Covid-19 and Comedy

The cliche that ‘laughter is the best medicine’ has probably never been less apt than during a global pandemic, but human beings do often resort to humour in the most desperate of circumstances. What role did humour and comedy play during the pandemic? How important was it for our mental well-being? Along with all other forms of live entertainment, comedy clubs closed down and touring comedians could not ply their trade – did other forms of collective amusement rise up to take their place? If so, what were they and how did they function? How did comedy play out over digital media? To what extent did we use comedy to assuage our fears during the global crisis, and what was it acceptable to joke about?

On the 19th August 2021 the Pandemic Perspectives group debated these issues guided by their personal experience and a mixture of key performances, scholarly and popular articles. A starting point was Bo Burnham’s magnum opus, Inside, that streamed on Netflix with clips available on YouTube for non-subscribers, and David Tenant and Martin Sheen’s lockdown bromance, Staged, available on the BBC’s iplayer. A collection that claimed to offer the funniest covid-19 memes and jokes, and a scholarly investigation from Frontiers in Psychology ‘ Humour in Times of Covid-19 in Spain, Viewing Coronavirus through memes’. An article on the impact on the comedy business in London from The Evening Standard, and reflections on the impact of covid by stand-up comedians themselves from The Vulture. A reflection on the appropriateness of comedy under Covid from The New York Times ‘Are we ready to laugh about covid?‘ and on the importance of comedy from The Conversation ‘Laughing through Lockdown: Why Comedy is important in Times of Crisis’ 

Richard Kendall opened the debate by raising the question of when, and under what circumstances it was possible to joke about Covid. He noted that the mockery of our most absurd reactions to the pandemic by Australia’s ‘internet historian’ in Tales of the Varus had made him laugh, and that most of the ‘funniest’ moments for him had been unintended, noting the pomposity of the collection of celebrities singing John Lennon’s Imagine, the antics of Dominic Cummings and the conspiracy theories promulgated by David Icke and Eamonn Holmes. David Christie noted the complexities of utilising humour at times of tragedy and mass suffering, arguing that, in the case of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, humour would be viewed as being in very bad taste. He noted, however, that in his long experience of working in homelessness, where suffering and misery were commonplace, for staff working in the field, ‘black humour’ was ubiquitous and helped them to cope with the pressures of the job. He suggested that such a response would likely to have been common in front-line workers during the pandemic. He speculated that what was and was not acceptable to joke about depended greatly on context, whether you had been personally affected, and whether the humour was expressed publicly or privately. Chris Griffin referenced Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, Antiviral Wipe broadcast on the BBC in May 2020 and his subsequent Newsnight interview, where he argued that humour was cathartic and a means of coping with traumatic events. Alex Doak broadly agreed that ‘black humour’ was a coping mechanism for victims, but had a different resonance if used by unaffected observers. he pointed out however, that under the pandemic, everyone was some kind of a victim which made the legitimate use of humour more complex to determine. Alastair Gardner noted that Bo Burnham had explicitly struggled with the appropriateness of comedy during the pandemic beginning his opening song with ‘Is comedy over? Should I be joking at a time like this? What’s the point of joking when no one is laughing at a time like this?’ He noted that Burnham’s piece had overcome this doubt by mixing pathos with humour and that the full piece was a personal (if highly choreographed) meditation on isolation and virtually-mediated life under lockdown which was also the collective experience of his audience. Kendall noted the uniqueness of the Pandemic in relation to human suffering, stating that although the number of deaths had been horrendous, it had a very different tone to the suffering caused by war. Instead of horror, the experience of most people under lockdown had been monotony, a kind of ‘Groundhog day’ that perhaps lent it self more to comedy than tragedy.

