‘Mad, Ted!’ Why Comedians and Artists (Mostly) Go (and Stay) Woke
Why have the youthful politics espoused by most comedians, rock stars and writers seemed to degenerate into senselessness as they age, making them into defenders of power, nonsense and nonces?
This Woke Isn’t Funny Anymore
As the last week of 2022 wound downwards to the start of a new year, someone sent me a link to a recent article in the Irish Indo, something I don’t generally welcome. Apart from the general scumminess of that former newspaper these days, many of the articles are paywalled, which means that my iron principle of not supporting lethal lies generally prevents me from enjoying anything useful contained therein — a bit of a long shot, in any event. But this article struck me immediately as an exception, because it was obvious that its entire meaning is contained in the headline:
‘John Cleese and Graham Linehan are comedy legends — what’s tragically unfunny is how they’ve become the exact thing they taught you to rebel against’
The article is by a Ryan Coogan, of whom I have never heard, but who saves me the trouble of investigating him by providing his entire profile in the initial paragraphs, supplied as a forlorn ‘teaser’ to induce scabby Indo browsers to part with digital currency. Ryan reveals:
‘I’m a thirtysomething comedy nerd, so the past few years have not been kind to me.’
Together with the headline, this sentence conveys enough information to profile the author and critique his article’s core idea without reading further.
But Ryan generously gives a little more:
‘You can’t put on an episode of Father Ted or NewsRadio without feeling like you’re somehow complicit in some terrible crime (that doesn’t stop me from watching them; I just make sure to donate £10 to transgender youth charity Mermaids every time I let out a shameful giggle). Let this be a lesson to you, kids: all of your heroes will betray you eventually.’
The NewsRadio reference loses me. I have a vague memory of a US TV sitcom of the 1990s bearing that title, though I have never seen it and, as far as I can elicit, it did not feature John Cleese, who currently has a programme on a somewhat analogous real-life TV news channel, GBNews; nor was it written by Graham Linehan.
For those who have been pursuing careers on Mars for the past 28 years, Graham Linehan is an Irishman and the co-creator (with his friend Arthur Mathews) of Father Ted, a Channel 4-produced TV sitcom series set in a Catholic presbytery that — as a senior counsel might explain to a particularly desiccated judge — became popular with the youth at the turn of the millennium, m’lud. Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews once worked for Hot Press, where I also cut my writing teeth, though somewhat earlier. I know Mathews slightly, though not Linehan, who I understand may have taken the odd cut at me in the past on account of our different views about abortion. John Cleese, of course, is John Cleese, one of the great comedy actors of the past century.
My investigative efforts reveal that the article originated in the London Independent, once — briefly — a sister paper of the Irish Indo, but nowadays unconnected. The headline there is ‘John Cleese is irrelevant — just like all of my old comedy heroes’, and the strapline follows the same train as the Irish version: ‘It’s hard seeing somebody you used to respect seem to try their hardest to become the exact thing they taught you to rebel against.’
I hunt the article down on archive.is (a useful site for those not wishing to support journalistic mendacity — go for it!) and immediately tumble to four things: (1) that Ryan Coogan has more shares in Woke than a three-legged Albanian lesbian; (2) that his target is Cleese and the Graham Linehan angle was mainly ramped up by the Indo to excite local interest; (3) that the NewRadio reference is an oblique kick in the shins to Joe Rogan, who played Joe Garrelli, an electrician and handyman at the show's fictional news radio station; and (4) that Coogan’s article is pretty pathetic as a defence of Woke against those who know it to be a sinister and nonsensical programme of societal destruction.
These brief citations, however, provide an enhanced sense of where Ryan Coogan is ‘coming from’:
John Cleese is a particularly sad case because if you go back and watch Fawlty Towers or Monty Python’s Flying Circus, you don’t get any sense whatsoever that the man doing silly walks and trying to refund dead birds will one day be most famous for complaining about ‘cancel culture’ in the middle of a global pandemic.
And this:
There’s this weird myth among John Cleese fans (and I’m talking modern John Cleese fans, who are mostly in it for the bad takes) that Monty Python was some kind of politically incorrect, anti-woke, deliberately offensive entity that your modern-day lefty snowflake couldn’t possibly handle.
And this:
The UK has had a Conservative government for what feels like the past thousand years; why are you [John Cleese] so mad at the Left? Because we said you can’t just put a dress on, call yourself something like ‘Mrs Winterbottom’ and present that as a completed joke anymore?
The article is almost entirely about Cleese, only mentioning Linehan once, referencing one time he tweeted something in Cleese’s defence, which, out of context, doesn’t really make sense. I suppose you had to be there.
The charge, in both newspapers, is that Cleese, and/or Linehan, and/or Rogan, have sold out to the enemy, probably because of taking stances agains the trans agenda and, possibly, other Woke sacred cows. It is hard to imagine any sane or sentient person defending the lunacy that is transgenderism, but we have to remember that, since this is a core element of the Combine’s agenda for the destruction of concepts of sex-difference so as to clear the way for the transhumanist agenda, all purchased media are on board for it, regardless of the damage it may wreak in the lives of countless young people, especially young girls. [‘The Combine’ is what I have fallen into the habit of calling the actual, concealed world government, which has finally, with the Covid cult, bared its fangs. I borrowed the term from Chief Bromden, the protagonist of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, subsequently made into a movie by Michael Cimino, featuring a different protagonist, R.P. McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson. ‘The Combine’ is what the Chief, in both contexts, called the evil syndicate he intuited as bearing down upon humanity, seeking to oppress it and re-set its behaviour. The Combine runs everything, using technological, technocratic means, as well as human agents like Nurse Ratched and her vicious orderlies.]
