Jonathan Coe - Number 11

When he felt that he had exhausted the range of printed sources available to him, Nathan went online and started trawling through comedy blogs and message boards, most of them devoted to contemporary manifestations of humour. Here he found himself entering a very different world, where comedy geeks and nerds who knew far too much about their subject, and had far too much of themselves invested in it, discussed modern humour with all the unfettered passion, obsessiveness, hostility, vitriol, scatology, abuse, unfairness, aggression, mean-mindedness, rudeness, impudence and nastiness that the internet allowed. These were people who loved comedy with a fierceness which could transmute into hatred at the flip of a coin. A joke which they had not found funny, a comedian who had not made them laugh, would be taken as a personal insult which had to be returned tenfold. A grudging reverence was shown towards a handful of the more radical comics, those who used their platform to make bitter, shocking, fundamental criticisms of society in language which put them beyond the pale for most audiences. Mainstream comedians, those who set out merely to amuse and to entertain their public with gentle absurdity, were tolerated as a harmless distraction. Real hatred was reserved for those whose work fell between these two stools: those who peppered their toothless routines with comfortable, crowd-pleasing political digressions in order to advertise their liberal social consciences. These people were attacked, pilloried and abused mercilessly by their safely anonymous online critics.

After he had been wading through this material for two or three hours, Nathan followed a link to a blog which struck him, simultaneously, as being particularly well argued and particularly unhinged. The writer seemed to be some sort of would-be anarchist/terrorist, although whether his revolutionary impulses ever carried him any further than the screen of his laptop remained unclear. There was a profile picture, but in it his face was turned at ninety degrees from the camera, in shadow, and the photograph was so out of focus as to render its subject (deliberately) unidentifiable. The blog was called thisisyourwakeupcall and the writer’s username was ChristieMalry2.

The entry which caught Nathan’s attention was headed ‘No Joke’, and he found it interesting on several counts. It was obvious, for one thing, that ChristieMalry2 accepted Freud’s theory of the basis of laughter; but he transposed it, rather intriguingly, from the psychological sphere into the political:

Freud [wrote the blogger] believed that laughter is pleasurable because it creates an economy of psychic expenditure. Quintessentially, in other words, it takes energy and RELEASES or DISSIPATES it, thereby rendering it ineffective. So — what does that imply about (so-called) ‘political’ comedy, for which Britain is historically so famous? It implies this: political humour is the very opposite of political action. Not just its opposite, but its mortal enemy.

Every time we laugh at the venality of a corrupt politician, at the greed of a hedge fund manager, at the spurious outpourings of a rightwing columnist, we’re letting them off the hook. The ANGER which we should feel towards these people, which might otherwise lead to ACTION, is released and dissipated in the form of LAUGHTER. Which is a way of giving the audience exactly what they want, and exactly what they’re paying for: another excuse to sit on their backsides and continue on their own selfish, comfortable path with no real threat or challenge to their precious lifestyles.

That’s why it isn’t Josephine Winshaw-Eaves and her tiresome ilk who provide the greatest threat to social justice in Britain today. It’s the likes of Mickey Parr, Ray Turnbull and Ryan Quirky, with their oh-so-predictable jibes in her direction which the fucking Radio-4-listening, Guardian-reading, Pinot-Grigio-swilling middleclass wankers who pay to see them in stadiums and tune in to their radio shows lap up and laugh at and then feel they have to do NOTHING except sit back with their arms folded and wait for the next crappy one-liner. Chortling along at these pathetic, woolly-minded jokes, which a blind chimpanzee could write in its sleep, gives them the perfect excuse to salve their consciences and confirm their deluded self-image as righteous combatants in a playground battle between left and right which in any case was fought and lost years ago.

I hate these fucking middleclass liberal-left comedians and so should you. It seems to me quintessential that they are all wiped off the face of this planet, or we are never going to summon up the energy to overthrow our current rotten, corrupt and soul-destroying political establishment. Down with comedy, for fuck’s sake! And on with the real struggle!

PC Pilbeam read these paragraphs through a number of times. Then he bookmarked the site and also, to be on the safe side, printed out the relevant pages and placed them neatly into one of his box files. He yawned and looked at his watch. He was starting to feel that familiar ache in his eyes from so many hours staring at a screen. He was conscious, also, of another task that he needed to perform, unrelated to detective work but just as important. He put on his coat and left the flat.

Buttoning up his coat against the autumn chill, PC Pilbeam made the ten-minute walk to his local Tesco Express, where he filled a recyclable bag with tins of soup, vegetables and cooked meat. These items did not constitute his normal diet, and indeed he was not buying them for himself. He was on his way to the food bank. Normally he would have taken unused and unwanted items from his own kitchen shelves, but he didn’t have any of those left. The fact was that he had learned, on the evening of their dinner together, that Lucinda Givings had started to help out at the food bank during the evenings and weekends, and for this reason he had started to visit it regularly — although so far his timing had been unlucky, and he hadn’t encountered her. This would be his fourth visit in three days, and he had reached the point where he was having to buy food especially for the purpose.

And yet today — joy! — his civic altruism was rewarded, for there she was, standing behind the counter and looking as radiant, as desirable as ever. She was wearing a thick woollen jumper which would have made Marilyn Monroe herself look like a sack of potatoes but, even so, Nathan felt that he could not possibly have conceived a vision of purer loveliness, of sweeter, more crystalline beauty.

‘Hello,’ she said, with a smile — he was sure — of genuine affection. ‘How good of you to come down.’ She began to remove the tins from his bag. ‘And with such generous donations!’

‘I feel I must do what I can,’ he answered. ‘The terrible thing is that there should even be a need for places like this.’

‘I know.’ Lucinda sighed. ‘It’s very depressing, and I’m sure there’s some perfectly terrible explanation, but I don’t know what it is. I’m afraid I’m not really one of those angry, political types.’

Her colleague, however, a middle-aged woman in denim jacket and jeans, had definite views on the subject.

‘Essentially,’ she said, ‘this is what happens when the ruling elite uses a crisis of its own making to legitimize attacks on the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m Caroline, by the way.’

Nathan shook her hand, but he was not really in the mood for further conversation on this topic. His real objective was to find out whether Lucinda was busy tonight, and whether she’d like to go out with him. Turning back towards her, he casually ventured:

‘I was walking past the cinema just now, and couldn’t help noticing …’ Then he stopped, and frowned. Something in Caroline’s last remark had suddenly set off a strange, intriguing echo in his mind. Talking more to himself than anyone else, he mumbled: ‘Yes, of course. That’s right. That’s perfectly right.’