Memorials

Today is a good day to talk about statues.

Charlie Gilmour has just been sent down for 16 months for violent disorder during student fees riots. He notoriously swung from a union flag hanging from the Cenotaph before later harassing some royal cars, smashing up Topshop, concealing a mannequin’s leg and angrily refusing to eat cake. As the Mail puts it, ‘although Gilmour was not sentenced for his behaviour at the Cenotaph, he was told his actions were ‘reprehensible’.’

The Judge in this case, Nicholas Price QC, was quite clear, though, that Gilmour’s actions at the “empty tomb”, despite not being the crime he was prosecuted for, had certainly been reflected in the sentence. He was explicit in highlighting that Gilmour’s reckless behaviour was made significantly worse by the cultural significance of the space he did it in.

“For a young man of your intelligence and education and background to profess to not know what the Cenotaph represents defies belief,” he said.
“You have shown disrespect to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, to those who fell defending this country.”
But Gilmour was given some credit for apologising for his actions.
“You expressed yourself in a fitting way when you said how deeply ashamed you are for what is, as you acknowledge, the terrible insult to those who gave their lives,” the judge said.

BBC

For Price, it is inconceivable that an intelligent person could fail to understand the importance of the memorial. Everyone knows what it represents, and in failing to give it the reverence it is seen to deserve, Gilmour has disrespected our war dead with an insult which penetrates right to the heart of our national values.

The soldiers died, Gilmour was told, to protect his freedom and the freedom of all in this country. It is because they gave their life that Gilmour has the right to peaceful protest, and so not only did he disrespect their memory by using the flag as a rope swing, but also by failing to live within the limits of the freedom they apparently won. And this is where I start to lose my footing with established wisdom on the subject. Firstly, because of the obvious obliviousness on the part of the Judge to the irony both of lecturing a man about the privileges of freedom while simultaneously condemning his behaviour and curtailing his liberty and of chastising him for his failure to remain peaceful in the same breath as recalling the example set by soldiers in a war. Secondly, and more unsettlingly, because when one looks at the situation afresh, nothing seems more disrespectful to the thousands of dead than, decades later, to appropriate their suffering as a tool with which to admonish a foolish man for his drunken idiocy. The reverence that Price expected, the reverence we are instructed to feel about those killed in combat is a function of the gross hypocrisy surrounding the issue. At the heart of this hypocrisy is the problem of statues, monuments and artifacts of commemoration.

Today, the Queen, our head of state, unveiled a new statue to honour the work done by the men and women of Bletchley Park during the second world war. These were the nation’s best cryptographers, logicians and mathematicians and, by creating what is sometimes regarded as the world’s first computer, they were able to crack the Enigma machine’s code, which was a decisive moment in the course of the war. Little mention today was made of the fate of Alan Turing, one of the most significant thinkers of Bletchley Park. Turing was gay, and because homosexuality was a crime he was given the choice between prison or ‘treatment’ in the form of female hormones which amounted to chemical castration, which he accepted. Eventually he was found dead from cyanide poisoning, in what is presumed to be suicide. Neither Gordon Brown’s 2009 apology on behalf of the British government nor today’s statue can undo the suffering that was inflicted on Turing by a state whose ill-conceived values he was unable to live by. What we instead witness is an effort to disguise the sordid ideology on which we have built so much of our society behind a whitewash of reverence, ‘respect’ and patriotism. By honouring the work of the Bletchley Park team, the establishment is merely exploiting their legacy to celebrate itself. Turing is best known today for lending his name to the Turing Test, a means of identifying artificial intelligence. Turing enables us to differentiate between genuine humanity and its mere cynical imitation.

The Cenotaph, as our primary war monument, is possibly the most focused example of the self-serving and dishonest logic of commemoration. The inherently false values are perhaps best expressed in three words engraved on one side: “THE GLORIOUS DEAD”. Why, we must ask ourselves, is there not a monument to our glorious living? There is a legend that when the Cenotaph was unveiled soldiers who had returned from the war impoverished, wounded and hungry remarked ‘we asked for bread and you gave us stone’. Consider those words for a moment, and you begin to understand the truly chilling nature of war memorials. When sleeping rough in Westminster is criminalised in September, a proportion of the homeless people the Police will be moving along will be ex-soldiers who we will claim to honour in November. They can’t sleep in the Cenotaph. The state’s failure to adequately provide for veterans reveals its appreciation for soldiers’ sacrifices to be little more than a pose. The glorious living are an inconvenience, the glorious dead are a tool. They are to be celebrated, because their memory is a short hand for the values which keep us in line. Today, their deaths were used to criticise a twit because he had played on the cold stone with which we celebrate their suffering, and their memory was appropriated in the courts to add generations of emotional weight to the establishment’s artificial distinction between ‘proper protest’ and that which deviates from what is acceptable by providing a genuinely confrontational challenge to the state’s authority. Is this what those men died for? I suspect it probably is.

