long history of journalists misunderstanding the site). Trump’s win was viewed as a sort of 4chan troll that got out of hand, or as one user put it: “We actually elected a meme as president.”

Some of the site’s users were clearly delighted about the election win, but it seemed primarily motivated by the pain it would cause to pious, sanctimonious actors, hysterical commentators and the rest of the progressive establishment. The meme-creating trolls aim to shock and to wind up, and journalists – privileged, pompous and partisan – are obvious targets.

It’s this very organic nature of memes that makes them effective, an in-joke magnified. They cannot really be controlled or faked. Their power depends on who is using them, and the Meme life cycle means that, by the time a 43-year-old journalist is writing about a meme, it’s probably dead.

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Authenticity is the key, and Clinton’s attempt at making popular cultural references aimed at younger voters always sounded flat. Similarly, just as Hillary’s Twitter account was clearly written by a group of insufferable Ivy League graduates, especially crafted for the election strategy, Trump’s tweets were obviously written by the mad bastard himself; they were authentic, just as he was authentic, and, despite his immense faults as a human being, also very funny.

Many memes aren’t necessarily far-Right or even Right-wing but are just socially obscene, which is basically the same thing now. For example, Norf FC, a satire of English football fans, would certainly be considered “problematic”, to use the language of sanctimonious bores who police discourse. Originating on 4chan, it’s decidedly offensive but also funny, at its best a modern-day Hogarth, making fun of certain aspects of English life, including the English abroad, their obsession with football above all else, and their tendency to drink and fight. But it has also expanded organically to cover our history, including the Napoleonic Wars and the Roman invasion. (A remake of Our Island Story but illustrated with Norf FC would make an excellent book).

Then there is Wojak, perhaps the most popular of Right-wing memes, and arguably the bleakest. The EU report describes how the meme “has gradually been adapted and advanced by far-Right meme culture to portray liberals with blank expressions” who “do not question the information that comes from mainstream press and politics”.

One of the earliest variations of Wojak was NPC, or Non-Player Character Wojak, a grey, lifeless figure who repeats empty phrases like ‘‘The future is female” and “Reality has a liberal bias”. “NPC” comes from online gaming, and reflects the view that most of the population are mindlessly conformist, lapping up the low-brow mass culture which carries a shallow progressive message, and repeating it.

Wojak has evolved into various other forms — Withered Wojak is a favourite, often used in response to the latest self-harm masquerading as life advice spread by journalists and other opinion formers, or to children being exposed to drag queens, or the most recent race-baiting directives from on high. He represents despair that this will never be over and will only get worse.

Then there is Soyjak, who with his mouth agape in pathetic admiration is not just physically unimpressive, but mentally emasculated, desperate to win the approval of women and of polite society. The name stems from the common Right-wing belief that the consumption of soy reduces testosterone, while the facial expression – also known as “cuckface” – comes from the idea that an open mouth is associated with lower social status and submissiveness among male primates. This was a scientific theory first posted on a 4chan messageboard, which is good enough citation for me.

Soyjak is often paired with Gigachad, a manly, ubermensch figure (in reality an Azeri model called Ernest Khalimov, who apparently is vaguely aware of how his image has become a meme but otherwise lives a wholesome life far away from this madness). Soyjak and Gigachad often appear together in memes, the former hysterical about something of little real importance, the latter relaxed and happy, unafflicted by modernity-afflicted neurosis.

Strangely, the Soyjak and Gigachad meme has its antecedent in Soviet propaganda about cuckface factory bosses and Gigachad communists. However, the muscle-bound Gigachad is a sort of Right-wing masculine ideal, although a cynic might suspect that most of the people posting these memes have a stronger resemblance to Soyjak (just a wild guess).

Some of the memes are funny and imaginative; “Should have let us grill” pays tribute to Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who pointed guns at Black Lives Matters protesters trespassing on their estate. It’s a play on “grillpill”, a Left-wing meme about babyboomers and their “I don’t care about politics, I just wanna grill” mindset. The McCloskey meme, in contrast, laments a hellish progressive world where everything is political and no one can be left to grill in peace without being bothered by ideological fanatics. Those ideologues now seem to be in control, which explains why so many popular memes come from the Right; hence the popular expression “The Left can’t meme” – which is a meme itself.

