IS IT STILL ALL RIGHT TO LAUGH THESE DAYS? by Harry McAvinchey

I used to love the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy comedies from the 1920s and 1930s.I would watch them on television, as a boy with my father He saw them first in the local cinema when he too was a boy in the 1930s . I could see how these old comedies tapped into the absurdities of everyday life, pumped them up full of air to bursting  point and then exploded them with exaggerated  comedic glee. I think watching them was a great preparation for a life lived mostly in Northern Ireland, in the second half of the twentieth century and the spawning , glittering twenty-first. Back then in the dawning age of  mass communication and the almost-new  novelty  of film, these old comics and comedians  used their vaudevillian skills to entrance a wide -eyed audience with slapstick  eccentricity and  attacks on the pomposity of the established order.

There was a time when we were allowed to laugh.

 In the 1960s Johnny Speight wrote a ground-breaking television sit-com  called .”Til Death Us Do Part”…The characters he invented for this  mirror of our times  were caricatures  of  an average English household.The main focus was on  Alf Garnett {who was played by a fine Jewish actor called Warren Mitchell} Speight wrote Alf as a misogynist, wife-beating, racist  anti-youth , ultra-conservative  bigot. He was such  a cartoon that he was the repository of every awful trait that could be conceived to inhabit any errant  household. His “lazy layabout Socialist”  son was played by Tony Booth who in real life was to be  the  alcoholic lover of Coronation Street’s Elsie Tanner and father of Tony Blair’s future wife Cherie. The show was a hit. People across the televisual nation laughed at how it exposed the grisly underbelly of racism , ultra-conservatism and so on for us to laugh at.

The thing is , as sometimes happens out there in the real world…..some people did not see the join between the artifice of a TV show with actors and the actual reality. For them, reality was blurred. They held the Alf character as a living breathing hero.For them he was real. He was a friend .That’s the thing about humour.Nobody can tell you when it’s  the time or place to laugh. It’s why  laughter tracks are sometimes dubbed on afterwards.As Ken Kesey might have said ..”You’re either on the bus or you’re off it”.

Many people took offence with that TV show.They were uncomfortable with the awful truths it unearthed but it went on to spawn the kind of humour that brought on  the absurdism of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the likes of the late Rik Mayall ‘s Young Ones and the political puppetry of Spitting Image. We had our own watered-down versions  in Northern Ireland in the shape of the Hole in the Wall Gang and Give my Head Peace..

The thought struck me though while reading Jude’s column about Nelson McCausland. recently…. When are we really allowed to laugh? Are there real rules slipping into place with encroaching Political Correctness , implying that we simply will not be allowed to poke fun at things we too find absurd…Will we not be allowed to laugh at  a political banality or make  playful reference to Mr Poots’s ears?Will we not be allowed to question and laugh at  some strange religious beliefs or cultural tics that are alien to our worldview?  Will we not be allowed to laugh along and with the playfulness of Morris Dancers or Mummers or laugh out loud at a Minister of our government telling us that the earth is 6000 years old?

We are living in increasingly strange times .If you had told anyone forty years ago that they would sell bottles of clear water in supermarkets all over the land  or ban smoking while you supped your pint, you’d have been laughed out of the bar and onto the street.

Will we soon need a government booklet  The Rules for Laughter and Social Deportment”..to be updated annually and signed off on like a MOT certificate … Then we’ll all know what is really funny again….