Every major war shapes our attitudes to war itself. In the days of empire, war was glorious and masculine. In the 20th century WWI and WWII were honourable, noble, righteous, necessary. As we watched Vietnam the tide began to turn, as we started to weigh up the moral authority with which the Western powers engaged overseas, the demographic of the men who died and the atrocities that were committed against indigenous people. For many of us raised on Iraq, war is an expensive, misguided, illegitimate affair, as much an assault on the decency and character of a people by their government as on one nation by another. Is it any wonder that those who engineer war are so keen to remind us of The Great War? Is it any wonder that we still talk in outdated terms of ‘trenches’, ‘the front’ and ‘no man’s land’? Is it any wonder that the symbol of our remembrance is the poppy of 1918, not the deserts or the oil fields of 2011?

Jon Snow sparked a modicum of controversy in November for declining to wear a poppy on television in the weeks leading to the 11th, as he found the gesture lost its meaning if it became just another unthinking habit. TV studios have baskets of poppies on stand by so that everyone who is to appear on camera can be fitted with one, ensuring that a consistent and unconfrontational set of values are presented at all times. Wearing a poppy to ‘remember’ the dead has become a default for the public figures who appear within the mainstream media, a cultural trend to which one conforms. The ubiquitous prevalence of poppies is, to any student of symbols and their political potency, disquieting. They hang, pinned to the lapels of every apolitical figure, as an uncritical invocation of horrific bloodshed nestled harmlessly into everyday life, or plastered all over crosses in what could almost be taken as a deliberately cold and humourless pun on religion as the ‘opiate of the masses’. They are a totem, a prop, a signifier which tells onlookers that the wearer is compassionate and caring about soldiers’ deaths but they fail to do anything to prompt deeper thought. There are those who seek to counter this without appearing unfeeling by sporting a white poppy for peace, rejecting the militaristic jingoism and the glorification of war that is suggested by the red poppy and instead embodying the only fitting sentiment that could adorn a sincere war memorial; ‘this must never happen again’.

War memorials are dishonest. They are a way to satisfy our guilt and our concerns whilst allowing us to excuse ourselves from addressing the real tragedy. Stone is an imperfect material with which to express genuine sorrow or gratitude. War memorials are a cultural shorthand for a sentiment that we no longer bother to feel. They are a two minutes silence, when what is required is a scream. They are an exploitation of tragedy. They are a celebration of death. We should not celebrate the casualties of war. We, who have the luxury of not being soldiers, should not take a second’s pleasure, satisfaction or pride in their suffering.

This morning I was prompted to remember the provocative and flippant intellectualism of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys:

“All the mourning’s veiled the truth; it’s not ‘lest we forget’ it’s ‘lest we remember’. See, that’s what all this is about; the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two-minutes silence, because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.”

Political Reform: A Proposal

Political parties should exist for a maximum of ten years, and then be completely disbanded. The career politicians would then form new parties, from scratch, with new names, policies, compositions, power structures, etc. This would stop parties exploiting their, or their opposition’s, past to curry favour. The nature of branding in politics would be seriously altered; the words ‘Conservative’ and ‘Labour’ would lose their potency and the focus would be on how to communicate and define new ideas. In essence, politics would be liberated from the tedium of tradition, from the tribalistic loyalty, from the narrow minded grudges.

It would break up the strange bedfellows who are only in the same party by historical coincidence. Why should those socialists on the left who want to support the trade unions have to share a party with New Labour? Why should socially progressive libertarians have to share a party with the bigotry and intolerance of old Tories? Why should any Lib Dem have to share a party with Nick Clegg? If people didn’t feel it necessary to opt for the main three (ultimately, the main two) parties to avoid wasting their vote, they might be able to vote more honestly. Allowing splits and factions to flourish into distinct parties gives voters a greater degree of choice in line with their outlook. For example, rather than just choosing the right wing party, you could have a choice of several different right wing parties and select the one you most identify with or have the most confidence in. It might no longer be an inescapable function of political campaigns that all the parties fight over a thin sliver of centrist middle ground.

Some of these parties, understanding their limited scope, would set up more like taskforces to respond to specific political conditions. For example, if we were experiencing a time of considerable economic turbulence and a man like Vince Cable really did feel that the best way to improve things was for him to put aside other differences and join forces with George Osborne for the good of the nation, that could happen. They could form the Deficit Reduction Party and see what the electorate felt about that.

There are two obvious objections: Firstly, that people who want to keep voting for the same party year on year would not be able to; and secondly that as parties disband and reform there would be core groups of people who stick together. Essentially, the two answer each other. There would be small cabals of politicians who, once their party had been disbanded, would remain together to form the next one, and people who were genuinely happy with their performance would vote for that new party. What the process of constant change would achieve, though, would be to shake off from the periferies of these clans all the people (politicians and supporters) who no longer shared their view, who weren’t happy, who could then go to form their own party and have it appear on a level footing with whatever new party their former colleagues had formed.

New parties entering the arena would be placed on a level playing field. Even parties made up of familiar faces would be unknown and untested to some degree. The idea of a ‘life-long Labour voter’ or a ‘life-long Conservative voter’ is ludicrous and can only exist in a world where parties to do not progress and voters’ views are not adequately represented. If we did away with the old giants, removing the default voting option, then in order to have a clue who to vote for, people would actually have to read manifestos and engage with policies.

Traditionalism, loyalty and branding produce nothing but stagnation in politics. Constant change keeps us on our toes. Constant change brings us progress.

