Comedians V Authoritah - FIGHT!

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You've got to be joking
The contest between comedy and authority can wipe the smile from your face, writes Anthony Ackroyd.
Sydney Morning Herald
June 28, 2008

Fool versus rule is an archetypal battle. The forces of anarchy and outrageousness against those of authority and established order. The comedian's principal brief is to create laughter. Yet a few go for more. These performers push the limits of legality to expose the injustices, hypocrisies and pretensions of the culture in which they live. However, using mirth to stick it to the Man is not without its perils. The jester wins laughs by mocking the king, but the king may decide to see the jester in court.

Legal confrontations in which funny people must defend their jokes are illuminating. They - the confrontations, not the jokes - tell us much about society's values. Can this comedic content be accommodated within our value system? Taboo or not taboo, that is the question.

The Chaser 11 won't go to court for driving a fake motorcade deep into the exclusion zone of last year's APEC summit with one of them dressed as Osama Bin Laden, a masterstroke of satirical intervention that reduced to Keystone Kops the phalanx of police entrusted with protecting world leaders. The subversive antics of Chaser gave them entree to an exclusive club of comic dissidents not all of whom have fared as well with the legal system.

The No. 1 ticket holder is the American Lenny Bruce, who pioneered the role of stand-up comedian as social revolutionary. His verbal attacks nearly half a century ago on institutions many held sacred - capitalism, religion, sexual mores, the US government - were incendiary to those claiming to represent American values. The civil libertarian and free speech advocate Harry Kalven jnr said of him: "In order to give value to his gestures of defiance, Lenny did need a lot of opposition. If you are going to break a taboo it has to be a taboo."

Bruce's taboo-breaking led him to a five-year legal odyssey that included six obscenity trials in four cities, 35 lawyers and 30 judges, and 3500 pages of transcript. In 1966, broken emotionally and financially by his legal battles, 40-year-old Bruce was found dead from a morphine overdose in the toilet of his Hollywood Hills home.

Breaking the taboo against "bad" language in the name of free speech was one choice that caused him serious problems. A Bruce performance in New York kept one policeman busy counting more than a hundred utterances later judged "obscene, indecent, immoral and impure". Many, such as "ass", are now in everyday speech. Within just a few years of Bruce's death these obscenities were spoken with impunity at most comedy clubs.

Once live performance language was liberated, attention turned to TV. In 1972 George Carlin recorded the classic routine, the seven words you can never say on television. Pacifica Foundation broadcast a version on radio, and was sued by the US Federal Communications Commission, which, in 1978, won a US Supreme Court landmark decision giving it power to regulate profanity. Today you can hear Carlin's seven words on the telly, although they are sanitised in newspaper copy. Here they are in ascending numerical order: shit, piss, f---, cocksucker, motherf---er, tits. We've come a long way since Graham Kennedy was kicked off the small screen for imitating a crow call.

Even the genteel listeners of ABC mainstream radio accept a little colourful language, although the "expletives" usually are uttered by guests, not hosts, like 702 ABC's Richard Glover. It is context, says Glover. "If bad language is used in a way that's aggressive and boorish we'll get complaints; if it's genuinely witty and used for a reason, generally people will give it a tick."

The comedian Gary Eck says: "Audiences tend to react negatively to bad language when it has no purpose; that is, where the comedian just swears for the sake of swearing." Infrequent swearing, particularly in context, often goes almost unnoticed, Eck says. "Billy Elliot the Musical is full of swearing, but the audience doesn't care because it's all in context."

Glover says his listeners take greater offence at poor grammar. But that wasn't the objection of the Illinois Supreme Court to a Lenny Bruce lesson in syntax that skilfully attacked the taboo against plain talking about sex. Ordinary adults, it ruled, would find his references "thoroughly disgusting" and "beyond customary limits of candour". According to police, the Bruce routine included reference to "sexual intimacy with a chicken" and a story about "the masked man, Tonto, and an unnatural sex act".

Bruce always protested the real obscenity was war, not sex. The only way of making a body dirty, he said, was to kill it. "Hiroshima was dirty."

If promiscuity with poultry, and the Lone Ranger sodomising his sidekick, doesn't extend past your limits of candour, try Oz magazine's characterisation of the loved children's cartoon figure, Rupert Bear having his wicked way with an unconscious woman. In 1971 London, it landed the publishers Jim Anderson, Felix Dennis and Richard Neville in the Old Bailey. Randy Rupert was the creation of a 15-year-old member of a team of young people brought together to construct a special "School Kids" edition of Oz. The Oz Three were accused of producing "sexually perverted articles, cartoons and drawings with intent to debauch and corrupt the morals of children and other young persons".