Ryan Coogan is working off the assumption that his readers will instantly agree that anyone he once approved of who opposes this manifest psychosis is some kind of sell-out, a born-again reactionary who has abandoned sense and decency to line up with the forces of darkness. I, in response, imagine that anyone still reading either the Independent or the Indo is either brain-dead or Woke — essentially the same thing. A sane and sentient person will intuit that both Linehan and Cleese (and Joe Rogan, for that matter) have, by adopting the stances they do, remained true to the impulses that most likely propelled them into comedy in the first place: unerring noses for unspeakable nonsense, and deep suspicions of the explorative tentacles of underhanded and unaccountable power. Unless, in the coming years, the world goes completely off the rails (a possibility that, due to the comprehensive corruption of the purchased media, we cannot completely discount) there will come a moment of public awakening to such derangements, when the world in general will shake itself out of its moral torpor and stammer things like, ‘Did I dream that we were encouraging children to mutilate their own bodies in the name of a contrived and toxic ideology?’
At source, the trans/Woke agenda is merely to a partial degree ‘deranged’, since it is a carefully calculated scheme of the Combine for achieving its goals, and is pathological purely in the sense that it attracts mainly people suffering from incipient mental illness, while also managing to persuade some previously reasonably balanced individuals (in medicine and media particularly) to become its advocates on the ground that it amounts to a form of ‘progressivism’. Credit where due: The Combine has, with remarkable ingenuity, managed to persuade whole tranches of the ‘progressive’ constituency that trans is simply the next step in a succession of enlightened improvements that began, perhaps, with the Suffragettes and worked its way via second- and third-wave feminism to the LGBT assault in the past decade on normative understandings of family, parenting and marriage. Many ‘liberals’ have become convinced of some apparently ineluctable sequential logic of this ‘progression’ in much the way an apprentice mountain climber might progress from the nursery cliffs of Dalkey Quarry to the upper slopes of Mount Everest.
Woke and its tributaries protect their agendas by the use of ‘spell words’ like 'homophobe' and ‘transphobe’, employed by LGBT bullyboys to smear anyone who objects to, or even questions, any proposal of any gay person operating under the rainbow flag, which means that anyone who tries to defend the cultural or legal status quo against such attacks is automatically cast as a bigoted extremist. Hence, no meaningful opposition has been mounted against any such proposal, which means that, while such corrupted and malignant behaviours prevail in our culture, our civilisation will continue to be dismantled — legislatively, institutionally and culturally — taking us ever nearer to the state of nature.
People like Linehan and Cleese came rather selectively to these battles, Linehan in particular only identifying a problem when the trans issue brought things into the realm of unambiguous insanity, though Cleese displayed an earlier wakefulness to the difficulties with mass migration and the EU. Their instincts, though, have been essentially solid and their interventions courageous, especially given that their changes of direction have attracted outright hostility from former close allies and fans. You might cast them in the style of the frogs who — realising they were being boiled in a liberal saucepan that had ceased to be merely ‘tolerant’ and ‘compassionate’ — ‘woke’ up and jumped the rim.
The core problem with liberalism is that it is not liberalism, but a forgery directed at gaining power and forcing mankind down a particular path of modification. Another difficulty is that, having gained a stranglehold on virtually all purchased media, it never has to justify itself against the observations of any significant challenger.
There is, too, a deeper and more abiding matter, which the Combine has succeeded in leveraging to great effect: the assumption of virtue that accompanies left-liberal obsessions. Few may dispute that, to begin, liberal-leftism appeared to have good intentions: It pursued equality and fairness and justice, all good and necessary qualities for a society to place high on its blackboard. Then, however, the feeling of warm self-congratulation that accompanied these objectives in those advancing them became a quasi-addiction, at first unobtrusively, then rapidly, aggressively and malignantly. Each ‘cell’ of the left-liberal mission became a self-enclosed Groupthink, galvanised not only by the issues it propounded but even more by the opposition it provoked. As is the way with Groupthink, an ‘out-group’ obligingly formed itself, provoking the ‘in-group’ to consolidate itself and its positions, in doing so making opposing the ‘out-group’ the primary focus of the Groupthink. This led not merely to an abandonment of reason, but a demand for new ‘liberal’ ’products’ with which to drive forward the change-project and thereby further antagonise the 'enemy’. The consequent destabilising of any prior coherence of ideological understandings, the blurring of focus that this occasioned, and the unwillingness of the group to maintain oversight of how these shifts were modifying its sense of purpose, enabled the Combine to feed ever more radical ideas through the network of left-liberal activism, triggering the evolution of an internal myopia that caused activists to lose sight of their original mission, and become blind to how the ideology and its initially idealistic protagonists were being manipulated. The ‘logic’ carrying the ideology forward was no longer concerned with making the world more equal, but using ‘equality’ as a battering ram to break down the edifices seen as harbouring anterior and disapproved-of ideas. The focus shifted from the ‘issues’ to the ‘enemy’. And, very quickly, this tendency spread to the outlying support constituencies of the left-liberal ideologies: journalists, artists, musicians, novelists, poets, et cetera. This is why we observe folk and rock musicians and singers, who once presented themselves as working class heroes, lining up with governments to support the imposition of huge numbers of unvetted migrants on working class communities safely remote from where they live themselves. Or, in a slightly different context, acting as shills for Big Pharma in the purveyance of a dangerous medicine, supporting tyrannical coercion as the means to its acceptance.
