Friday, October 23, 2020

Rough and Rowdy Ways

A new album by Bob Dylan.

A lot of us thought that Tempest would be his last album; we thought the title was a reference to Shakespeare. No, he said: my album is called Tempest: Shakespeare’s last play was called THE Tempest.

He surprised us with an album of Christmas songs; then he surprised us with an album of Sinatra songs; then he surprised us with — er — another album of Sinatra songs. And then he didn’t surprise us nearly so much with a triple album of Sinatra songs.

And then, suddenly, in the middle of lock down, almost unheralded, ten new songs.

Ten new songs.

By Bob Dylan.

You’d probably decided whether they were going to be the crowning glory of an illustrious career or a the final and clinching proof that Dylan was and always had been an over-rated no hoper before you listened to the first note.

I’m in the first camp. You won’t be surprised to learn.

But it’s a silly question. Here is a very old man who has lived through the second half of the last century and the first decades of this one. Here is a man who smoked pot with the Beatles, jammed with Johnny Cash and shared a platform with Martin Luther King. Good, bad, indifferent, we are going to listen to these songs; we are going to think about them; and we can be pretty certain that in a hundred years time people will still be listening to them and re-assessing them.

Who the hell listens to Planet Waves, they said, apart from joyless completists? And then suddenly talented young folk-singers are covering Forever Young and calling it the most beautiful song ever written.

And his Jesus phase. Everyone agrees that was a crashing embarrassment. And then you find yourself in the main tent at Sidmouth listening to a tent full of youngsters swaying happily along to Man Gave Names To All the Animals.

Who actually enjoyed Time Out Of Mind? Apart from Adele, apparently.

You just never know.

What we have here is an album of poems: Dylan rarely gets beyond speaking the words; and if someone told me that he had read the texts into a mic and someone had added musical tracks afterwards without his input I wouldn’t be entirely surprised. They are wildly free-associative: there is barely a narrative, a character, or even a coherent argument on the whole CD. Maybe you should think of the record as a single extended song; a smokey room, a husky voice, 6o minutes of imagery.

Say what comes into your head says the Freudian analyst; just say whatever comes into your head.

Or perhaps the smoke and the rhythm and the riffs take us inside Bob’s head and we start to share in his dreams — not Sandman dreams or Lewis Carol dreams, but real dreams, dreams where one thing flows into another and everything is multiple but it all makes total sense at the time.

Ten Songs By Bob Dylan.

Let’s listen to them.

One at a time.

1: I Contain Multitudes

A long time ago, T.S Eliot and Ezra Pound were spotted dancing in the captain’s tower. Calypso singers were laughing at them while fishermen threw flowers. T.S Eliot wrote a shattered world-weary poem called The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock. Andrew Lloyd-Webber appropriated it and turned it into a song about a suicidal pussycat.

I Contain Multitudes is nothing like Memory, but it is something like Prufrock.

It’s a poem, drawled out slowly with someone tinkling away in the background, like a bluesman talking over the opening bars of a song which never quite gets around to starting. We don’t find out who the poet is or who he is speaking to; but the lyrics draw us into a world of heaviness and contradiction.

There are dead flowers; there are skeletons; there are old queens; there is a man who shares a bed with death and life. The poem is driven forward by the phrase “I contain multitudes”: each stanza ends on a contradictory couplet.

“I fuss with my hair and I fight blood feuds”

“I rollick and frolic with all the young dudes.”

“I drive fast cars and I eat fast foods”.

The strong rhymes push it into the realm of nursery rhyme:

Pink pedal-pushers, red blue jeans
All the pretty maids, and all the old queens
All the old queens from all my past lives
I carry four pistols and two large knives
I’m a man of contradictions,
I’m a man of many moods
I contain multitudes

I suppose a pink pedal-pusher is a young girl on a bike; which may have been suggested by the idea of the young man trying to join in with the younger men in the previous lines. I am not sure how jeans can be both red and blue at the same time. Each line is a distorted echo of the one before. “All the pretty maids” sounds like something out of Mary Mary Quite Contrary, but “all the old queens” seems to be evoking aging gay men who are tying to look young. But then they become literal old queens; as if Bob is now thinking about reincarnation and famous historical figures he might have met. “Mary” in the nursery rhyme may be Mary Queen of Scots. She died.

