Funny ha ha

An economic and technological schism separates us from the recent past. You see the gulf yawn in the writing of its greatest satirist, Craig Brown, whose collected journalism has just been published by 4th Estate.

No one will repeat Brown’s success, and not only because he is “quite brilliant” (John le Carré), “the wittiest writer in Britain today” (Stephen Fry) and “the most screamingly funny living writer” (Barry Humphries) – although he is all these things – but because the world he parodied and adored is now utterly remote from us.

Consider the position of a middle-class Englishman from the late twentieth century enjoying Brown’s writings as he travelled into work on a commuter train. He would look up and know that his fellow travellers would get Brown’s jokes. Nearly everyone shared a common culture and an intimacy with a cast of characters, created not by the Bible or Shakespeare, but by the UK’s media restrictions.

There were just four television channels. You watched them because there was little else to watch. That restricted world with its gatekeepers and regulators was on its way out even before the Web blew it apart. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, politicians worried that satellite TV was stopping migrants to the UK from assimilating. They would once have picked up the national culture from television. By the turn of the millennium, new technologies meant migrants could remain in the mental worlds of the Indian subcontinent or Middle East.

Today’s flood of information forces everyone into fragmented tribes and isolated silos. The educated pretend we are immune and that groupthink only afflicts Trump supporters, conspiracy theorists, or whoever else we dislike. But we too follow, read, and share with the members of our little tribes. It is impossible in a time of information overload to do otherwise. We live in fragmented worlds because they are the only worlds we can cope with.

In the 1980s you could call a dodgy guy an Arthur Daley or a Del Boy and most people would get the reference. The only fictional references modern writers can be sure readers will understand are from global hits: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and, perhaps, Game of Thrones.

Today’s journalists therefore write in styles that could not be more different from Craig Brown’s confident and open prose. Half of them issue declamatory rants that preach to their right- or left-leaning bubbles. The rest issue nervy pieces, peppered with links to sources, which show that writers doubt their readership of strangers will trust them unless they offer a forest of facts.

Familiarity in the twentieth century bred affection rather than contempt. It’s telling that, scorching satirist though he can be, Craig Brown could not bring himself to be cruel about the actors and comedians who once filled the nation’s imagination.

In real life, Arthur Lowe was Captain Mainwaring: a short pompous man who took himself very seriously. Rather than mocking Lowe’s self-importance, Brown notes that “playing oneself requires as much skill, and perhaps rather more subtlety, as playing any other character.” Dad’s Army is too perfect a sitcom for Brown or anyone else of his age to denigrate.

Meanwhile, rather than blame the man himself, Brown blames the intelligentsia’s humourlessness for Peter Cook’s failure to fulfil his youthful promise. “If only his jokes had been less funny, Peter Cook might have been rated the equal of Pinter and Beckett, perhaps even their superior,” Brown writes. “His vision is informed by their sense of hopelessness and restlessness. But to my mind it is somehow less solemn, less forced.” (With all due respect to Brown’s late friend, it might have helped Peter Cook’s reputation if he had written a play or two.)

He treats Kenneth Williams, Les Dawson, and even Benny Hill with equal sympathy. Typically, the only politician Brown has any time for is Alan Clark, not because of he approved of his policies, but because his diaries were funny.

WH Auden caught Brown’s English mentality in 1939 when he wrote of how posterity

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives,
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardon him for writing well.

Brown prefers a line of Auberon Waugh’s and takes it as his motto: “Whatever others hold seriously should immediately be seen as ridiculous to the civilised man.” For Brown, if you can entertain millions or write well, if you are funny rather than solemn, stylish rather than forced, then you cannot be wholly bad. Anything is better than boredom.

The ability to regard the world as ridiculous depends on a certain level of security. Poverty, illness, loneliness, oppression and rejection turn most of us into bores. Although the UK as a whole is richer than it was in the last century, Brown’s audience in the comfortable middle class is not what it once was.

Whatever else ailed our twentieth century commuter, he likely enjoyed a security few now enjoy. In 1989, 51 per cent of 25-34-year-olds were buying a home. Today about 28 per cent can afford a mortgage. The young middle class can no longer take well-paid jobs and decent pensions for granted, any more than they can leave university without being liable for enormous debts.

The secure are not necessarily indifferent to politics. Members of the middle class have always retained the capacity to fear and deride the people who lord it over them. In twentieth-century Britain there was a deep suspicion of “London”: not the real city, but the London of the political, financial and cultural elites. Throughout his career Brown has satirised our masters, and remorselessly. Sometimes his mockery is gentle. He presents Tony Blair as a desperate attention-seeker yearning for the recognition he thinks is his due. The pretensions of radical chic by fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood are expertly deflated. She may blame the rich for destroying the planet but “seldom hobnobs with anyone earning less than half a million pounds a year.”

On other occasions, he is brutal. You will go a long way before you find an evisceration as thorough as Brown’s destruction of his namesake Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair in the 1980s, a time when the editorship of major magazines bestowed real power. (Her celebrity is another instance of the changes the Web has brought. Who knows who edits Vanity Fair today? Or cares?)

Like a chef picking out the bones of a cold fish, he examines the egotism that allowed her to boast in her diaries about how much money she earns, the cruelty that allowed her to sack her colleagues on Vanity Fair as she chirruped “gotta clean house”, and the indefatigable social climbing that makes “the parties she throws and attends sound more like meat processing plants.”

Brown’s criticism of the powerful usually comes down to a list of purely personal faults. They are self-obsessed. They are greedy. They are only in it for themselves. They are hypocrites. You can read this volume of collected journalism and learn nothing about the vast social and political changes of the past 50 years.

Which is not to say that Brown’s writing is purely pleasurable (although he provides plenty of pleasures). His attitudes, and the attitudes of his and my generation, have shaped Britain. I cannot pretend we can look back with satisfaction at the wreckage we have left behind. The apparently civilised belief that we should pardon those who write well and ridicule bores who take the world too seriously has had bitter consequences. It led to the British (or a plurality of the British) embracing a politician who was never dull. He inflicted an incurable harm on our economy by leading us out of the European Union and then took official mendacity and corruption to new heights when he was prime minister.

I once berated a senior figure at the BBC for granting Boris Johnson so much free airtime on Have I Got News for You.

“Why did you give a politician on the make so much help?”

“Because he’s funny,” came her reply.

Now we are in a country where nothing works, not the criminal justice system, the education service, the NHS, nothing. Eight million are waiting for medical treatment and 2.5 million are unfit to work.

But at least it’s been fun, eh.

Meanwhile anti-politics, the belief that the corrupt elite are the enemies of the people, cleared the way for authoritarian rule. When Craig Brown’s style of mockery was replaced by the bitterness left by the crash of 2008, in the US, Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, and many other countries, it led to “the people” or a large chunk of them, despairing of representative democracy, and turning to fraudulent strongmen who promised to “drain the swamp” and “end business as usual”.

We cannot go back in time. But it would be worthwhile to attempt to recreate something like Craig Brown’s world. A country where people could afford decent homes and live comfortable lives, and believe that the worst thing they can say about their leaders is that they are silly bores.