People like John Cleese and Graham Linehan did not abandon the principles they started out with, but rather, sensing the shift that was enabling these principles to be appropriated for purposes antithetical to their original idealism, broke away. There ought to be nothing surprising about this, though people like Cleese and Linehan tend to stand out as sitting ducks because the numbers of those prepared to stand up are so few. The majority tends, each day, to follow the same line as yesterday, so that eventually individual ‘liberals’ stir in their slumber one morning and find themselves abed with the kind of people they condemned in the beginning. By then, it is way too late to jump the rim.
Comedy is actually a rather excellent pyrometer for measuring the temperature of cultural phenomena, since it is concerned mainly with provoking involuntary — and therefore unpremeditated — responses in human beings: releases of nervous energy triggered by incongruence and absurdity.
Some years after Father Ted became a cult hit, attending a journalists’ conference in Istanbul, I found myself discussing this subject with a group of colleagues from virtually every corner of the globe. Listening to British journalists expounding on the subject of TV comedy, I noticed two things: one, that they were claiming Father Ted as their own, and, two, that they regarded it as primarily a satire on Catholicism, Irish-style. In truth, Father Ted is essentially a produce of the long tradition of Irish existentialism and is not a satire.
When comedians talk about comedy, they always assume that the nature of their craft and function is self-evidently virtuous. They speak about their achievements, or those of their fellow comedians, as though of heroic exploits, with occasional mentions of honourable failures. Always there is this sense of a lengthy battle to overcome vaguely intimated dark and oppressive forces which — it is implicitly suggested — have conspired to prevent us laughing as is our entitlement. It is almost invariably to be inferred also that these forces are by definition either political or religious. Thus, in attempts to discuss the subject with its practitioners, there is inevitably an encounter with vainglory. Invariably, the retrospectives include tacit celebrations of the daringness of the stand-up comedian — for example, Tommy Tiernan, in provoking the wrath of Catholic Ireland by his regular appearances on the Late Late Show, allegedly facing down what he characterised as ‘clench-holed people’ and ‘crawthumpers’, souls easily upset by what he calls ‘stupid stuff’. In the same vein, Father Ted, when it hit the small screen as the twentieth century drew to a close, and although produced by a British TV channel, was often touted as an example of the increasing ‘maturity’ of Irish culture in relation to Catholicism.
As it happens, Dermot Morgan, the late actor who played the eponymous ‘Father Ted’, was a friend of mine, and we conducted multiple discussions, and a handful of interviews, on the general topic of comedy. Morgan was a profoundly political individual — liberal, leftish, anarchic, but also a highly functioning subject of ‘modern’ political society. He was copped-on and clued-in, with a deep intelligence about his craft and mission. He was not a radical, not even in comedic terms; he liked to stir things up a little, but still hugged closely to the mainstream where he knew his bread would be better buttered.
The writers/creators of Father Ted, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, were quite different from Morgan and from each other. Of the two, I would say Linehan was the more mainstream, seeing things from a left-liberal perspective — whereas Mathews is more of a surrealist, evincing a mordant view of the totality of human reality. It might be said that Linehan is closer to the British strain of modern comedy, while Mathews offers an interesting mix of American and Irish influences. British humour is generally class-based and highly politicised, whereas the American kind is essentially existential. You can get the distinction pretty precisely by contrasting the styles of John Cleese and Woody Allen. Cleese, in Fawlty Towers, rails against the toffs whom he imagines look down upon him, whereas Allen contemplates the inevitable pratfall of his existence, worries that the universe is expanding and wonders why his life is naturally shit. ‘I never regard any woman as perfect unless she rejects me,’ he says, moving — and leading us — ever closer towards the abyss of self-apprehension that allows of no sociological excuse.
Father Ted, the offspring of this trans-Atlantic cultural marriage, really operates on the basis of an implicit question: What in the name of God do priests do all day? The programme was so unmistakably Irish that it should have been made in Ireland, but wasn’t, and probably — for complex and by no means obvious reasons — couldn’t have been until perhaps the past decade. The problem is that, seeing its success through British eyes, we identify only those elements that correspond to the social revolution that, coincidentally, accompanied it: the sudden eruption into plain sight of religious scepticism arising from the scandals enveloping the Irish Catholic Church from the early 1990s.
