In the third chapter of Of Mice And Men a dog gets bantered to death. When Candy, an old ranch hand, brings his stinky, decrepit mutt into the bunk house the other workers all start to make fun of its smell. What starts as good-natured joshing soon becomes insistent demands and ends with one of the other ranch hands taking Candy’s dog outside and shooting it while Candy lies on his bunk and stares at the ceiling in silence.

It’s one of my favourite scenes in literature, insidious in its ability to break your heart, unabashedly sentimental and all taking place in about four pages. I’ll admit I’m a sucker for Steinbeck (The Red Pony pulls much the same trick) but I love that dog scene above most others because it remains the most incisive, clear-eyed examination I’ve ever read of “banter”.

Banter is perhaps the most pernicious word in the English language, stealing the clothing of comedy to drape over bog-standard bullying. As Steinbeck saw, when men tell jokes about each other it isn’t an exercise of wit, or a desire to explore a comic flight of fancy: it’s an attempt to assert some sort of dominance in the social order.

Perhaps there is some platonic ideal of banter. Perhaps somewhere there really exists good-natured joshing between equals performed in an atmosphere of mutual trust. But I doubt it’s been discovered by the stag-do blokes wearing matching rugby shirts emblazoned with Legends On Tour 2023: Archbishop Of Banterbury, Billy Banter, Vive La Bantz, Pato Banter, and Judith Bantz. Pulling someone’s trousers down as they’re going through airport security is not light-hearted, witty ribbing. It’s boorishness that makes everyone’s day that bit longer.

As an aside, one of the weirder moments in recent political history was when the GOP decided to try to pass off Donald Trump’s admissions of harassment as “locker-room” talk. Who in their right mind talks in a locker room, especially one full of men? Why is “locker-room talk” a synonym for harmless fun, instead of a reminder of shame-facedly having to pull humid clothes onto a still-damp, tubby body as fast as humanly possible? The only thing it is ever necessary to say in a locker room is: “Please stop flicking that wet towel at the back of my scrotum.”

Banter reinforces the male hierarchy. It’s conformism masquerading as transgression and reinforced through emotional violence drenched in plausible deniability. It’s unsurprising that it was the default mode of communication in the late 1990s. Magazines like Nuts and TV programmes like They Think It’s All Over communicated almost entirely in Bantz, as a substitute for having to write jokes.

The only necessary thing to say in a locker room is “Please stop flicking that wet towel at the back of my scrotum”

For decades comedy has been one of the few approved methods of communication for teenage boys. When crying and describing their feelings was met, at best, with blank incomprehension and, at worst, with being upended in a latrine, most boys turned to expressing emotions through rugger, freelance kicking and upending people in latrines. A lucky few terminal nerds found fellow nerds and, rather than bottling everything up, could sublimate their feelings into recitations of famous comedy “bits” instead. We’d pore over script books and badly VHSed copies of Blackadder’s Christmas Carol like they were holy texts and we were preparing for comedy bar mitzvahs.

Comedy performers seemed to offer different models of masculinity too. Pythons and Frys and Mayalls weren’t just boring lads. We could even forgive Hugh Laurie for being a rower. Softies and poets and thinkers could rejoice, as long as they could do a number of reasonably-effective but now-definitely-racist voices.

Since then, it’s become clear that many of our sketch performers are tiresome arseholes of the most predictable kind. Conformists posing as transgressors, again – but so deluded they believe that their work is dangerous. Miriam Margolyes’ autobiography makes it clear that this tediously inevitable self-regard isn’t a feature of their old age. Most of them have been irretrievable turds since at least the mid-1960s.

The best sketch performers today are no longer gangs of middle-class white men, but the likes of Natasia Demetriou & Ellie White, Katy Wix & Anna Crilly, Famalam, and Egg – the sketch group of Anna Leong Brophy and Emily Lloyd-Saini. It’s a shame Horne & Corden kicked the mainstream sketch show to death so thoroughly that none will get the recognition it deserves. It is, of course, simply a coincidence that when they stopped being the preserve of white men, mainstream television channels stopped making sketch shows.

It wasn’t just lads and banter in the 1990s. Rob Newman also showed us a stylish refusal to accept the status quo, even if you did have to wade through Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis and David Baddiel to get to it. Jarvis Cocker showed wit in the middle of Britpop’s shouty pleas for attention. Eddie Izzard gave us permission for a new type of masculinity: one that could wear dresses, put on mascara, kiss boys and girls and whoever we liked and still make jokes in Latin.

Not everything was Nick Hancock. He must have been delighted by Covid, by the way, no longer being the most loathsome Hancock in the public eye. The chortling, back-slapping sportsmen of They Think It’s All Over destroyed comedy by showing commissioners that banter was a cheaper alternative. Panel shows replaced sitcoms, celebrity quizzes replaced sketch shows, and no one had to pay writers anymore.
Besides, as any true, bitter, outcast comedy nerd will tell you: it’s not proper comedy if a rugby player can do it.

Nathaniel Tapley is a comedy writer and performer on the TV shows you hate