The award for “best joke” at the Edinburgh fringe is dead and permission to laugh at its funeral is granted. No arrests will be made, no fines issued.
The annual list of allegedly the funniest gags to be heard across hundreds of shows staged at the month-long festival has been sent to the comedy scrapheap, with the organiser/culprit, UKTV-owned channel U&Dave, releasing a straight-man statement citing an “opportunity to reflect” on how it supports grassroots comedy talent.
To be fair, U&Dave – known as Dave before UKTV slapped a “U&” on its channels to make them sound like a family of deodorants – does do its bit to spotlight comedy talent, which used to be something bigger broadcasters took more of an interest in before their nerves failed.
What UKTV didn’t say was that its pun-heavy rundown of handpicked one-liners had the risible effect of reducing hours of intelligent, precision-timed, carefully honed comedy sets into a creaking, groaning slab of rage bait.
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Take, for example, last year’s winning effort by English comedian Mark Simmons: “I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship but I bottled it.”
Most wordplay is reverse-engineered, but it’s not great when the steel beams of a joke are so fully exposed, is it? Still, the British public voted this the best joke of the fringe from a selection offered to them by a panel of critics and comedians doubling as U&Dave collaborators.
Voters might have been less wrong if they had instead plumped for Arthur Smith’s third-placed absurdity, “I sailed through my driving test. That’s why I failed it.”
But I’m falling into the trap now. I’m engaging. It never mattered what came out top. As long as it struggled to bear the weight of the “funniest joke” accolade, it did its job as cheap filler content that reliably provoked stiff breakfast-host laughter or, more usually, a sceptical sigh.
As it goes, I have a high appreciation of the shameless pun, though almost-puns are tough to swallow. This week I learned that former Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey has a policy on these. When the singer turned environmental campaigner was spotted struggling with his earpiece on BBC Breakfast, a viewer, referencing lyrics to solo hit A Good Heart, commented that “a good earpiece [these days] is hard to find”. Sharkey cheerily outlined his normal penance for “the bad-pun lobby”, proposing a £20 donation to his chosen charity.
This was all in good spirit, and didn’t muddy Sharkey’s advocacy on UK water reform. The problem with the Joke of the Fringe wheeze, by contrast, is that it wound up misrepresenting the essence of the festival.
It wasn’t U&Dave’s fault, but the list’s reproducible nature meant it attracted more attention than the genuinely prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award and, in the process, reaffirmed the views of people predisposed to believe that stand-up comedy is a bit rubbish, a touch childish; the product of a Vitamin D-deprived cohort yet to get a real job.
Never mind that at festivals such as the fringe, you will discover some of the cleverest, most magnetic people delivering 50-minute masterclasses in stitch-inducing storytelling, their styles ranging from the surreal to the polemical, their words as judiciously selected as poets’.
Other gag lists will now fill the void. But this media fodder, rather than promoting the craft of joke writing, risks contributing to the minimisation of stand-up and reinforcing the dismissal of comedy as something other than art.
It all becomes part of the same attitude that saw comedians here in the Republic barred from applying for the Government’s Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme. They’re not artists, you see. Well, the State says so.
Humour is subjective, as proved last week by reactions to the Coldplay kiss-cam couple. Some people thought the pile-on a clear nadir for surveillance society and media tabloidisation, with unfunny pitchfork-culture vibes thrown in. Others found it hilarious, for some reason.
I didn’t laugh, obviously, but reading a recent edition of satirical magazine Private Eye, I was struck by the acuteness of a cartoon capturing Westminster’s hypocrisies and moral failure on Israel and Gaza. This was in light of the UK government’s move to proscribe the organisation Palestine Action. “Unacceptable” Palestine action, it read, was to spray military planes with paint, while “acceptable” Palestine action was to shoot Palestinians queuing for food.
A retired teacher called Jon Farley was also taken with it, so much so that he stuck a blown-up printout of it on a placard and brought it to a silent demo in Leeds. Alas, this got him arrested, as police officers didn’t recognise it as political satire.
Maybe they were more pun fans. Or maybe some truths, pinpointed by satirists, are just too dark to countenance. Either way, arresting people for “carrying a joke”, as editor Ian Hislop put it, suggests a U&Dave-style “opportunity to reflect” is urgently required.
