Part Three — And Now for Something Completely Different

There is a tendency to imagine that comedy progresses in a nice straight line.

First there were the old-fashioned comedians, then the clever young comedians arrived, and everything became sophisticated.

It wasn’t quite like that.

Indeed, some of the most revolutionary comedy was being produced while the traditional entertainers were still packing theatres.

Consider The Goon Show.

Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe created a world in which almost anything could happen, usually without the slightest regard for logic.

The Goons didn’t merely tell jokes. They attacked the very idea that a comedy programme needed to make sense.

Characters appeared and disappeared. Sound effects became jokes in themselves. Stories wandered off in directions that no reasonable person could have anticipated.

And behind much of it was the extraordinary imagination of Spike Milligan.

It was anarchic, frequently ridiculous and sometimes completely incomprehensible.

Which was rather the point.

Then came Beyond the Fringe.

Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller represented something different again.

They were educated, articulate young men who were perfectly prepared to make fun of the people who ran Britain.

Politicians, military officers, the Establishment itself.

This mattered in a society where deference was still expected.

It was one thing to make a joke about a pompous official. It was another to suggest that the people supposedly in charge of the country might be rather absurd themselves.

And then there was Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

First broadcast in 1969.

An interesting year, for all sorts of reasons.

Python took the absurdity of the Goons, added elements of satire, television parody and surrealism, and produced something that didn’t always bother with conventional punchlines.

A sketch might simply stop.

Or turn into another sketch.

Or be interrupted by something completely unrelated.

The famous announcement, “And now for something completely different,” was itself part of the joke.

It often wasn’t completely different at all. It was simply another excursion into madness.

But I think we should be careful about treating all this as the moment when comedy suddenly became intelligent.

The older comedians weren’t necessarily stupid, and their audiences certainly weren’t.

They were working within different conventions.

Nor was the new comedy universally admired. Plenty of people found it irritating, pretentious or simply unfunny.

And they were entitled to that opinion.

Comedy is a peculiar business. You can explain why a joke works. You can analyse its structure, its timing, its cultural significance and its place in the history of popular entertainment.

But you cannot make somebody laugh by explaining that they ought to.

And that brings us to another interesting question.

What happens when comedy stops merely making fun of authority and starts challenging the social rules themselves?

Because by the 1970s, and certainly by the 1980s, the argument was no longer simply about what was funny.

It was increasingly about who was being laughed at.

And who was doing the laughing.