Terribly Funny

Did you hear the one about the Scottish comedian who told the tsunami gag? He was bottled off stage and fired by the management.

“Proper Order” you may be thinking. But is it really? Was Will Andrews rightly pilloried for tastelessly combining references to the Blondie song 'The Tide Is High' and the Asian tsunami disaster while onstage at his weekly show in The Liquid Room in Edinburgh earlier this month? Or was his slip-up no more than careless vocalisation of something common in the internal ramblings of us all for which his evidently genuine public apology should have been sufficient recompense?
Comedy can be thought of as quintessentially about taboos. A stand up comic is given licence to voice thoughts, fears and anxieties which are commonly experienced but which are difficult to express between ourselves in the normal course of events. There is however the notion of some sort of boundary between what is acceptable within the terms of that licence and what is not: what in fact constitutes “bad taste”. Big disasters or tragedies are generally held to be out of bounds when considering what is fair game to make fun of in the public arena. However what seems a reasonable and reasonably straightforward rule is in fact anything but.
Take an example a little further in the past: the suicide bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001. Because some time has elapsed since this happened, it’s probable one could get away with material based on this event which it would have been inconceivable to wheel out in the immediate aftermath. It’s a peculiar phenomenon, but tragedy does seem to have a sort of sensitivity half-life, whereby a space of time between an horrific event and now makes it a more acceptable topic to make jokes about.
The further away in time the disaster, the more leeway you get. The famine in Ireland was a dreadful event with huge and real human cost. If it had happened months ago I would be in trouble for making the slightest reference to it in a comedy context. Because it was a long time ago, I would cross at least the initial taste hurdle without too much trouble if I introduced it in most settings. This observable fact reveals that at some level there is an arbitrary decision being made by the listeners as to whether a joke is dealing with something where the level of horror and suffering involved is just too great and too immediate to admit humour or the thought of humour.
Now it gets more complicated, because it is one thing between you making for yourself the decision that a joke is in such poor taste as to be unforgivable and inadmissible, and quite another to hold that there is universal or even generally held agreement on such matters. If I am outraged by Will Andrew’s gag (and there are a number of reasons I might be, not all of which have to do with whether I think it in poor taste) and I decide to show my distaste by booing him off then that’s my decision and the fight is between Will and me. But when, seemingly, a whole crowd of people do it and the guy loses his job, it suggests that a general rule has been broken and punishment is merited.
But what has the guy done? Did he invent tsunami jokes, or disaster jokes come to that? Of course not. User groups and internet joke sites are swamped with far worse jokes almost instantly when any big tragedy becomes public. The true stature of his crime diminishes still further if you accept his explanation that the gag slipped out in the context of his making an appeal for punters to financially support victims of the tsunami disaster. Doesn’t the motivation for his remarks, which would generally be accepted to be a good thing, somewhat mitigate their content, which was instantly deemed a bad thing by a baying mob of sensitive Scottish comedy lovers?
Andrews is not the only casualty, nor even the highest profile one. Sky Sports’ football pundit and all round loveable '70s dinosaur Rodney Marsh found he had overstepped the mark with an ill judged pun. (Incidentally most of the “tsunami jokes” thrown up by a search of the internet are pun-based bringing to mind John Cleese’s three rules of good comedy which are: “No puns, no puns and no puns”). And in the US, New York radio station presenter Todd Lynn was fired for remarks after airing what one can only assume was an attempt at a satirical song about the tsunami written and produced by Rick Delgado, who was also fired by the station owners. It is likely that the latter were as much casualties of a culture where highly politicised special interest or minority lobbying and representative groups police public speech of all sorts rigorously for signs of prejudice or unwarranted disrespect.
In both those cases one can argue that this type of comment on a subject like the tsunami disaster are utterly out of order, purely on the basis that either forum was a place where a listener could reasonably expect not to be assailed with that type of content. In a comedy club however, the rules might be expected to be somewhat different, at least to the extent that any topic might debatably be within the remit of stand up, and the more difficult topics are often the most fertile in terms of humour.
I’m not saying that I believe that the tsunami is a reasonable or good topic to make jokes about. What I would argue is that too strident a reaction to such material is in danger of missing some fundamental points to do with freedom of speech and the issue of bad taste. Taste and indeed humour are subjective. If I find a tsunami joke funny, then for me it is funny. If I find it reprehensible then the reverse applies. But if I turn to you and, as well as expressing my distaste for you and your humour, I go further and tell you that you therefore may not make the joke at all, I am now impinging to some extent on your personal freedom to think and say what you like. That’s a dangerous and debate-killing area to go into.
Brendan O’Carrol has recently been vilified for a tsunami gag here, and wondering at the extent to which this is a live issue locally, I spoke to Comedy Cellar MC and booker Andrew Stanley who confirmed that in recent weeks there have indeed been brave or foolish souls onstage who have referred to the tsunami disaster, and the reaction has pretty much been universally censorial and disapproving from the audience. He also told me of a young new comic who a couple of nights ago made an initially successful tsunami gambit - again pun-based, something to do with the Flood tribunal - but when he extended the gag to suggest that the name of an Asian equivalent to Justice Flood would be “Tsunami” he crossed the invisible line in that room and was roundly chastised by the assembled arbiters of taste.
I wouldn’t disagree with that audience, but I don’t think that guy should be fired or banned; I think he just needs to think more and write better jokes. Until then, you don’t have to listen to him and you don’t have to like what he says.