The conventional wisdom is that the ‘point’ of Father Ted was to heroically ‘take on’ an allegedly all-powerful institution. In reality, the Irish Catholic Church had long since lost most of its power, and Father Ted, counter-culturally, treated its priest characters with something not far removed from affection. Its aim, really, was not political, but to make people laugh at something that played with the mystique of the priestly life. Father Ted does not take on the role of satirising or condemning — it simply plays situations for the humour of a singular joke that has more to do with the difficulty of living a day-to-day life in modern society in the pattern of asceticism traditionally ascribed to the priestly vocation. It is funny not because it exposed Catholic priests for ‘what they were’ — or ‘are’ — but because it gets to something that almost nothing else has got to: the felt rigidity that bedevils the religious lifestyle in the eyes of believers and unbelievers alike. Mostly, people walk on tiptoe around the clergy, but Father Ted shows priests offstage, behaving like the Young Ones. Nobody believes there is a scintilla of reality to it, but therein lies the joke. A central tickle-spot is the modern neurosis towards religion: the incongruity of reverence in the midst of its antithesis, the residual attractions of certainty bedevilled by the cultural implausibility of belief. Father Dougal, in his gormless innocence, breathlessly expressing the same doubts felt by most people in modern secular society, offers a kind of liberation that, yes, transcends any shallow political or sociological aspect.
My favourite theory of laughter is that of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. In his Laughter — An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Bergson proposes that humour derives fundamentally from rigidity in human behaviours and affairs. We find funny, he says, anything that breaks away from the natural patterns of human life, by becoming mechanistic and predictable. Hence, what makes people laugh is the absence of alertness and elasticity in the object of ridicule, i.e. forms of sclerosis arising from the culture of the group. What we find funny, it seems, are those elements in each other that deviate from the law of life, which abjures rigidity and mechanisation. This expresses itself in what Bergson calls ‘absentmindedness’ — an accidental deviation from the rigidity — which can embrace the concept of a man falling down a manhole, or the idea of a Catholic priest who thinks the story of Jesus is ‘mad, Ted’. We laugh at the idea that the rigid get their comeuppance, and also at the idea that an absence of rigidity (e.g. Father Dougal) is not necessarily a bar to priestly survival.
Adapting Bergson’s thesis, we might say that Father Ted was funny because it placed its characters in a putatively inflexible lifestyle and uniform — that of Catholic priests — and then allowed their lives to proceed in a manner that constantly defied and indeed transcended this inflexibility. To put the theory somewhat theologically: Comedy occurs with the insinuation that, in spite of whatever certainties we may hold to on the score of our hardwired searching for meanings, we cannot shake off the fear that we may not possess free will, but are mere puppets on wires being pulled by heavenly — or hellish — forces.
But a problem with exploiting this condition of ‘rigidity’ arises when new forms of repression exercise themselves in reaction to the old ones. In the natural, organic flow of things, these too ought quickly to attract the life-protecting quality of laughter, but sometimes, for complex reasons, this fails to occur. Several generations of Irish comics have made copious hay from lampooning various picaresque figures from recent historical/social memory — the ‘godfather’ of the Irish nation, Eamon de Valera, the legendary ‘Catholic ayatollah’, John Charles McQuaid, et cetera — while ridiculing various aspects of Ireland past: Catholicism, nationalism, and so forth. A tremendous boon to this kind of comedy is that Irish ‘traditionalists’ — always a reliable ‘out-group’ — will predictably respond to it with rage and fulmination, thereby setting loose a real-time re-enactment of the ‘rigidity’ under laughter-fire.
Comedians, by and large, regard themselves as belonging to the more progressive movements in social thinking and action — a condition usually intrinsic to their function. However, a problem arises when a failure to achieve the natural, cyclical turning-over of political and cultural change in a society causes public thought to become stuck at a certain point. This occurred, for example, in Ireland from roughly the end of the 1980s, when, apparently by osmosis, a consensus was arrived at concerning questions of progress, modernity and political/social virtue. By definition, artists, including comedians, signed up to the agenda of lampooning the past, which would have been unproblematic if the cycle of culture had continued to operate normally, with that generation of comics being in time succeeded by another, with new ideas, perhaps reacting against the outlooks of their predecessors, as is the normal tendency, generation to generation. However, since the late 1980s, the needle of ideological consciousness in the public square of Irish self-understanding remained stuck on the same concepts of what constituted public good and ill (liberalism, leftism, progressivism are considered self-evidently virtuous, whereas dissenting from them is regarded as morally suspect). Hence, several generations of comedians have come and gone, making jokes about the same people and phenomena, by virtue of adhering to the same ideological blueprint.
The ‘joke’ about a society or epoch cannot remain constant. As change occurs, as power shifts, the joke should change, and with it the ‘target’ of the comedians. If this fails to happen, comedy begins to contribute to the shoring-up of the cultural sclerosis, invisibly stymying the society’s capacity to see forward to the new joke that might help to provoke a fresher understanding, and thereby keep itself vibrant and alert. Long before the 1990s, the target of comedians ought to have ceased being the greybeards of the 1950s and 1960s, or the hollowed out husk of the Catholic Church, with comedians recalibrating their sights to perhaps the faux liberalism that sustains itself by maintaining such scapeghosts long after their power has ebbed.
