Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
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Books: Research
The emergence of (what became known as) ‘alternative comedy’ is widely regarded as an important critical moment in the history of British comedy, where comedians began to break with the idea that their craft was ‘just for laughs’ (Giappone, 2017). A range of new acts fundamentally reinvented the nature and form of comedy to place in question prior conceptions of the gag, the audience, and the overall ‘point’ of humour. Whereas the satire boom had touched upon politics through the nature of its targets and a wider public debate over whether it really changed anything, alternative comedy foregrounded a set of avowedly resistant concerns with anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism and ‘Thatcher’ (Lee, 2010; Schaffer, 2016).
While the previous chapter explored a certain ‘anti-elitist elitism’ in the satire boom, whose protagonists were mainly white, male, upper-class, Oxbridge and so on, the egalitarian politics of alternative comedy was often embodied in the comedians themselves, who came from ‘art schools’ and ‘lesser universities’. Suddenly comedians were working-class, black, female, they had regional accents, were angry, or anarchic. A punk mentality informed their audience interactions as the new medium of ‘stand-up’ explored the possibilities of spontaneity, provocation and violence in humour (Sayle, 2016). In addition, surviving outside the Oxbridge production line of student reviews and BBC commissions required an alternative economic model. Their circuit consisted of pioneering new comedy clubs like The Comedy Store and the Comic Strip, as well as regional arts centres, student unions and pubs.
British comedy took an essentially ambiguous turn through the 1990s and into the early 21st century. The complex layers of ironic meaning, critical distance, and reflexivity in relation to ‘our’ situation within global power relations served distinct functions. In the hands of satirists like Chris Morris, there was a subversive and potentially radical message: the mediatized form of global politics had prioritized spectacle, personality and soundbite. Yet, the popularity of ironic resistance, especially as it was developed by Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais, created a moral dilemma: how far could – or should – irony go with questions of identity? A relentless focus on race, gender, disability and so on, might perform as reactionary when circulated for applause. As Stewart Lee (in Kovesi, 2012) reflected: ‘in the 80s when alternative comedy started, one of the things that it was supposed to do was not be sexist, not make fun of people who were differently abled, not do racist stuff … […] A lot of it has crept back in under the idea that there’s “irony”; that the comedian is holding up a mirror to society, showing us our prejudices by enacting them for money.’
This is a clear ethical limit for irony. While Gervais may be capable of articulating the distinction between the ‘subject of social violence’ and ‘the joke he is making about that violence’, it is unclear whether this nuance is always operative with the audience.
British comedy emerged in relation to some important political questions, imperial decline, deregulation, globalization and, more reflexively, the ethical ambiguities entailed in comedy itself, for example, over class, race, gender and so on. On this view, comedy is an everyday vernacular of resistance through which global politics is known, legitimated and contested. Less a tool, than a space of politics in its own right. Indeed, the previous chapter argued that radical comedy foregrounded a politics of agency within the (affective) context of global market life. While potentially more engaging (and responsible) than the ironic form that preceded it, the popularity of radical comedy also created its own limits, of race, gender and ‘celebrity’. Indeed, it arguably commodified a type of anti-austerity critique that increasingly manifested in the public sphere. Suddenly, the ‘anti-establishment’ anger of radical comedy was celebrated – and facilitated – by social media platforms, satirical memes and hashtag politics. We are all satirists now.
If British comedy is an important and productive element in the politics of globalization, then it might have been expected to play a pivotal role in the politics of Brexit. The famously unexpected British vote to leave the European Union (EU) was widely seen as a challenge to cultural values of social inclusion and progress, values that arguably resonate with (the self-identity of) British comedy. Yet, for many, the actual experience of comedy after Brexit has been a disappointing failure. On the one hand, the instrumental critique looms large, that, despite an overwhelming comic turn against Brexit, rather obviously, the plethora of anti-Brexit jokes did not manage to affect the result of the referendum.
While the study of comedy and politics can boast a venerable lineage that spans several disciplines and theoretical approaches, the practice of comic resistance is not normally considered an important subject of global politics. Indeed, as the Introduction argued, at least one of the key approaches – the instrumental approach – has understood the political significance of comedy in fundamentally state-centric terms. Although the critical approach raised wider, utopian concerns with truth, emancipation, and ‘the people’, it had a tendency to read modern manifestations of comedy as either a legitimating or a disciplinary element in modernity and global capitalism. On this view, the resistant potential of comedy was deeply qualified, as likely an ideological smokescreen, or a ‘medicinal bath’ for docile market subjects. Instead, this book will read comedy as an everyday practice of resistance in global context, where the very idea of resistance is politically productive: part of the generative grammar of global market life.
This chapter will situate comic resistance in global context by engaging the everyday turn in IR and IPE. This literature foregrounds the importance of (apparently) small, mundane, or otherwise marginal actors and practices in global politics (Best and Paterson, 2010; Solomon and Steele, 2017; Elias and Roberts, 2018). Crucial to the everyday turn is the idea that the agency of non-elite subjects is far greater than is normally assumed by mainstream approaches to the ‘big issues and actors’ of the ‘international system’ (Hobson and Seabrooke, 2007).