All Women Shortlists

All Woman Shortlisting for a party’s selection of MP candidate is an often contentious point. The justification for it is that despite women making up roughly half the population of the country, they have never come anywhere near this proportion of seats in the House of Commons. A dearth of women is a problem for many reasons, chief among them that ‘women’s issues’ are given less attention than they deserve, that there is a lack of positive female role models demonstrating a woman’s capacity to exercise power and that, symbolically and literally, our political system is revealed to be dominated by, and managed in the interests of, men (and white men, at that). As important as it is to see the hugely discrepant male to female ratio rectified, AWS seem to be an imperfect, and potentially damaging, tool.

The most obvious reason to oppose them, and one which is sufficient for many to make up their minds on its strength alone, is that refusing to allow someone to run in an election on the grounds of gender or any similar characteristic is inherently at odds with the basic values of our democratic system. In fact, Labour’s use of all women shortlists was ruled illegal in 1996 under the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, and remained so until the Labour government introduced the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002 to allow themselves to continue the practice.

There is also an argument that the women elected through these lists are not respected because they haven’t had to go though the same rigours as other MPs. The Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson made her opposition to all women shortlists unambiguous with a t-shirt bearing the legend “I am not a token woman”.

To some extent, though, it is for each party to decide how they select their candidates, and as the women selected through this process still have to go on to legitimately win an election, it could be argued that this does not constitute a serious democratic shortcoming. Aside from this, AWS are fundamentally at odds with another key ideology of our democracy; the idea of representation. The suggestion is that for women to be adequately represented in the House of Commons, the proportion of female MPs must be (or at least must approach) the proportion of women in society; approximately 50%. The first response to this is to recognise that women are not the only under represented minority group*. Other groups, who are also likely to be adversely affected by ignorantly made policy, might also be justified in demanding electoral manipulation to ensure representation. Why not all black or Asian shortlists? Why not all disabled shortlists? Why all openly gay shortlists? I’m not being facetious. Why not engineer things so that there are a few more working class MPs, or better still, benefits claimants? A number of MPs end up in prison, but why not engineer things so that some ex-convicts are elected; would their experiences not be useful in informed law making? Yesterday in Parliament Labour MP Paul Flynn suggested shortlists to get more people over 80 into the Commons. There is not one (acknowledged) transgender MP. Isn’t it time something was done about that? Shouldn’t a few more of our MPs be unemployed? (Ok, now I am being facetious)

Though it would be nice to see a more diverse Parliament, all women shortlists are built on the notion that in order for women’s interests to be protected, women must be represented by women. This is problematic for a representative democracy; ultimately, if you consent to be represented by someone else in a political system you must accept that they will not share all of your characteristics, up to and including gender. (Practically, if you are lucky enough to find a candidate whose political views are compatible with yours, other concerns become secondary). Furthermore, this debate focuses on the composition of the Commons as a whole, and somewhat neglects the role an MP has in representing their own constituency. Is my sister, whose MP is female, better represented, benefiting from a greater democratic empowerment, than my mother, whose MP is male? Am I served less well by my female MP than I would have been by a male one? It is worth remembering that the women of Mid Bedforshire are represented by Nadine Dorries, who, with her views on abortion, abstinence only sex education for girls and ‘just saying no’ to sexual abuse can be viewed as one of the most pressing threats to the dignity and sexual equality of women in the current Parliament. She doesn’t even support all women shortlists, so anti-feminist is she.

All of this is to say that, within the context of our democratic system, any attempt by the major political parties to influence that type of person who is elected is fundamentally undemocratic; all women shortlists are built on a rejection of the most basic concept of representation; and that women in power are no guarantee that women’s issues are being properly championed. The very idea of all women shortlists is fundamentally at odds with the internal logic of our political system.

It’s also worth looking at this in a wider context, though. All female shortlists are intended to address the recognised problem that our political system is dominated by men and maintains masculine, patriarchal privileges. With this in mind, it is seriously doubtful that this system can be a mechanism for protecting (or even understanding) women’s best interests. Put bluntly; if you do not believe that our democratic system is institutionally prejudiced in favour of men then there is no need for all female shortlists. If you do believe that our democratic system is institutionally prejudiced in favour of men then there is no reason to trust it as an agent of female empowerment. A policy handed down from above, by men, within a patriarchal system will not empower women; it is a gesture of condescension. Women cannot be given equal democratic power, as the very act of giving is an assertion of superiority. Fundamentally, our representative parliamentary democracy is a hierarchy of power and privilege which has consistently disenfranchised women. Genuine gender equality cannot be achieved with in it.

*It is worth pointing out that at half the population, women are not in any meaningful sense a numerical minority, but are referred to as one because they suffer the same effects of marginalisation, victimisation and ‘othering’ as is common for actual minorities.

