Mary Fitzgerald
Miss Behave: a sword-swallowing cabaret madam
“A real comedian—that’s a daring man,” Eddie Waters tells a group of would-be comics in Trevor Griffiths’s 1975 play, Comedians. “He dares to see what his listeners shy away from, fear to express. And what he sees is a sort of truth, about people, about their situation, about what hurts or terrifies them, about what’s hard, above all, about what they want.”
Identifying what an audience wants has long been one of the trickiest parts of a comedian’s job. But today it may be harder than ever before. The archetype of the ageing white male stand-up comic, able to rely on well-established and widely shared social norms, was relegated to history both by the growth of alternative comedy in the 1980s, and indeed by multicultural Britain itself. Take Leicester. In February each year, the city hosts Britain’s longest-running comedy festival. In just a few years, it will also become the country’s first city with a majority non-white population. And—as I found when I attended this year’s event—this makes it one of the most exciting places in modern Britain for comedians to test, challenge and redefine what is (and isn’t) deemed acceptable, thinkable and sayable.
Director Geoff Rowe started the festival in 1994 as part of a university project. His timing was fortuitous: the year before, NME magazine had declared comedy the “new rock’n’roll” with a cover featuring Rob Newman and David Baddiel, the first comedians ever to grace a music magazine’s front page. Meanwhile the first handful of stand-up comedians were starting to play big arenas. Live comedy was taking off.
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David Goldblatt
The politics of the playoffs
Whatever the real correlation between the state of a nation and the performance of its national football team, the relationship is often seen as a form of morality play. The World Cup in particular offers a unique and globally televised theatre of popular nationalism. And 2010’s tournament will have some way to go to top the drama of the final days of its qualifying campaign.
In central Europe, conventional plot lines of national decline and fall have been in evidence. Slovenia, one of the most successful post-communist economies, edged out the Russians on away goals. Slovenian television abandoned coverage of parliament to show the victory celebrations and newspapers wrote that the country had taken its “rightful place in history.” The prime minister kept his pledge to clean the team’s boots if they qualified. Meanwhile, Bosnia’s exit at the hands of Portugal seemed to confirm the country’s malaise. As one Sarajevan student said: “We lost the war, we lost the past, we have no future… We really needed to win something, somewhere. It seems losing is in our blood.”
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Leo Hornak
Pinned down: the politics of social taboo
Ever considered sticking a pin into a child’s hand? How about kicking a dog in the head, hard? What about undergoing plastic surgery to add a two inch tail to the end of your spine?
Surprising as it may seem, your answers to these questions may throw some light on your political loyalties and affiliations. Recent research from the US has produced surprising data about differing attitudes towards social taboos across the political spectrum. The authors include Jonathan Haidt, whose thoughts on the moral and political choices facing Barack Obama are featured in this month’s edition of Prospect in an essay that is free to read online.
According to the study (pdf), published this Spring in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, conservatives are likely to feel more strongly about social taboos revolving around purity, authority and ingroup loyalty, while liberals feel a stronger sense of obligation around issues of harm to animals and other people. Libertarians, those rootless individualists, scored lower in every moral category. Read more »
William Barnes
The Thai monarch's flag: time to take it down?
Prospect’s James Crabtree was full of praise for The Economist’s unprecedented, biting articles on the Thai monarchy, “A Right Royal Mess.” It’s a piece that certainly suggests the Economist does not fear moving its South East Asia desk out of Bangkok. Yet the article ultimately misses the central point about the Thai monarchy—that it is a moral compass and a comfort for many Thais, a function never matched even by Queen Victoria in her imperial pomp.
Still, there’s no doubt that it it was brave. And the response of the Thai authorities will be keenly watched. Some 30-odd people have been charged under Thailand’s severe lèse majesté laws (which make insulting the monarchy a criminal offence) over the last couple of years, some for saying far less than the Economist just has. A new government might try to burnish its patriotic credentials with some Brit bashing. Those Thai intellectuals, foreign observers, journalists and academics who find the monarchy curious must be delighted.
Bravery aside, there is a strong whiff of condescension in the Economist’s tone: “It cannot be good for a country to subscribe to a fairy-tale version of its own story” it says. Meanwhile King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 81 last Friday, “risks leaving behind a country unprepared for life without father.” The Economist gives the monarchy credit for nothing: apparently it is an irrational institution, out of time and of scant utility. Yet Thailand’s monarchy coexisted quite comfortably with civilian prime ministers for most of the period between 1980 until a couple of years after Thaksin came to power in 2001. The Economist seems not to have understood that many Thais hate Thaksin for his strange megalomania; an election victory does not licence despotism.
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