In such conditions, most comics fail in their vocation not because of a lack of comic talent but because they can’t see past the ideological phantoms standing in the doorways and blocking up the hallways. This condition has afflicted comedy on the global stage over the past couple of decades, with a long line of comedians assembling to display their liberal credentials, imagining themselves at the cutting-edge, but in reality delivering themselves and their audiences into the Combine-prepared pratfall of Woke. Many contemporary comics are good at provoking releases of nervous energy in their like-minded audiences, because this merely calls for a minor shock element, or the leveraging of the consensus factor. One of the symptoms of this cultural sclerosis is a kind of manic obsession with laughter directed at the imagined enemy by those seeking to persuade themselves that they remain a beleaguered opposition to some tyrannical and systematic imposition upon their freedoms. This is the Groupthink working hard to maintain its long-serving functional out-group. The fact that the Groupthink’s cultural enemies are long dead does nothing to inhibit such comedians.
The true comedian goes deeper to unsettle his audience and its sense of self-satisfaction or naivety — even risking alienating his audience by moving ahead of it into the murk of cultural programming and misdirection. But, without a broader vision, comedy tends towards laziness, and becomes content with obvious targets. Addressing the actual present tends to decant comedic opportunity under more hazardous conditions, requiring comedians to risk losing their existing audiences. This is why, more and more, comics rely on passable imitations of political and other figures, getting tame laughs for accuracy rather than insight. This is partly why Father Ted has become a sacred cow of Irish comedy: not just because it is funny, but because it draws its audience together in a gleeful huddle at the idea of Catholic priests being taken the piss out of — a kind of cultural ritual of vengeance — whereas this of itself is not funny in the least, and actually has little or no basis in the actual content of the series.
Since all humour is group-based, the things regarded as funny tell a great deal about what the group considers to be in need of changing. But there is a difficulty, as Bergson outlines: Society, in order to maximise its own efficient operation, imposes a certain degree of automatism on its individual members, seeking to reduce everyone to an approximate common mentality, agreeing broadly on things and seeing things broadly in the same generalised way. This is regarded as a necessary element of communal living, and indeed is essential to the currency of jokes. And yet, taken beyond some indeterminate point, this automatism rightly becomes the target of the laughter of the group, as though some architect of human society has contrived the device of laughter to prevent the (up to a point) necessary process of homogenisation from going too far. Thus, humour plays a role in maintaining the integratedness of a society, against the dangers of both excessive compliance and — paradoxically — also eccentric dissent.
An inferior comedian depends, essentially, on the current prejudices of the society. As these prejudices themselves become rigidified and outmoded, a problem arises: What, now, does the comic construct his material from — the low-hanging fruit of the popular mentality or the stuff that cuts underneath to the subtexts to reveal what is really happening but remains unsayable? The best comedians are those who lay bare the inner turmoil held in place by society’s conventions and protocols. But unless comedians are prepared to break out of their comfort zones, the rigidities remain undetected and everyone gets a pain in the face from laughing at the same yellowing gags. The heading of the Indo article referred to above is designed to leverage precisely those rigidities that cause comedians to cling to the market for low-hanging fruit. Hence, although the author takes it for granted that he is at the vanguard of thinking about the roles of comedy in society, he is actually functioning as a culturally conscripted one-man auxiliary cavalry to protect an army that is — unbeknownst to itself — in retreat.
A rather self-aggrandising sentiment commonplace among comedians is the notion of the comedian as congenital rebel — a syndrome akin to acquiring a reputation for getting up early in the morning to enable you lie abed all day. The comic rightly regards his calling as a subversive one — that, you might say, of undermining societal rigidities, i.e. (mostly) petty oppressions and tyrannies. In practice, however, the most effective comic often directs his fire at the individual, serving either to provoke her into wakefulness, or conversely, if this misses its target, of carrying out society’s dirty work of keeping her in her place. Comedy is therefore a little like tyranny: It either stirs people to revolution or frightens them into silence.
Comedy intimidates, as Bergson says, by intimidating. It is neither compassionate nor just. It remorselessly seeks out the fear and the hidden secret. As Mel Brooks said: ‘Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open sewer and die’. In all but the most rudimentary jokes, there is a withdrawal of affection. Even the chicken crossing the road is subject to mockery for its absence of ambition. From the viewpoint of the powerful, comedy can assist the maintenance of the balance of societal control by providing a kind of cultural inoculation — against both any separatist tendency of the individual and the terminal sleep of the sheepish. ‘Successful’ comedy tends towards balance.
From the viewpoint of the powerful, the ideal is for people to be laughing, but not at them. Inadequate comedy — i.e. comedy that falls short of its highest calling to subversion — becomes most deeply reactionary when it hunts people into the absolute centre, where they become least dangerous to the establishment. Thus, the paradox: The ‘rebel’ comic is capable of becoming essential to the survival of the system — by, for example, providing forms of deterrence against radical forms of rebellion. We saw this during the Covid episode, when ‘anti-vaxxers’ became the butts of very bad jokes — comedy in the service of the status quo. It is pretty clear that, in the past 20 years or so, comedy has been, all but universally, commandeered by the new ideologies of liberal progressivism, and an unacknowledged liberal establishment still pretending to be in opposition. Far from confronting power, it has acted on behalf of the nouveau power-wielders in policing loyalty to newly-minted orthodoxies that increasingly lead to novel forms of tyranny. The exception that proves this rule is Father Ted, which is redeemed ‘only’ because it is funny, and is funny mainly because it manages to see beyond the ideological obsessions of the generations which have taken it to their hearts without really asking why.