Fools and Clowns: Bruce, Hicks and Stanhope

Twentieth century Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that the festive laughter of a carnival is ‘universal in scope, it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants’. [1] He went on explicitly to differentiate between this ubiquitous laughter and the laughter of ‘pure’ satire, because ‘the satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it’. [2] The difference between satirical comedy and the egalitarian folk laughter of carnival is that the satirical performer is distinct from the laughter of the audience, controlling it from above with assumed and granted authority. But while in Bakhtin’s idea of carnial the laughter is the laughter of ‘all the people’, he also describes the role of ‘clowns and fools’, individuals who stand out as being ‘the constant, accredited representitives of the carnival spirit’. [3] Stewart Lee has observed what he described as the ‘shaman-clown tradition’, stemming from ancient comic festivals, in certain modern stand up comedians, and it is helpful when looking at contemporary performances in the light of Bakhtin’s theories to think of some comics not as performers per se but as a focus for this ‘carnival spirit’, leading the collective laughter of the audience. The humour of American comedians Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks and Doug Stanhope, through whom there has widely been observed a chain of succession, can be read as one modern incarnation of Bakhtin’s folk humour, placing them in a far older tradition than is perhaps usually thought. This influence is debatable, but it manifests itself both superficially (in terms of the content of their shows, made up of grotesque taboo breaking jokes about religious and authoritarian institutions) and in a deeper sense (the very mechanics of their performance; that which accounts for their success with audiences).

Bakhtin described how in carnivaleqsue traditions ‘verbal etiquette and discipline are relaxed and indecent words and expressions may be used’ [4] and wrote of the significance of what he called ‘marketplace’ or ‘billingsgate’ language; an often vulgar vernacular of ‘curses, oaths [and] popular blazons’. [5] Far from this being a negative, he argues that ‘an ideal and at the same time real type of communication, impossible in real life, is established’. [6] What is achieved is more than unrestrained communication, however. Sue Vice wrote that ‘carnival profanation consists of ‘a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth’, to the level of the body’. [7] By debasing and linking with the body (and specifically its digestive and reproductive processes) carnival not only undermines its subjects but also strengthens them. That which denies its own reproduction and consumption has no mechanism for sustained life, whereas that which acknowledges what is natural about itself (even if a little unsavoury) is capable of continual regeneration. Bakhtin referred to this as ‘grotesque realism’; it is distasteful but it is real. The vulgarity of the ‘billingsgate’ is, deep down, a celebration; sexually explicit language is also the language of reproduction, scatological language is the language of the living body and by using this language one is allowing for and acknowledging the healthy continuation of life. As Vice wrote, ‘Death and renewal are central to carnival … the two states are inseparable’. [8]

The title of Lenny Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, demonstrates the significance of profanity in his career (as do his many arrests for obscenity). His supporters argue, however, that his shows, though vulgar, had redeeming social importance, and he has been compared directly (both in court and in a petition of support) to Rabelais, one of the central authors from whom Bakhtin derived his theory of the carnivalesque. [9] Indeed, Bakhtin could have been describing Bruce when he published in 1965 that ‘these [billingsgate] elements still prevent public reading of Rabelais, although in other respects no author is better suited for such reading’. [10] While this unacceptable language became a public distraction from the actual substance of his routines the language should not be viewed as irrelevant to this deeper satirical content. Rather, Bruce’s questioning of (and challenges to) the formal values of performance language were no different from his questioning of (and challenges to) the government, organised religion, Hollywood, etc. Satire can promote great public discourse but it is therefore always necessary to ensure that language, the tool of this discourse, is not constrained, restricted or controlled to the point of impotence. In attacking the idea that audiences should not hear certain words Bruce was also protecting a performer’s right to offend and be critical, establishing the ‘real type of communication’ that Bakhtin described. Bruce was described as a ‘moralist’ [11] and many of his jokes revolved around an attempt to hold various institutions to a consistent set of moral standards (take, for example, the line ‘the Ten Commandments doesn’t say “Thou Shallt Not Kill Sometimes…”’). [12] One of Bruce’s routines was built around the phrase ”to’ is a preposition, ‘come’ is a verb’ and was an example of how obscenity could be constructed out of individually innocuous words, as though he were trying to find the secret of what made them offensive. In place of any rational values, however, he found only hypocrisy and created performances which undermined this hypocritical behaviour. He created imagined scenes in which he could caricaturise untenable opinion and expose its shortcomings, or as Lou Gottlieb, a witness in his first obscenity trial put it ‘… as Mr. Bruce presents his performances he creates a world in which normal dimensions … are transmuted into a grotesque panorama of contemporary society’. [13] In a ‘bit’ called Christ and Moses, for example, Bruce describes those Biblical figures returning to Earth and their impression of the modern day Church, with irreligious and foul mouthed priests failing to uphold the tenets of Christianity. Burlesques of this nature, with figures of authority being recast as comic foil, have much in common with carnival.

In 1991 Eric Bogosian wrote a new introduction to How to Talk Dirty and Influence People in which he says ‘as the pendulum slowly shifts we are back in such conservative times as those that spawned [Bruce] in the first place, and so now’s the time to read him’. [14] This was also the time, though, for a successor. Bill Hicks was performing stand up comedy in a similar vein, and has been compared to Bruce in a variety of critical and popular material ever since, including Early Day Motion 678 in the British Parliament on the anniversary of his death which described him as ‘one of the few people who may be mentioned as being worth[y] of inclusion with Lenny Bruce in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.’ In the context of carnival, this ‘unflinching’ quality is what allowed him to defy established social conventions as Bruce did.

