Can we all take a moment to marvel at the courage of Joe Lycett? Imagine the cojones it must take to go on the BBC and make fun of the Tories. How truly stunning and brave. Roll over Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks – there’s a new comedy insurgent in town.
I’m being sarcastic, clearly. And sarcasm, as we know, is the lowest form of wit. Apart, perhaps, from going on the BBC to make fun of the Tories. I honestly cannot think of anything more pedestrian and less amusing than that.
Lycett is being fawned over for his satirical storming of Laura Kuenssberg’s new Sunday morning political show. Boy, he really stuck it to The Man. He pretended to be right wing – what larks! – and said he fully backs Liz Truss. She may be the ‘backwash of the available MPs’, he said, but she always gives ‘great clear answers’.
The usual suspects are lapping it up. They really seem to believe that Lycett’s droll act as an ‘incredibly right-wing’ comic who loves Liz is satire on a par with Swift. He’s become their rebel hero, the beautiful fly in the ointment of the BBC-Tory nexus of power that they think is a real thing but which isn’t.
In truth, this was one of the most risk-free acts of comedy I have ever witnessed. There will be not one negative consequence for Lycett as a result of his Sunday morning Tory-bashing. Because hating the Tories is received opinion among the cultural elites. Poor Laura may have been ticked off with Lycett’s satirical posturing but I guarantee that every BBC bigwig in the control and upstairs will have been chortling along. ‘An ‘incredibly right-wing’ comedian on the BBC? Brilliant!’, they’ll have chuckled.
Indeed, Lycett’s entire schtick relied for its bite on the very fact that an ‘incredibly right-wing’ comic would never even be on the BBC. What a preposterous notion. The humour, for what it was worth, derived precisely from the unlikelihood of such a person appearing on a respectable BBC talkshow. Everyone in the production team, and most people at home, will have smiled knowingly at Lycett’s subtle mockery of such a scenario.
The guffawing middle classes who watch shows like this were all in on the joke. They know that people like Lycett – good, clean members of the cultural establishment – are not right-wing. In playing his opposite, Lycett was actually further ingratiating himself with his own kind – influential cultural players for whom being a Conservative party supporter is such an alien concept that they know instantly it is satire when one of their own claims to be that most curious and risible thing.
Witness the way Lycett kept looking over at Emily Thornberry, the doyenne of bourgeois London leftism. She was his audience of one, the provider of approving laughter to his sarcastic performance as a right-winger. Darling, as if!
Lycett is the anti-Sadowitz. Where comics like Jerry Sadowitz take huge risks – and face huge consequences, like being banned from the Edinburgh Fringe – Lycett stays in the safe, warm territory of elite consensus opinion. Tories bad, Daily Mail awful, Boris a posh lunatic – this is the pool of middle-class opinion every BBC comic now swims in. It’s just dull, I’m afraid. There’s no peril for the comic, and thus no tension, and thus little humour.
Lycett’s comedy is the comedy of received opinion. Comics once bristled at the establishment – think That Was The Week That Was. Now too many of them reproduce establishment ideas repackaged as twee jokes. Expect Lycett to be on the BBC more and more. The director-general will probably have him for tea. ‘Incredibly right-wing – Joe, that was genius.’
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