The result was the longest obscenity trial in Britain. The defendants arrived one day dressed as schoolgirls, the comedian Marty Feldman called the judge "a boring old fart", and John Lennon organised the recording of God Save Oz. The guilty verdict was overturned on appeal because the trial judge misdirected the jury. In an age when graphic pornography is available at the click of a computer mouse, a rogering Rupert looks like a quaint artefact. Comedians can discuss fearlessly every permutation of sexual behaviour.

Eck says it comes down to timing. "I think the amount of sexual material in your act should be directly proportional to the time you spend performing the act in bed - about three minutes."

With taboos against profanity and so-called obscenity on the ropes by the late 70s, comics tackled new frontiers and in 1979 Monty Python set about crucifying the factionalism, hypocrisy, inconsistencies, and ungodly violence of organised religion. To a coalition of conservative taboo enforcers, Life of Brian was hell breaking loose.

Lenny Bruce, of course, had been there, irritating authority as much with his riffs on the commercial aspirations of evangelical leaders as with his alleged obscenity, although only the latter was prosecutable. On the other side of the Atlantic humourists taking the Lord in vain were less protected because Britain outlawed blasphemy.

Just before production of Life Of Brian Mary Whitehouse - Christian morality campaigner and dead ringer for the early Dame Edna Everage - succeeded in prosecuting an editor for publishing a poem deemed to be blasphemous. According to the cultural historian Robert Hewison the case forced a re-definition of the crime of blasphemy as "irreverence, scurrility, profanity, vilification, or licentious abuse of the Christian religion". It was almost the perfect summation of the Pythons' upcoming project, but legal advice cleared the team to proceed.

When the film opened in the US the first objection was from rabbis offended that a John Cleese character wore a prayer shawl. Lutherans, Catholics, Protestants, Calvinists and other Christian denominations protested outside cinemas, prompting Eric Idle's boast that Python had succeeded in at last uniting them. Whitehouse and her lot mobilised forces in Britain and the film was banned in several towns, including some without cinemas.

Twenty-nine years after its controversial release, Life Of Brian still polls as the funniest movie of all time, and has been enlisted even into the service of the institution it set out to ridicule. Sixteen months ago an English church hosted a sell-out screening, with the congregation wearing fake beards and singing Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life. The reverend said the film tackled important issues about the Christian church, and deserved to be seen.

You know that when the Man starts stickin' it to himself - as the Lenny Bruce supporter Bob Dylan might have sung - the times they are a changin' big time. In an era when Bono accepts a Golden Globe with the words "this is f---ing brilliant", mums and dads visit Sexpo to get happy snaps with their favourite porn stars, and YouTube viewers can watch a video of "Jesus Christ" singing Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive, before being hit by a bus, it's hard for radical comics to get into much strife over language, obscenity, or blasphemy.

However, freedoms hard won by courageous humourists all too often are reduced to the banal by performers befitting the court criticisms levelled at Bruce - devoid of artistic merit and appealing to the prurient interests of the audience. The 2dayFM website features a blindfolded radio jock and the Big Brother host Kyle Sandilands guessing the gender of various men and women by kissing them. Another video promises to show Sandilands's on-air partner, Jackie O, as a "saggy-boobed bogan".

And don't miss the clip of Damo drinking his own urine. Hard to see the redeeming social value here, but perhaps that's not the point. Yet the tradition continues of talented comedians genuinely challenging taboos. At 70 George Carlin pushed the boundaries until heart failure took him from life's stage this week. And the new brigade's Margaret Cho and Sarah Silverman train their satirical sights on racial stereotypes and bigotry. Cho, a big fan of Bruce, considers her role as interrupting polite society.

"I believe you can joke about anything; it all depends on how you construct the joke," Carlin said. Eck agrees: "That's where the skill lies. Making people laugh at something they wouldn't ordinarily laugh at. Obscene material tends to be stuff that just isn't funny."

The Chaser team's Julian Morrow says challenging the law isn't essential, but can have merit, "especially when the core values of a liberal democracy are being undermined". "Our stuff is at the frivolous end of that spectrum, but I think what Liberal Party spin doctors call 'Chaser-style stunts' have a legitimately illegitimate role to play." The Chaser is in a lineage, extending back to ancient Greece, of comic stirrers who disrupt our passive acceptance of entrenched authority in all its forms.

Healthy societies appreciate the vital role played by these voices of comic dissent in challenging accepted norms and debunking stale and restrictive assumptions. But the work doesn't end. America's Federal Communications Commission is moving to restrict the broadcast of expletives, the British Religious Hatred Act threatens to stymie worthy satire, and Australia's Senate is investigating TV language.

Perhaps comics using humour to bust through barriers of the status quo need the same "the road's yours" advice from the same Sydney policeman who waved the Chaser motorcade through security. And if authority doesn't like it, borrow from Carlin's prohibition list, and No 3 'em.

Anthony Ackroyd is a Sydney comedian.

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Quite a good article - not enough comedians have the balls to say anything substantial and the world's a poorer place because of it.