As with Bruce, Hicks’s work was reminiscent of the carnival practices described by Bakhtin, but while Bruce’s language allows us to consider billingsgate, Hicks advanced the performative element of this to become a more physical, more graphic, less verbal spectacle, more reminiscent of carnival burlesques and parodies. These were often vulgar, yet were based firmly in moral satire. He frequently performed routines in which various celebrities or politicians would ‘suck Satan’s cock‘ as a symbol for their lack of ethical caliber. In one recorded show he describes television presenter Dick Clark unzipping a rubber mask to reveal himself to be a ‘cloven hooved, horned wolverine‘ who then has anal sex with game show host and singer John Davidson. Hicks creates the image of ‘a black, blood gorged tic which crawls out of the scaly penis of the wolverine and into the bowels of John Davidson’, impregnating him (at this point on the recording Hicks bids farewell to audience members who are walking out). ‘Six months, six days and six hours later his bile breaks and he shits the brood’, Hicks continues before attempting to represent this action loudly and at length. With its mock religious mythology, satirical sense of ritual and grotesque bodily images every element of this routine is in keeping with medieval carnival traditions. In a similar scene he expresses his contempt for contemporary musicians by depicting Debbie Gibson, one of the ‘new rock stars who drink diet cola and shop in your malls’ being raped by Jimi Hendrix. The audience respond enthusiastically as this figurative act debases one popular figure and reinstates another through the use of sexual metaphor.

Vice wrote that ‘Bakhtin is keen to point out that carnivalesque parody and travesty are quite different from ‘the negative and formal parody of modern times’, which only denies without renewing. This is a consistent thread in his argument: in modern versions of carnival laughter, billingsgate profanations, and so on, only the downward half of the subverting movement has survived’. [15] While there is undeniably a sense of regeneration in Bill Hicks’s performances they were a constant negotiation between denial as an opportunity for renewal and denial as a negative, almost nihilistic suppression of life. A reviewer wrote that ‘the key to Hicks’s longevity is his idealism‘, and throughout his work there is an implication that we are only a few correct collective decisions away from a better world as he recognises (as Bakhtin did) the power that common people have when acting together. He says that life is ‘just a ride, and a we can change it any time we want; it’s only a choice‘. In spite of these encouraging words at the ends of his shows about how the world could be made better (which were, with a carnivalesque sense of balance, always tempered by Hicks pretending to be assassinated) it can be said that his actual appeal was not that people were convinced by this message but that they enjoyed temporarily accepting it. For the duration of his performances he liberated his audience, emotionally and intellectually, and allowed them to feel empowered, even though after his shows people would return to their lives and society would continue to operate as normal. This is comparable to the medieval carnivals Bakhtin wrote about; while they occurred the ordinary restrictions on behaviour were relaxed and the people had the power. In daily life people were subjects but during carnival they had the power collectively to crown and decrown a carnival king, they could burlesque their religious leaders, they could break taboos and talk freely. Even though it was a temporary and licensed experience carnival was attractive, just as Hick’s shows were, because it provided a window into an alternative, and presumably preferable, world. Bruce apparently believed that by exposing the hypocrisy and pettiness of the Church and the state he could affect development within them. He fought his comic battles in court and brought court transcripts into his comedy shows as though believing that vindicating his ideas could change things. Hicks, an idealist from a subsequent generation, did not so much seek to redress the harshness of society’s problems as to create a space where people could be given cathartic relief from them, being allowed to believe that a positive rebirth was possible.

The Independent on Sunday wrote that ‘there’s a kind of Olympic torch of extreme American comedy, which passed from Lenny Bruce … to the late Bill Hicks. Doug Stanhope is its latest, and equally brilliant, bearer’. Like Hicks and Bruce before him, Stanhope’s humour is grotesque; he revels in sex and scatology, he is profane and blasphemous but despite this confrontation of social values many audiences respond enthusiastically. Yet while he talks, as his predecessors did, about the problems that society creates for people, he has taken the subversive stage persona that he inherited a step further and begun to subvert that persona itself. While Bruce was called a ‘secular moralist’ and Hicks an ‘idealist’, Stanhope sets himself apart from his audiences not by being superior to them but by presenting himself as a mess, who, though perhaps inspirational, few would aspire to emulate. He complains, constantly, but about vague and sometimes unidentifiable problems, talking about ‘the media’ and ‘society’ in petulant, naively uniformed terms. While former satirists chose specific flaws in specific targets and attempted to convince the audience of a new critical viewpoint, Stanhope rages against mercurial forces of oppression which he scarcely defines, much less offers a genuine critique on. Far more than Bruce and Hicks he is a focus point for a carnival feeling, while they were (by comparison) lecturers. On his DVD Deadbeat Hero he advises his audiences not to take him too seriously, admitting ‘I’m probably wrong about half the shit I say and … you can find me to be a hypocrit’, undermining his own views in a way that the former comics didn’t. His shows, if not about the message of his words, then, are about the feeling of playful liberation he temporarily gives his audience. Of ‘clowns and fools’ Bakhtin wrote that they were ‘representatives of the carnival spirit in every day life out of carnival season’ and that they ‘remained fools and clowns always and wherever they made their appearance’, standing on ‘the borderline between life and art’. [16]  This seems, in some way, to be Stanhope’s appeal, too. ‘What makes Stanhope essential viewing is that none of this is an act’ writes one reviewer, another declaring that ‘he lives a mad, mad life and what he remembers he reports back to us’. While this type of review obviously indicates that audiences are experiencing a vicarious thrill they are also apparently willing to regard Stanhope as a living embodiment of the carnivalesque disregard for formality.