If this is the first art form since the late 19^th century in which the Right has dominated, that only reflects who is in control of culture, and particular its taboos; it’s the very willingness of meme-creators to upset these taboos that the likes of the EU Commission find so disturbing, since without them all sorts of social norms might break down.

Yet that is what art has often sought to do. While writers, playwrights and artists from the late 19^th century increasingly saw themselves in moral opposition to the establishment — the monarch, the church, even to bourgeoise sexual morality — since the 1960s progressives have taken over the commanding heights of culture both in the United States and Britain, meaning that much of the art world has lost the place of opposition in which it feels most comfortable.

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Revolutionaries in the past have faced a similar problem. The EU report looked at the possibilities of “attempting to counter extremist humour with a form of alternative humour”, which it concedes is very difficult, and this is indeed what was attempted after the revolution in Russia. There, political jokes were banned as “anti-Soviet propaganda” and were replaced “with their own brand of dull official humour, which they disseminated in satirical magazines”, in the words of Ben Lewis, author of Hammer and Tickle.

These new official jokes were often about peasant stupidity, or when they made fun of the system, it was because it wasn’t being properly implemented by local officials; the beliefs behind that system were sacrosanct. As a result “there were now two kinds of humour: official and unofficial – the written and the spoken, the public and the private. In the censored void, a culture of the spoken joke would develop, a collective satirical work produced by the whole population”.

A similar pattern occurred in the West when, following our cultural revolution, new taboos replaced old ones, but mainstream humour failed to maintain its role of undermining them. Satirical comedy stopped laughing at prevailing ideas but instead, with Michael Moore and then The Daily Show, began making stupid peasants – older, rural Republican voters – the punchline.

The same is true in Britain, where the Right has limited political power and the Left has unlimited cultural power; following the American lead with Wojak-like conformity, British clapter-comedy such as the Mash Report, where the audience applauds rather than laughs, has made the political out-group the butt of jokes, while avoiding the sort of unspoken, absurd truths that make political humour bite.

The same is largely true of consciously “anti-woke” comedy, much of which is very poor quality; or, if I were to be charitable, is aimed at older people. Perhaps it is because it employs a similar tactic to clapter, using a political out-group as a punchline, without in any way hitting a taboo. Memes, in contrast, are more provocative and darker, coming from a place of genuine contempt and despair.

Whoever the people making it, anything that grinds away at taboos is going to be at least mildly funny; laughter is a release from social norms. When I was a child, there was still the great British tradition of schoolboys drawing pictures of penises on religious figures in books, an almost instinctive desire to shock and mock; it’s funny because of the reaction it would provoke. Today even publicly desecrating Christ barely registers, yet when a pissed Man City fan drew a willy on a Marcus Rashford mural it led to a public meltdown — and even a vigil — because of a fear it had broken our number one taboo, race.

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It’s not that the Left can’t meme, it’s just that Left-wing beliefs don’t trigger taboos, even quite extreme Left-wing beliefs, so there is no need for them to employ the memetic equivalent of criminal cant to conceal their views. The sort of internet culture epitomised by 4chan aims to shock, and as the prevailing culture has become more progressive and censorious, it has grown more outrageous in blaspheming that new moral code.

If the likes of Wojak are popular, it’s partly because the cultural atmosphere feels quite heavy at times, so much so that many conservatives live a sort of coded existence in public life, the equivalent of taqiyya, the Shia Muslim practice of shielding your true opinions. They can either learn to keep their views quiet, or heavily-qualified, or they can become social pariahs. Humour, especially arcane, coded humour, is an escape.

Offensive as these memes are to polite society, the idea that Pepe and Wojak are going to normalise extreme-Right politics, or even centre-Right politics, is outlandish. Much of the time they are shared to provoke, or as a joke, but it’s also the case that much of the online Right is play-acting anyway, whether pretend trads or fake fascists – they’re all the children of liberalism. The problem is that, like the Russian revolutionaries before them, the post-1968 progressives now find themselves no longer rebels but rulers, and facing the difficult task of policing social norms and keeping the peasants in line.

Too soon?

