Monday 7 September 2009

Hunting of Snark

Snark - a kind of witlessly abusive non-comedy - seems to be a hot topic. This will surprise no one who spends much time navigating the blogscape, where snark can erupt in even the most civilised corners (I name no names). Now one David Denby has written a book about it, and defines it at rather gruelling length here. He was also on Radio 4 this morning, debating briefly with a vaguely pro-snark Toby Young. What strikes me about Denby's analysis, American-based as it is, is how, in political terms, it is the mirror image of the snark situation here. In the US, it seems, the snarking is coming from the Right, targeting the Left, whereas here the master snarkers are overwhelmingly of the Left - often, in the case of the kind of supposedly satirical wiseguys who populate the 'topical comedy panel shows', of the ultra-Left - and the snark bombs are being lobbed in a rightward direction, against anything that doesn't fit their lefter-than-left worldview (this is why a Labour government can be in the firing line too - it's not Left enough). Historically, I think British snarkism had its origin and seedbed in anti-Thatcherism, long ago reaching the point where mocking Lady T for being old and having had a stroke - and openly wishing her dead - would raise a comfortable laugh. Radio 4 itself is infected, with the likes of Jeremy Hardy and Mark Steel snarking away all over the place. The News Quiz is almost unlistenable (post-Coren) for the prevalence of witless, entirely predictable leftist barbs. Happily the TV equivalent, Have I Got News For You, is pretty much a snark-free zone and is often quite funny. But the place to go for full-on snarky vileness is BBC2's Mock The Week - read this brilliant piece by Nick Cohen if you want to know the depths to which our homegrown snarkists can sink. It makes the situation in the US seem quite healthy by comparison.

15 comments:

  1. Absolutely. I find Mock the Week unwatchable. All British political 'comedy' is like this. The assumption is that you subscribe to the usual package of left-wing views, which automatically puts you on the moral highground, from which you can laugh (joylessly) at everyone else.

    It must be a source of constant amazement/bewildered bitterness to these comedians that so many people continue to vote and think conservatively.

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  2. There's a good headline today about some recent wildlife discoveries in Papua New Guinea (though quite why they went all that way to get a rat and pull it by the tail beats me), but it perfectly describes Mock the Week and its relationship to the BBC:

    "Giant Rat Found in 'Lost Volcano'"

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  3. I hadn’t thought about this in these terms. The word ‘snark’ is new to me. I’ve read the Nick Cohen piece and I think there’s a danger of taking comedy out of context. That show is for a certain audience who know what they’re getting. I don’t watch the show myself because I too know what I’d be getting. I’m not defending it. I’m just saying that they’re going for the territory where they think the audience lives. That says more about our culture’s taste for extremes, when drugs and pornographic terms get the biggest cheers.

    The problem is twofold. The BBC dole out their business to independent production companies who know how to ‘knock out’ these panel shows by the dozen. They hire the same old faces (Phil Jupitus, David Mitchell, Frankie Boyle, Jeremy Harding, Rob Bryden, Johnny Vegas) who have done the rounds of all the shows. They are all friends together, know how to work the system, have the material semi-prepped, and, as Cohen rightly notes, they are all out to further their stand-up careers by being the edgiest on the show.

    The second problem is that the comedy itself. It’s easy to be edgy and very difficult to be mild. The older I get, the more I appreciate comedians who can make me laugh with clean material – I’m even finding myself looking for Alan Coren’s writing, which I’d never before appreciated. I actually believe that censorship is an aid to the comedian, not a barrier. I’m no prude but I don’t actually think that Derek & Clive are any funnier than Pete & Dud. In the same way that genre constrains a film-maker, preventing their excesses and forcing them to address form, so too does censorship focus the comedian’s mind on language and jokes. I adore The Marx Brothers but would they be funnier if they could go ‘extreme’? And having just finished watching a season of W.C. Fields’ films, I’m certain the censors were his friend. He couldn’t say ‘God Damn!’ so he says ‘Godfrey Daniels!’ and a comic legend was born.

    The problem with ‘snark’ is that it’s too easy. As Sasha Baron Cohen hopefully discovered with his soulless ‘Bruno’, shock comedy no longer shocks. It is just very tedious.

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  4. That, Mark, is a story for which the world is not yet prepared... Rather a cute rat, though.

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  5. I think you're dead right there, Uncle Dick, on all counts - except that David Mitchell, though of that company, seems miraculously uncontaminated by it and certainly makes no attempt to be 'edgy'.

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  6. True, Nige. Perhaps he's more successful in his own right. Successful commedians don't share that stink of desperation that's noticeable on the newer 'stars'.

    I can't say I blame them, though. Give the way the system works, they probably have one or two chances to make their name or they're back to working nightclubs. I think if I'd ever have got the chance, I'd have written myself half-a-dozen of the filthiest jokes about the Pope. It's called playing the system.

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  7. I don't have a problem with filth per se, so long as it's funny filth as opposed to unfunny filth. I actually laughed uncontrollably throughout Bruno though, tellingly, the funniest bit was clean: when he was being an extra in the courtroom TV drama.

    Nick's article opposes Mock the Week for slightly different reasons to mine, though I agree with him that overly competitive banter is entirely joyless.

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  8. Brit, I did laugh quite a bit at Bruno but I thought it best (as was, the much better, Borat) when exposing the audience to other people’s prejudices, such as that mother who agreed to have her baby play a Nazi concentration camp guard. His replies to the audience when he wheeled out his baby were good too. But when the film-makers turned their gaze to the audience, as if trying to offend us (such as when he tried to become straight, the fake TV show with the close up of a talking penis), I thought it was much less successful and actually quite dull.

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  9. I think the only reason Denby identifies American snark as coming from the right is because he is on the left and doesn't recognize what comes from his side as snark.

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  10. I did wonder about that Frank, tho from what I've seen of them from over here, America's left-inclined comedian types seem mostly unfunnily smug rather than unfunnily snarky.

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  11. Notably Bill Maher's 'Religulous'. Smug comedy at its worst, laughing rather unpleasantly at faith.

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  12. I love snarkiness -- it's just another word for sarcasm, really; the sarcasm of the literary, is how I think of it. Many a snarky reviewer, for example, from Anthony Lane for movies to Dale Peck for books. A snark goes too far sometimes and then he becomes a hatchet man (Peck) or a shooter of fish in a barrel (almost all political pundits).

    By the way, Nige, I wonder if you realized you had a wonderful transitioning device from the last post to this. It is the word "Denbie/Denby." Think you can keep doing that? Have one word that connects the last post to the current? It could be your form of blog bricolage, a Nigean art form.

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  13. The snark in the states is coming from the right becasue the Democrats are in power.

    When it goes back to the Republican's being in charge, the snark will shift.

    Such is the nature of American politics and the American people.

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  14. I think the Democrats are still perfectly capable of snarking- viz. Bill Maher, many of the imbeciles on MSNBC, and Obama's own incompetent press secretary Robert Gibbs.

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