These satirists are problematic, though, because while their humour might be considered ‘folk’ in some regards (it is empowering of the people, it is democratic, it provides subversive satisfaction and appeals to a non- ruling collective consciousness) it is not all inclusive. Stanhope named a show No Refunds, playing on the likelyhood of offending his audience and failing to meet their expectations to the point that they leave and demand their money back; which demonstrates the difference between this satire, attacking dominant systems of authority on ideological or philosophical grounds, and genuine folk laughter as Bakhtin described it, which is apolitical and does not criticise these systems so much as allow for their temporary relaxation. Even as Stanhope attacks he does not specifically exclude, however. He opens one show with the advice that ‘eventually I’m going to hit a subject that you’re going to be queer about, well … don’t, just wait for the next joke … don’t get all upset’.

In these terms it can appear that Stanhope has introduced a stronger carnival spirit into American satirical stand up comedy, but this claim must be qualified by looking at the nature of his material. Despite not assuming the satirist’s moral high ground that Bakhtin spoke of Stanhope is an exponent of comedy which ‘only denies without renewing’. He discusses coarse subjects but they do not operate in the same way as carnivalesque billingsgate. While Bruce’s attitude to sex treated it as the basis for a healthy relationship, a thing that because it is so universally natural should not be taboo, Stanhope’s general approach is less balanced. He does not talk in terms of reproduction, for example, and in fact, like Hicks before him, consistently argues that there are too many people in the world and that the human race should stop reproducing, boasting in one show ‘I have a vasectomy and an abortion on my record’. As well as joking about abortion he also comments on sex as a manipulative tool, sexually transmitted diseases and child pornography; clearly placing at the heart of this humour not the positive renewal we get in carnival but a focus on damaging, unhealthy experience. Similarly, while the consumption of the carnivalesque, even when referred to indirectly by scatological imagery, was a mechanism for sustained human life, Stanhope talks in similar terms about alcohol and narcotic drugs. Again like Hicks before him (and, to a limited degree, Bruce) he is keen to point out the unreported positive effects of drugs on the mind but also highlights their negative effect on the body. Stanhope’s entire persona is built around the idea of self indulgence to the point of self destruction. This is the contradiction of his work; while he allows his audience to experience a sense of the carnivalesque, complete with its empowerment and its unity, he himself is a pessimist (‘this is the most boring generation in the history of people’) and refuses to allow for the renewal which is so central to Bakhtin’s carnivalesque theories. Stanhope’s work is difficultly complex, though. This could be alternatively read as a simple extention of grotesque realism, acknowledging that the worst limits of human excess are, whilst horrifying, not unspeakable. He addresses the negative, the dangerous and the deadly leaving the audience to negotiate for themselves the renewal.

Though there are flaws in referring to it as such, it seems that Stanhope has progressed ‘folk humour’ past the limits of the carnival to a new stage. It is still low, communal and vulgar but unlike carnival it is illicit and unlicensed, it is not all inclusive but requires a willing and sometimes troubling complicity from his audience and it no longer burlesques established figures of authority such as the Church or the state. Instead, in recognising (rightly or wrongly) that in modern society people’s situations are ultimately dictated by their own choices, Stanhope’s folk humour makes the ‘folk’ themselves its target, attacking the apathy and hypocrisy which allow people to endure disappointing lifestyles and allowing audiences, temporarily, to laugh about them and feel relieved. Here, arguably, lies the renewal and rebirth that Bakhtin wrote about as the antithesis of the negativity and denial.

*  *  *

[1] Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World (United States: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 11.

[2] Ibid. p. 12.

[3] Ibid. p. 8.

[4] Ibid. p. 16.

[5] Ibid. p. 5.

[6] Ibid. p. 16.

[7] Sue Vice Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) p. 152.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Lenny Bruce How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (United States: Fireside, 1992) p. 118, 173.

[10] Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World (United States: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 145.

[11] Frank Kofsky Lenny Bruce: The Comedian as Social Critic and Secular Moralist, (United States: Monad Press, 1974)

[12] Lenny Bruce How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (United States: Fireside, 1992) p. 71.

[13] Ibid. p. 116.

[14] Ibid. p. vii.

[15] Sue Vice Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) p. 154.

[16] Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World (United States: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 8.