Since comedy is essentially a moral instrument, a society that allows comedic sclerosis to develop will inevitably lose both its creativity in the present and its long term memory, the past functioning mainly as a source of scapegoats — in the case of our contemporary societies, summoning up myopic black-and-white figures stumbling around in the fog, unhappy and tyrannical in equal measure, alternately bashing their constitutions and their Bibles. The highly ideological societies of our present imprisonment provide object examples of these conditions, being fixated on the past as a form of malignancy almost from the moment it ceases to be the present, this being the final outcome of the longitudinal machinations of the Combine. And, since comedy functions as a kind of immunity to nonsense and corruption, the effect is appositely akin to what happens in an immune system enhanced by MRNA technology: The system turns on itself, disabling its resistance to pathogens and disease.
Whereas comedy, because of its playing with norms and ideas, provides the optimal viewfinder of these conditions, the same sclerosis tends to spread through every corner and crevice of a culture. Thus, not merely comedians, but all manner of artist, writer, actor, celebrity and intellectual is liable to become affected — or, perhaps, infected. The comedic therefore offers a useful viewfinder in which to observe and capture a much broader tendency, afflicting journalism, literature, the plastic arts and popular music, even philosophy and poetry. Rock musicians, for example, are hidebound by similar rigidities, their music having derived historically from a context of oppression in the slave plantations and elsewhere, but nowadays serving as the backing track for lifestyles that could hardly be more removed. It seems right that its followers should therefore evince left-liberal sensibilities, and yet this serves to provide them with an alibi for adopting countervailing positions towards the present. The result is that the rock ’n’ roll ‘industry’ tends towards the same scleroticism as occurs in the comedy arena, and this tendency is exacerbated by the prevalence of establishment propaganda in modern societies — in media, education, et cetera — conditioning the potential audiences in particular ways of thinking, and thereby also osmotically inducing practitioners of the various disciplines to follow preset tramlines of thought and perspective, eschewing other options. Again, the concept of an ‘out-group’ is germane, since pop music, of its very nature, has always managed effortlessly to outrage a certain kind of conservative mentality. In the Sixties, this was easy: The establishment was right-wing, so rock ’n’ roll rebels did what came naturally to teenagers. In contemporary society, with establishments increasingly left-wing, it’s gotten more complicated. Now, the artists tend to identify with certain political factions (LGBT, BLM, the Democratic Party of the USA, for example) and follow them down whatever alleyways they chose to frequent, with minimal attention to the content of the agendas being pursued. This is fundamentally why we ended up with only a tiny handful of artists — Van Morrison, Morrissey, Ian Brown, Eric Clapton, John Lydon, then you’re struggling — standing up against the greatest freedom-grab in the history of Western democracies, starting from the Spring of 2020.
Musicians, on the other hand, who were only too delighted to be pictured baring their arms for the lethal Covid jab included Brian Wilson, Elton John, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Graham Nash, Brian May, Willie Nelson, David Crosby, John Fogerty, Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. Recently, and even after the potential lethality of the vaccinations became common knowledge, the Rolling Stones made vaccination certification mandatory for concerts on their forthcoming American tour. The general response of the rock ’n’ roll fraternity was dramatised by Ricky Wilson, frontman of the Kaiser Chiefs, back in 2021, demanding a show of hands from an audience as to vaccination status. Wilson shouted out from the stage the names of vaccine manufacturers Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, asking fans to applaud depending on which they had received. He then said: ‘Let’s hear it for the anti-vaxxers’, which was met with boos from the crowd — directed not at Wilson but the mythical ’Covid deniers’ — the out-group of the sclerotic Groupthink.
A combination of factors, then, appears to ‘push’ musicians into situations where they find themselves supporting erstwhile democratic governments in purveying profoundly illiberal policies against their populations: the ‘out-group’ consolidation element, the increasing trend toward leftist governments; and a blindsided obliviousness to the changing nature of ideology — the boiling frog syndrome. This was never supposed to arise, since rock ’n’ roll was minted on the implicit presumption of an everlasting tyranny from the Right. But, as the poet, Dylan Thomas, once laconically put it: ‘The only politics for a conscientious artist is left-wing under a right-wing government.’
The shift from this paradigm has led to many artists getting caught in a cultural offside trap. To change their play at a late stage in their careers appears to be too much for many artists, who have from the beginning evinced egalitarian, liberal or libertarian views, and thought the holiness of their positions a permanent and unchanging state of being. All of a shot, the world started to turn upside down, and soon they found themselves, incomprehensibly, on the winning side, their habitual loyalties and antagonisms suddenly like the tingle in an amputated limb, as power flipped like a pancake between pans, Right to Left. As an alternative to a reevaluation of their beliefs and ‘policies’ on public questions, they placed their minds on automatic pilot, and the resulting somnolence, aided by the binding force of media propaganda, rendered them as though helpless before their own descent into craven support for cynical and unscrupulous authorities slyly morphing the liberal model out of shape.