First rule of comedy: it’s never funny unless it risks something, unless there exists the possibility of disapproval, of offence. And the greater the possibility of offence, the funnier it is. To be clear: it’s not the offence itself that makes something funny. Many would-be ‘brave’ comedians make this mistake. But the presence of the possibility of causing offence is certainly a multiplier when something is funny. The greater the repression, the more explosive the release.

We laugh in the presence of Covid-19 death charts because, well, what else can we do? The darkness of the present situation is not an argument against the possibility of laughter, but exactly why it is so necessary. We laugh to transform what we fear into something that cannot psychologically overwhelm us. It is a strategy of resistance.

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By Gareth Roberts

You may remember from Harry Potter that a boggart is a shape-shifting creature that assumes the form of the worst fears of the person who encounters it. The spell that banishes a boggart is the riddikulus spell, which converts the terrifying apparition into something that can be laughed at. And once laughed at, all power is drained from the boggart and it disappears. A scary teacher is dressed up in the clothes of a fusty old woman, a giant spider is given roller-skates and cannot stand up. What would be the point of using the riddikulus spell on something that isn’t terrifying? In other words, comedy was designed for things like Covid-19.

This is why it makes no sense to say that some things are too serious to be joked about. On the contrary, only serious things can properly be joked about. And if it’s not serious, it’s not funny.

The funniest people I know, as a profession — apart from professional comedians — are undertakers, closely followed by nurses and those who work in the emergency services. Surrounded every day by pain and death, humour becomes a way of asserting that most specifically human of all reactions to the tragedy of life: laughter. On the one hand it creates a kind of solidarity in the face of fear and danger. But it also puts the danger in its place.

In this regard it’s hard to beat Spike Milligan’s famous epitaph, written on his gravestone: “I told you I was ill”. If I am right about the purpose of humour, this is about as perfect a joke as one could imagine. For to carve a joke on your own gravestone is to poke fun at our greatest fear within its own castle, and to do so in such a way that the darkness can never have the last laugh. You can just imagine Milligan’s words driving the grim reaper mad with frustration and fury. To have someone take the piss out of him rather than quake in terror is the ultimate riddikulus spell.

Freud put it rather more seriously in his 1927 essay On Humour:

“The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”

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Something similar is going on with Ricky Gervais’s comedy series After Life — season two of which has just been released on Netflix. Gervais’s character, Tony, is depressed and nihilistic, his wife having just died of cancer. He says things like: “A good day is when I don’t go around wanting to shoot random strangers in the face and then turn the gun on myself?”

It’s not a laugh a minute show. Sometimes you even question if it’s really a comedy at all. But because it’s Gervais, and perhaps because we know there will be moments of great humour — there really are — we allow him to take us into some pretty bleak situations. “That’s what humour is for,” Gervais told Holly Willoughby on the This Morning show last Monday, “to get us through bad stuff.”

Perhaps Gervais won’t like this way of putting it — given he’s such a passionate atheist — but this sort of comedy feels like it has a fundamentally redemptive purpose. It allows us to exist within the darkest of situations without being overwhelmed by them. To misquote Nietzsche: “We have comedy so we don’t perish of the truth”. Humour is a readily available coping mechanism. It’s a strategy of resilience.

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By John Lichfield

But there is a potential fly in the ointment of this argument. My wife — who is from Israel — is of the opinion that the humour I am talking about here is very specifically British humour. They wouldn’t get Covid-19 humour in Tel Aviv, she explains.

Now while I don’t altogether believe this, the argument still slightly bothers me because if I’m right about the fundamental connection between death and comedy, surely it would be a universally identifiable phenomenon.

Or maybe it’s just that the sort of comedy I am talking about is particularly acute in cultures with high degrees of emotional repression. And given that sex, death and status are hang-ups that us Brits have in considerable measure, perhaps there is something to this. Freud understood humour as a kind of release, a way for pent up, forbidden thoughts to come tumbling out. That’s why there is no such thing as ‘safe’ humour. Humour is no respecter of either political or emotional repression.

That’s why those people who think that coronavirus humour is just “a little too much” won’t ever understand those of us who find something funny not just in spite of it being a little bit inappropriate but precisely because it is. Safe, appropriate humour is never terribly funny. Which is kind of the point.