Bread and Circuses

With a widely reported [though deeply unlikely] estimated global audience of over two billion, almost a third of the population of the planet was expected to watch the marriage of Prince William to Catherine Middleton on 29th April 2011. As a piece of popular spectacle, few events can ever rival this broad and diverse audience, and in some respects, with its rehearsed structure, basis in tradition, powerful visual images, communal music and inclusivity, the royal wedding can be read as a phenomenal piece of popular theatre. Allain and Harvie discuss a definition of popular theatre that takes into account hugely successful commercial ventures which exploit popular theatrical forms and attract a wide audience, offering Cirque du Soleil or the Abba musical Mamma Mia as ready examples:

These examples point to the need to make a distinction (even if this formula is not rigid and the gap is sometimes bridged) between popular commercial theatre and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, popular theatre that has an overt political agenda.^[1]

In discussing a working definition of popular theatre Allain and Harvie are right to suggest dichotomised thinking, as the term ‘popular’ can readily be applied to both large scale national (and international) events and small scale local ones. It encompasses the openly propagandistic and the consciously apolitical, groups the commercial with the anti-capitalist and incorporates the technically proficient, the rehearsed and the engrossing alongside the crude, the improvised and the alienating. Demonstrably, it is not a single dichotomy which separates different popular performances but a multitude of spectra. The two opposing modes of popular theatre that Allain and Harvie suggest are specifically flawed, as their distinction presupposes that popular ‘commercial’ theatre (which we can take to mean theatre that is concerned with entertainment and a broad appeal and does not seek to undermine or alter the status-quo) is unlikely to have a political agenda, and also because there is no obvious place for an event such as the modern British royal wedding, which does not neatly fall into either of the two extremes or onto the continuum between them. The event is not commercial though it is an open display of wealth and privilege. Nor does it claim any political agenda, though events such as these, as will be argued here, can easily be appropriated for political utility. When the state (or any aspect of the establishment) conducts popular performance events which are stylistically indebted to popular theatre traditions and invite the public to engage as participants and spectators, problematic questions arise with regards to reconciling the event’s ‘popular’ status with its anti-subversive, non-transgressive nature.

The royal wedding can be seen in its contemporary context as one of many defining moments of an era in which the staging of popular performance events dominates political discourse in this country. The ideological and economic actions taken by the government have met with stiff opposition, an opposition which has frequently manifested itself in popular performance. Groups such as UK Uncut have sought to temporarily redefine public spaces (specifically commercial ones) into spaces of performance, often choosing to theme actions around certain issues or ideas. Through the introduction of props and performance, a targeted shop or bank might be ‘turned’ into a library, a school, a creche, etc in an attempt to draw a link through the performance event between their financial practises and funding cuts to those services. Returning popular performance to the marketplace, campaigners dressed as surgeons, superheroes and Santa Claus have occupied commercial spaces while yet others have staged poetry readings, stand up comedy gigs or concerts. Similarly, activists operating under the banner NHS Direct Action have staged the agit-prop skit Death of the NHS, in which a vampiric Andrew Lansley causes the deaths of screaming and bloodied patients while draining doctors and nurses, outside various government buildings. One interesting staple of popular performance that has been witnessed on many protests is the clown, with many people choosing (apparently independently) to dress up in conventional (or subverted) clown make up and costume, both to criticise the establishment and to affectionately satirise other protesters.

In a more extreme example, those using ‘black bloc’ tactics have codified a clearly defined costume of all black clothes, their faces covered, while props such as flares, coloured smoke, paint-bombs and spray cans are used to create a public spectacle in which they demonstrate, through the symbolic destruction of icons of capitalism (such as bank branches), their capacity to alter the world they operate within. Mass events, most notably the 500,000 strong TUC march through central London on March 26th 2011, have featured less conscious performances by individuals but still exemplify many traditional aspects of popular performance, including brightly coloured props and costume, subversive humour, songs, widely known chants (a ubiquitous feature of performative activism) and, most obviously and significantly, a deliberately broad appeal. In some regards these represent a midpoint between the unlicensed demonstrations of smaller groups and the large scale events organised by the state.

State events have a great capacity to draw people together for communal expression. In a quasi-carnivalesque way people are authorised to act outside of the normal bounds of acceptable behaviour with the rules temporarily relaxed. There is another dimension to the positive role of these popular events, and one that is of significant importance to understanding Prince William’s wedding, coming, as it did, at a time of national difficulty. Arch and Marschner, in their history of British royal weddings, touch on the social significance they can have, specifically the uplifting effect on a nation’s mood. Princess Anne’s marriage in 1973 is recorded as a major national event:

Colour television pictures, an explosion of souvenirs and the relief – articulated by newspapers and magazines – that such a colourful event could still take place in a country where social disorder and economic decline seemed poised to plumb new depths, seem, in retrospect, the salient features of the occasion. ^[2]

This sentiment was directly echoed by David Cameron who declared of the engagement ‘it’s great to have a piece of unadulterated good news that everyone can celebrate … I’m sure that’s how the whole country feels, and I’m sure it’ll be something when the country will come together’. Arch and Marschner remember Princess Anne’s wedding as a welcome event of buoyant elation:

In Britain – where the government had just declared a state of emergency, considering the current situation in the coal and electricity industries a threat to the essentials of the life of the community – the splendour of the occasion worked its familiar magic, and the newspapers reported that both the fuel crisis and the state of emergency were forgotten. ^[3]

While there are many who regard these popular events as merciful reprieve from difficult times, more sober critics present the exact same phenomena as an indictment. Ian Jack, writing in Newsweek, similarly remarks of Prince Charles’ marriage to Lady Diana that

The bells rang out, the guns saluted, and Diana rode to her nuptials in a glass carriage, but the celebration came as a relief and a distraction to a country beleaguered by social division and unrest [IRA hunger strikes, race riots in Brixton and Toxteth, and, like now, 2.5 million unemployed with the number rising].