Related responses afflict other kinds of artist. Fiction writers edge into surrealism and magic realism, as an escape from concrete engagement in a moment offering the greatest creative opportunities for many decades. Poets and painters keep their mouths mostly shut. Actors line up to demonstrate why silence might be such a good idea, rushing to speak where angels know to keep schtum.
We need to remember, whenever we observe a film star on the way up, or a boxer on the way down, endorsing some cause with a high fashion quotient and potential for media attention, that celebrity is both a form of power and a kind of currency. Media use celebrities to sell units, but also give back to the celebrity a kind of credit for cooperation with their agendas. To exploit celebrity ideologically is — for the star — a form of ‘saving’, enabling him or her to store up credits for a rainy day. That is why celebrities line up to support things like abortion and gay marriage: By doing so they can prolong their years of exposure to public attention, building a shelter for themselves against the attrition of the marketplace. Celebrity is therefore an enormous responsibility — like excessive physical strength, it has the potential to pose danger for others and for societies.
Accompanying these tendencies of celebrity is a mutant strain of scleroticism that is not immediately easy to diagnose as to its causes. In our culture, it is almost unheard of for a celebrity — no matter how escalatingly insane the factions he has aligned himself with — to recant and say he has changed his ideological mind. This is in part due to the recent fear of cancel culture, but also because he understands which side his bread is buttered on. For the past decade, Woke culture has been in the ascendent, capturing media, academia, Hollywood and the more lucrative (revenues-wise) end of public opinion. There might theoretically come a time when a reversal of some kind would make it advantageous to switch his convictions to a different lane, but that time is not yet. On the surface, this makes it seem as though such people, having embarked upon a set course, perhaps some four or five decades before, are now unable or unprepared to adjust to the changing underfoot meanings, apparently oblivious that their ‘convictions’ are not the same root motivations they started with, but are being fed to them in real time by highly-exercised vested interests.
These are some of the reasons why, since 2015 or so, we observed the bizarre phenomenon of American pop culture heroes like Robert De Niro and Bruce Springsteen opposing the categories of humanity that featured as characters in their respective life’s works, because analogous real-life blue-collar figures had the temerity to support for the presidency of the United States a billionaire with orange hair who said and did things that displeased liberal-leftists. Neither Springsteen nor De Niro seems to understand that the field has changed, that the Dems no longer speak for the blue-collar tribe to which they once pledged an implicit allegiance, and that Donald Trump stepped into the breach to give a voice to the people who once featured in the movies of De Niro and the songs of The Boss.
Practically every significant character that De Niro has ever played — from Johnny Boy Civello in Mean Streets, through Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, Michael Vronsky in The Deer Hunter, Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas, David ‘Noodles' Aaronson in Once Upon a Time in America — right up to and including Frank Sheeran in The Irishman — would have voted for Trump with a heart and a half. Yet, for the past seven years, De Niro has been dissing Trump non-stop. A few months before the 2016 election, he told an audience in Sarajevo marking the 40th anniversary of Taxi Driver: ‘What [Trump]’s been saying is really totally crazy, ridiculous . . . he is totally nuts. . . He shouldn’t even be where he is, so God help us.’ Sounding more like Travis than Robert, he later declared: ‘He’s so blatantly stupid. He’s a punk. He’s a dog. He’s a pig. A con. A bullshit artist. A mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’
‘I’d like to punch him in the face,’ he elaborated.
Having declared a brief truce after Trump was elected president, De Niro got himself a standing ovation from the luvvies at the 2018 Tony Awards for f-bombing the president. ‘I’m gonna say one thing: Fuck Trump,’ he explained. ‘It’s no longer “Down with Trump.” It’s “Fuck Trump”’.
In 2019, he declared in an interview with the Daily Beast: ‘I’m worried because if he gets re-elected, it’s gonna be very, very bad — very bad on a lot of levels. He’s going to be history at one point, though he’d love to be president for life. He jokes about it. I think that if he became president for a second term he’d try to have a third term, and let smarter people manipulate it into getting us into some kind of altercation: a war.’ Of course, as we now know, Trump failed to start any wars, and De Niro has had abundant opportunities over the past year to condemn President Joe Biden for leading American into a war with Russia, providing a textbook case of liberal incoherence incarnate. In reality, what’s happening is that De Niro is unconsciously responding to a bait laid down by the Combine, which adapts Trump and the Deplorables as an out-group calculated to galvanise his incoherent wrath.
A few years ago, Bruce Springsteen told Esquire that President Trump is ‘deeply damaged at his core’ and ‘dangerous’, and that Trump ‘has no interest in uniting the country, really, and actually has an interest in doing the opposite and dividing us, which he does on an almost daily basis. So that’s simply a crime against humanity, as far as I’m concerned. It’s an awful, awful message to send out into the world if you’re in that job and in that position.’
A year or so later, he told USA Today:‘We're living in a frightening time. The stewardship of the nation . . . has been thrown away to somebody who doesn't have a clue as to what that means. . . And unfortunately, we have somebody who I feel doesn't have a grasp of the deep meaning of what it means to be an American.”’
