Séamas O'Reilly: You can’t tell jokes like you used to — and thank God for that

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

“You can’t say anything these days’ is something I hear quite often, mostly in the context of comedy, and the exhausting pressures comedians must be under to pander to the woke scolds of modern culture. ‘That wouldn’t get made today’ is another, usually when someone shares a creaky old comedy routine which reflects, perhaps, some backward social attitudes of a bygone age. 

The most direct answer to these kinds of exclamations is that, yes, you’re right — you couldn’t make those jokes any more because they have already been made, and you would be guilty of plagiarism. A longer effort would be that, no, you can’t make those jokes any more because comedy is subjective to its time and place, and making jokes that reflect the mores of the ’70s and ’80s today would be as logically absurd and commercially perilous as passing off 1920s material would have been back then. I could go on, but first I’ll go back.

When I was young, it seemed like a lot of comedy was cruel. Not all of it, of course. There were stupid jokes, and absurdist gags, and obviously enough tortured, punning punchlines to kill you stone dead, which was a cruelty of its own sort. But the jokes in which people said and did things, where characters were established and situations explored, mostly centred on the ridicule of people by place or identity. 

About 90% of jokes seemed to involve men walking into pubs in groups of three. There were, in fact, truly epidemic levels of trio drinking: A rabbi, a vicar, and a priest; an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman. Local variants took the same form, in a dazzlingly variable arrangement of appellations; the Cavan man, the Kerryman, the Yorkshireman. In my area, as I’m sure happened everywhere else, these distinctions would become more granular still, and all three would be from Derry, but from separate areas, or townlands, even individual housing estates, with each becoming the standard bearer for some quality or other; smart, stupid, lecherous, a miser.

This was training wheels comedy, a blunt and clumsy format through which, nonetheless, I picked up the same comedic strictures as everyone else; set-up and punchline, the rule of three, the subversion of expectations nestled in familiar constructs. These survived, and stayed with me, long after their other lesson ‘everyone from this one place or background is stupid or cheap’ was discarded. I think about those jokes whenever anyone says ‘you couldn’t say that nowadays’. Firstly, because this is patently untrue. You can go into any pub in Ireland (either alone, or accompanied by two people whose stereotypes are hilariously at odds with your own) and hear them, loud and clear, from some red-faced stepdad or other. It’s just that you probably won’t get on TV with them, and that’s probably for the best.

At root, the problem with those jokes was never solely that they were offensive — and in amongst the gentler variants, some were indeed shockingly so — but that they were formulaic. Once you got a taste for comedy that blazed with insight, self-reflection, irony or the surreal, grouping an outside cohort of people together by ethnicity or identity wasn’t just morally dubious, but lazy and boring.

I often see arguments against ‘woke’ comedy, mostly online, and always from people who are themselves about as funny as the D-Day landings. You know the type; comedians and pundits who rant about being silenced, on the lucrative platforms, columns, radio shows, podcasts, and live tours from which they’re forced to eke their tiny fortune. They host events called UNSAYABLE and UNLEASHED, where nine people take turns telling that one joke they share about trans people, on a loop. I understand that it might not be pleasant for a comedian to be told that the joke they said is offensive, or sexist, or racist, but I suppose that is the problem with telling jokes for a living. People get to hear them. One might also wonder at any definition of free speech so agile, that it allows you to tell any joke you like, while censoring others from saying why they dislike it.

Saddest of all, they are eaten alive by their one good critique; that some ‘woke’ comedy amounts to little more than acceptable value statements delivered to applause, rather than laughter. Anyone who has had to suffer through this kind of comedy in the past few years will find this observation perfectly astute. (Ironically, Stewart Lee put it best when he castigated his own fans for this very practice: People say, “Did you see Stewart Lee?” “Yeah.” “Was it funny?” “No, but I agreed the f**k out of it.”) The problem is that the anti-PC comics are not just guilty of the same problem, but exclusively dependent on it. Since it is structurally bound to ‘unacceptable’ value statements, anti-woke humour is comprised wholly and entirely of pandering to the views of one specific and limited audience, rendering it both bad comedy in any formal sense, and also morbidly tedious to anyone who disagrees.

It is hard, but by no means impossible, to make people laugh at sentiments you know repulse them. It takes craft, and thought, and — crucially — empathy, to make people laugh at their own sacred cows, and thus their own selves. To make comedy without empathy is to do so with one hand tied behind your back. To make comedy that explicitly mocks empathy as a concept is to do so after shooting yourself in the head. This is why every skilled critique of ‘wokeness’ has come from the very people the anti-woke crowd despise.

It is when this attempt fails, and becomes polemic, or doctrinal, that people object. When it falls into the flapping, clumsy hands of people who lack even enough self-awareness to mask the underlying cruelty and disdain that motivates their material.

They say you can’t tell jokes like you used to these days. To which, the shortest answer is; no, you can’t, and thank God for that.