In Satire X, written in the first or second century AD, the Roman polemicist Juvenal suggested that the public, who once had democratic power over their leaders, had ‘pulled in their horns, there’s only two things that concern them: Bread and Games [also frequently translated as circuses].’ ^[4] That is to say, the people had become complacent about their political agency and were disengaged to the point that their only concerns were their immediate needs, ‘bread’, and diverting entertainment, the ‘games’ or ‘circuses’. The phrase has been developed in modern usage to refer to a deliberate attempt by the state to distract the public by providing these pieces of grand popular theatre, and in this vein has been appropriated by the activist performance group Bread and Puppet and the anti-Olympic games campaign group Bread Not Circuses (the political exploitation of various Olympic events is a persistent observation, most notably about the 1936 games in Berlin).

If there is a political usefulness in these events, it lies in their capacity to fully transform a communal mood. Allain and Harvie observe this in the age of modern broadcasting by considering one of the most important popular spectacles of recent decades:

Lady Diana’s funeral is just another example of how a local event becomes global spectacle when it is constructed by the vast resources of the world’s media. … The fact that, even though the live events were shown so extensively on television, thousands of people still felt the need to visit the palace in person or sign condolence books says much about the value placed on liveness and actual participation, however vicarious, in such events. ^[5]

The same was surely also true of Prince William’s wedding. Many people attended the event in London while many more expressed their own involvement by hosting parties, watching the television broadcast communally and dressing in specific costume for the occasion. It is not unreasonable to claim that for the weekend surrounding the wedding it was the dominant focus of the public’s attention.
The writer Ben Goldacre was quick to condemn the government for exploiting the distracting influence of the event, declaring that the Department of Health had won the ‘prize for burying bad news’ when they made a potentially unpopular announcement regarding increased cuts to NHS funding. This pronouncement is a simplification of the situation, though, and the full extent of his accusations (and the observations of Juvenal) can be be better understood when viewed in the context of the conflicted nature of popular theatre.

On the 28th April, the day before the wedding, Chris Knight, Anthropology professor and amateur exponent of political street theatre, was arrested, along with two others, for his intention to stage a mock public execution of Prince Andrew in effigy using a prop guillotine. The same afternoon, Charlie Veitch of performance activism group The Love Police was also arrested, for his stated intention to publicly voice his anti-royalist sentiment (though his specific plans were not revealed). All were arrested on ‘suspicion of conspiracy to cause public nuisance and breach of the peace.’ On the day of the wedding, a number of arrests were carried out in central London, including one by plain-clothed officers of a street performer while he was singing ‘we all live in a fascist regime’, adding an almost enjoyable irony to the performance. Veitch, Knight et al were detained in police custody for almost twenty four hours (the legal limit) and then released without charge. They had effectively been kept off of the street for the duration of the royal wedding, rendering their planned performances impossible.

Though the events, with their intended symbolic opposition, could not take place, they did contribute to a greater symbolic impression of the situation: just as the government and monarchy were engaging in a piece of popular theatre on a huge scale, enjoyed by millions across the world and uniting its audience in a sense of celebration, the Metropolitan Police were carrying out a coordinated operation to remove dissenting voices from the event. Popular theatre cannot be reduced to one single definable function, but the events of April 28th-29th 2011 demonstrate two extremes of the way it can operate. Official events, organised or sanctioned by authority, can legitimately bring people together, as was noted above, and enable them to communally express celebration, grief, remembrance, thanksgiving etc but, unlike the unlicensed, illegitimate performance of protest and political street theatre, they are unable to express dissatisfaction, radicalism and rage. In this age of dejection and dissidence, with a public torn between a desire to forget their societal troubles and an impulse to challenge them head on, the role of popular performance in public space is in flux. After the royal wedding, Assistant Commissioner Lyne Owens expressed the honour and privilege of being involved in a ‘fantastic day of pageantry and celebration’, and underscored the importance of events on the horizon from their perspective:

…today’s success should convince people that the Met is well able to handle next year’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games.

The disparity between theatre with a broad appeal and theatre that is consciously in the interests of the population will not be resolved, but analysis of the performance practises exhibited over the coming months and the social context they exist in will see it sharply defined. The future is uncertain, but with regards to social attitudes to government and the role of those who seek to find creative methods to voice dissent, Juvenal’s words already seem eerily prophetic:

Time was when their plebiscite elected Generals, Heads of State, commanders of legions: but now they’ve pulled in their horns, there’s only two things that concern them: Bread and Circuses.

‘I hear that many are to be purged.’

‘That’s right, they’re turning the heat on, and no mistake.’

*  *  *

[1] Paul Allain and Jen Harvie The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (Oxford: Routledge, 2006) p. 190.

[2] Nigel Arch and Joanna Marschner The Royal Wedding Dresses: The Splendour of Royal Marriage Across Five Centuries (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990) p. 127.

[3] Ibid. p. 127.

[4] Juvenal The Sixteen Satires (Middlesex: Penguin Classics, 1974) p.  207.

[5] Paul Allain and Jen Harvie The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (Oxford: Routledge, 2006) p. 102, 103.