Once, nobody would have dared to suggest something similar about Springsteen, but now things are not as clear as they were. He once seemed to know that the USA was best represented by its working people, the ones who get up in the morning to make and mend America, day after day. Can he really not see that virtually every single male character in his songs (and quite a few of the female ones too) would have walked 1,000 miles on broken glass to vote for Donald Trump? Jack, Daniel, Billy, Bobby, Kyle William, Frankie and Joe Roberts, Hazey Davey, Jimmy Bly, Lonesome Johnny, Rainey Williams, Junior Johnson, Spanish Johnny, Outlaw Pete, Raphael Rodriguiz, even Johnny 99, who robs a bank, shooting a cashier in the process, in his desperation on account of ‘debts no honest man could pay’ — every last one of then would have donned MAGA hats and picketed their creator’s concerts on foot of his ridiculous mouthings about their new champion. In truth, The Boss is caught in this time-warp, wherein he has missed the inverting of the world around the shift of leftism from supporting working people to supporting what reads like a random list of victim-classes, combined with a new contempt for the working class. Did it never occur to Bruce that, of all his audience, the most worthy are not the virtue signalling merchant bankers, or the diversity managers, or the stock jobbers, or the fact-checkers, but the textile millers and highway workers and mechanics who ‘have done their best to live the right way, get up every morning and go to work each day’ — all the blue-collar warriors whose lives Springsteen has immortalised in the very songs he uses to maintain the power to sell them out? He seems unaware that the Trump phenomenon has arisen only because the people he once claimed to stand with have been abandoned and denied by his ideological bedfellows, who, adopting a new ‘client class’ (the ‘minorities’) took to demonising the working classes as ‘racist', ‘homophobic’ and ‘misogynist’ — in punctilious obedience of the Combine’s instructions. In attacking Trump, he is really showing willing for the Combine’s agenda, instructing the working class to kiss his ass — as though he doesn’t need them anymore. In his music, he has treated these people with respect and even veneration, never judging their necessary compromises or defensive pride; as a celebrity, he tramples all over their hopes.
Where is all the tenderness, humanity, irony, complexity and ambiguity that characterised so many of Springsteen’s songs, or De Niro’s early films? They were once the oracles or our culture and its zeitgeist. We wanted them to be smart, which they used to be — serious artists who spent their lives delving into the psyche of America, and by extension the wider world under American cultural influence. In the time of their ascendency, there has been no art under any heading that surpassed their meditations on the soul of the USA.
What appears to happen is something like this: Maybe these guys lie awake at night worrying that people might think them unsound on the Trump question, the GOP question, all the ‘right-wing’ questions. So, just in case, they risk making fools of themselves by prating the kind of nonsense that would make an intelligent adolescent blush in mortification. The slide into madness is so gradual that the subject fails to notice while he is himself sufficiently compos mentis to fix the problem. He doesn’t notice that he is slipping off the path he embarked upon, of doing good and being decent and trying to make the world a better place. He cannot, surely, possess a profound belief in the importance and morality of, for example, Drag Queen Story Hour, in which hairy-arsed men dressed as women push their genitals into the faces of innocent children, but by the time he gets to the nonce phase he is in too deep to withdraw without a big fuss ensuing. Issue by issue, he drifts into the fog of insanity, swallowing each element because to do otherwise would be to hand the game to the ‘out-group’ — the Deplorables, Trump, the anti-vaxxers’, the ‘transphobes’ et cetera. If he notices anything amiss at any stage, it is already too late: He has made his bed, and lain upon it too long to simply smooth down the sheets and walk away. He rationalises this by a brief reflection on the nature and character of the out-group. His allies might be lunatics but they are his lunatics, and don’t have bad hair.
Or, maybe the problem is as banal as that art in particular categories nowadays makes people into superstars, inevitably separating them from the sources of their inspiration, so in the end they speak only to other celebrities, exchanging the same orthodox guff, day after day? Or maybe they just get so rich tapping into the veins of regular mortals that they lose touch with the heartlands that made them kings.
Somehow, as things move along, there will always be the few who keep their wits and their instincts about them, so that, at a certain point along the way, they are able to say, ‘I’m done with this! I don’t care what you call me, but I’m off the table.’ They don’t necessarily ‘get’ everything about what has happened in the world, nor do they always appear to be wholly consistent in the things they do ‘get’, but they still have lines they simply refuse to cross, and at least one hill they are prepared to die on.
So it is with John Cleese, Graham Linehan, and Joe Rogan, as with Eric Clapton and Van the Man, and Morrissey and John Lydon. Of course, there will be differences between artists as to which issues they wish to prioritise. Roger Waters, for example, though silent on the Covid coup, is one of those rare rock stars who has consistently deviated from the globalist drift of the music industry and kept faith with the true spirit of the music he plays, speaking of freedom and democracy not as weapons of partisanship, self-congratulation or moral blackmail, but absolute values that luckily endure independently of the filth now running our Western countries.
Contrary to the propaganda, these artists haven’t been the ones turning into reactionaries; they are the ones who stuck to what they have always felt and thought and believed. If they started out leftish, they still were. Like Václav Havel, who placed his right hand over his left breast and said, ‘My heart is on the left’, they didn’t change at all: They just held to the principles they started with, retaining also the presence of mind to blink one day and declare, on mature reflection, that what was going down under their very noses had become, as Father Dougal might say, ‘mad, Ted’.