This book has engaged with the practice and politics of everyday global resistance through a performative study of the emergence of British comedy. Against instrumental and critical approaches to the role of comedy and resistance in global politics, I argue that we need to pay more attention to the productive elements of humour. Too often, the study of comedy is limited by a particular vision of politics, whether state-centric and driven by a normative ontology of satirical engagement, or universalist and based on a quite demanding view of emancipation through subversion. Instead, by tracing a more performative account of comic resistance, the book suggested we should move away from questions of whether this or that joke can make an impact, or spark revolutionary change. Everyday comic resistances perform within a context of global social power relations. While certain jokes, in certain circumstances, may question, subvert, or otherwise undermine the everyday hierarchies of global market life, others may work to affirm such exclusions, or else provide a socially resonant, if potentially violent, mode of inclusion. Simply put, comedy does different things in different circumstances and that is precisely why it is political. By adopting this more open understanding of comedy ‘as’ politics, my framework of analysis has in turn licensed a more proliferative understanding of what comedy and humour can be/do. As Berlant and Ngai (2017: 235) argue: comedy isn’t just an anxiogenic tableau of objects disrupted by status shifting, collapse and persistence, the disruption by difference, or a veering between the tiny and the large.
British comedy is a widely consumed and distinctive cultural product. For some the British are virtually defined by their sense of irony, or a tendency for self-deprecation (Friedman, 2011; see also Fox, 2014). But humour and comedy are far more than static stereotypes. Over several decades, British comedy has emerged as a vibrant, productive, conflictual and avowedly resistant discourse within politics. From the 1960s ‘satire boom’ that chided the imperial pomposity of the upper-class establishment, through 1980s ‘alternative comedy’ that articulated dissent against Thatcher to embrace equality politics, and the rise of ‘radical comedy’ in the post-crisis, anti-austerity mode of Russell Brand or Charlie Brooker, British comedy has emerged as a vernacular through which resistance is imagined and performed (Brassett, 2016).
How can humour be resistant when it is part of a massive global industry? British comedy is big business. Sell-out tours, DVD sales, and cash-in memoirs are part of a burgeoning global entertainment industry. Keynote acts and producers like John Oliver, Ricky Gervais, Armando Iannucci and Richard Curtis straddle the lucrative US and UK markets. Comedy output by the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky is regularly distributed through global platforms like HBO, Netflix and Amazon. Yet British comedy is also a sophisticated genre that combines mainstream popularity with a capacity to challenge and provoke. Indeed, such provocation can be part of the schtick. As every satirist knows, controversy is good publicity and the moralizing think-piece industry has helped promote acts like Sacha Baron Cohen and Frankie Boyle (Hunt, 2010).
What can comedy tell us about the politics of a nation?
In this book, James Brassett builds on his prize-winning research to demonstrate how British comedy can provide intimate and vital understandings of the everyday politics of globalization in Britain.
The book explores British comedy and Britain’s global politics from post-war imperial decline through to its awkward embrace of globalization, examining a wide variety of comedic mediums, such as the popular television show The Office and the online satire The Daily Mash. Touching on issues such as empire, the class system and capitalism, the author demonstrates how comedy offers valuable insights on how global market life is experienced, mediated, contested and accommodated.
British comedy has an acute potential to relay critical and reflexive arguments in the everyday public sphere of media entertainment. Previous chapters discerned an, at first, incidental, and subsequently, far more explicit association between comedy and radical politics over questions of imperial decline, class, the economy, commodification and so on. The contingent emergence of these central concerns within British comedy speaks of a sophisticated vernacular of everyday resistance that can both anticipate and negotiate the lived experiences of globalization. The potentialities of everyday comic resistance are sharpened by basic elements in the British satirical method; a sensitivity to (our own) pomposity, and a pervasive doubt about the grounds from which we joke, that is, self-deprecation. A democratization of this language through the rise of alternative comedy allowed for a rather more politicized and resistant inflection. Comedians actively contested the dumbing down of humour and thus the resistant qualities of the profession became a fundamental point of concern, one that recurs in in successive decades.
Leaving to one side the critical nuances of British comedy, this chapter will explore how the rise of ‘irony’ would fundamentally question the possibility of political comedy. Exponents of 1990s irony turned their attention to dilemmas of the ‘self’, very often a self that did not care about the ‘serious’ and ‘boring’ political issues that occupied alternative comedians. This emerged as part of a wider turn away from ideology associated with globalization and the (apparent) end of the Cold War.
The origins of the ‘satire boom’ in 1950s Britain might seem curious. While the end of the Second World War brought relief (and the good fortune of victory), the nation had to adapt to some stark realities. The war had been costly, in human and economic terms. At the same time, the superior wealth and power of the US served as a demonstration of the changing position of Britain in global politics. The US was a former colony, and just as it reached preponderance, there were a growing number of national independence movements turning against British rule. The rise to popularity of satire happened during a period of acute decline, loss of political self-confidence and protracted self-analysis. As Stuart Ward (2001a: 12) argues: ‘Ideas about British “character” … became difficult to sustain as the external prop of the imperial world was progressively weakened. Notions of duty, service, loyalty, deference, stoic endurance and self-restraint and gentlemanly conduct were insidiously undermined by the steady erosion of the imperial edifice.’
Thinking about the satire boom as an everyday practice of resistance must therefore reflect and engage this politics of imperial decline; part of the cultural negotiation of this erosion of global power. Domestically, the late 1940s and early 1950s saw the implementation of austerity policies, many which went further than war-time rationing (Carpenter, 2000: 4–5). Internationally, this once ‘great’ and ‘proud nation’ that had been victorious in the ‘two world wars’, now faced palpable questions – both military and moral – about how to maintain global influence, a problematic that crystallized with the Suez crisis (Carpenter, 2000: 9–11).