Griffin went on to explore the nature of comedy in the internet age. Noting that in the 21st century the internet was popular culture, he explored the ubiquity of the use of memes as the dominant form of humour. He argued that one the one hand, the endless distraction of short bites of humour could be seen as a failure to engage with important issues, a form of online ‘bread and circuses’, but could also be seen as a kind of ‘wellness pill’ that helped people cope with difficult times. He noted the fundamental peculiarity of discourse on twitter, with its strange shifts form the ‘witheringly serious to the puckishly flippant’. He felt that this peculiar mixture of tones could be seen as ‘carnivalesque’ but also could be considered to undermine serious engagement leading to political stagnation. In the context of the pandemic he referenced the Frontiers of Psychology article on meme use in Spain. He noted that the article had analysed 644 memes, with the three most common themes being 1) political leaders, 2) the virus itself, 3)lockdown life. Most surprisingly the pronouncements of the Spanish epidemiologist, Fernando Simon, had been made into some of the most popular memes, and that the article argued that these ‘Simonadas’ had ‘meme by meme’ turned him into, ‘an icon of pop culture on the Internet’. He was unsure of the implications of this process of turning politicians into pop culture, but noted the unprecedented scale and pervasiveness of memes, particularly for the young who had no experience of a pre-internet world. Christie noted Mark Fisher’s 2015 article from the New Humanist ‘the strange death of British satire’, concurring with Fisher’s view that programmes such as ‘Have I got News for You’ had inculcated a pervading view that serious political issues were best responded to by a knowing public school smirk, tending to both a flippant and cynical view of politics – it had also, of course, provided the platform for Boris Johnson’s assent to leadership of the country. Gardner argued that the election of Dominic Trump had killed satire. He also argued that memes themselves were better characterised as ‘content’ rather than any kind of substantial comedy, and that their primary purpose was to engender ‘constant engagement’ and what their actual content was was largely irrelevant. Sadegh Attari concurred, noting the randomness of some memes and the rumour that to promote the 2 Fast 2 Furious franchise, algorithms had been deployed to randomly generate memes. Picking up on some of Griffin’s points, Gardner noted the carnivalesque in post-modern comedy and drawing an analogy to the mix of piety and profanity in Breughel’s ‘The battle of carnival and Lent’. He noted that Bo Burnham’s Inside echoed Griffin’s description of twitter feeds, switching abruptly from comedy to seriousness, but it was these unsettling juxtapositions that made the work so powerful.

Griffin noted that the pandemic had merely accelerated trends in the production, content and distribution of comedy that predated the advent of the virus. He argued that the shift from distinct ‘set up jokes’ characteristic of light entertainment and working men’s clubs of the 1950s to 1970s, which appeared to have been superseded by the ‘alternative comedy’ of the 1980s tied to the identity of the performer, had had a kind of curious renaissance in the form of the meme. What had changed was their democratisation and ubiquity. In addition, he noted that the setbacks and financial losses of the formal comedy circuit had been more of a temporary blip than a game-changer, and argued that the concept of ‘zoom gigs’ would be unlikely to survive the opening up after lockdown. He noted that where live gigs had returned, performers had reported overrunning by up to forty minutes, and that rather than shifting in their seats, audiences had been highly receptive, suggesting the expression of pent-up demand for the comedy experience. This space of shared laughter, he speculated formed a kind of ‘social coagulate’ that had been sorely missed. When asked about their personal experience of comedy during lockdown, Sadegh Attari echoed Griffin’s view of the failure of online gigs (an experience of watching a Frankie Boyle show had been distinctly off-putting). Hanan Fara noted that her younger siblings had become even more addicted to TikTok than before, thus creating their own comedic content rather than merely consuming but had also spent countless hours scanning memes. She herself had watched more comedy, largely returning to the comforting familiarity of conventional sitcoms such as Friends, which enabled a opportunity to disengage from troubled circumstances. Richard Kendall said he had watched a lot of comedy content, also tending to retreat to the familiar, revisiting comedy classics such as Fawlty Towers and The Office. Alistair Gardner noted that rewatching the already known and familiar was typical of people suffering stress and anxiety but in his case was fulfilled by re-viewing classic dramas such as Madmen.

There was much more, join Pandemic Perspectives to have your say or set up your own group…