The rhymes are contrived and whimsical (nudes/dudes; feuds/preludes) but the claim that he is a man of contradictions is disarmingly straightforward and unforced. The line “I contain multitudes” is a quote from a Walt Whitman poem called A Song Of Myself.

A Song of Myself would have been a good alternative title for this song: and indeed for every other song on this album.

2: False Prophet

False Prophet does at least have a bit of a beat behind it; and Dylan’s gravelly voice speaks the words in time with the beat. It is another song of himself; another song in which the speaker, who both is and is not Bob Dylan, tries to define his nature.

I am; I am; I am.

The poem is called “false prophet”; but the speaker twice declares that he is not a false prophet; which kind of means he is a real one.

But he seems to deny that as well: I ain’t no false prophet, I just know what I know. I ain’t no false prophet, I just said what I said. (“I am not a spokesman”, says spokesman.)

But he is also an ascetic, a seeker after truth, and a poet. He is a “false” prophet in the sense that other people have burdened him with a prophetic identity, when all he wants to do is live a life of integrity and sing songs; but in doing so he has somehow lost contact with himself.

When he speaks of mystical women guiding him through the underworld, like all those Johanas and Angelinas, one half-suspects he is really talking about drugs. He always was.

Well I’m the enemy of treason

Enemy of strife

Enemy of the unlived meaningless life
I ain’t no false prophet
I just know what I know
I go where only the lonely can go

Like I Contain Multitudes, False Prophet is neither autobiographical nor a final summing up of a career. But both are evocations of the persona that Dylan has adopted: the contradictory, elliptical bard.

3: My Own Version of You

I suppose it was about 1968; folkie Woody Dylan accepted the 30 pieces of silver and stopped writing songs of protest and started writing songs of himself. And by himself we mean the inside of his head, long chains of imagery. Either he is providing a compelling picture of the psyche; or he is offering up a musical Rorschach test in which we all see our own faces. Or just self-indulgently noodling imagery. One of his fans famously thought Bob had betrayed him: many of his fans were, and remain, puzzled.

Writing in this style requires an almost unachievable sense of balance. Like Luke Skywalker, you must learn control. Just speak every word which comes into your head and you end up with gibberish which means hardly anything to you and nothing to anyone else: but try to impose too much sense on it and the images stop coming.

Some people say it is all about drugs: but that’s what people who don’t have any imagination always say about people who do.

A Better Version of You has the balance exactly right: it starts with an image; it riffs off that image and distorts it in all kinds of directions; but the transformations bring us back where we started.

This time, the speaker sees himself as Frankenstein: he starts out collecting the necessary body parts “limbs and livers and brains and hearts” and ends up animating his creation with electricity:

One strike of lightning is all that I need

And a blast of electricity that runs at top speed
Shimmy your ribs, I’ll stick in the knife
Gonna jumpstart my creation to life

But he is not creating a monster. He is creating an ideal friend; or re-creating an existing friend in his own image. He is going to create his own version of you; someone he’s never seen; someone who feels the way he feels; someone with decency and common sense. In the end he just want’s to bring someone to life. The man who contains multitudes is going to create new life in more ways than one.

Sometimes it is a silly song: but there is a sense that Dylan has gone through “silly” and come out the other side. What can you do with

I’m gonna make you play the piano like Leon Russell

Like Liberace,
like St. John the Apostle

except drop your jaw and applaud.

Sometime it is cartoonish: but the cartoon keeps bringing us back to the Frankenstein image:

I’ll take the Scarface Pacino and The Godfather Brando

Mix it up in a tank and get a robot commando
If I do it up right and put the head on straight
I’ll be saved by the creature that I create

Yes: Brando/Commando is a silly rhyme: but the idea that Frankenstein is like a young boy trying to assemble an action-figure is rather cool. He is taking two gangsters apart and reassembling them as a sci-fi monster. If he puts the kit together correctly, then the robot will save him from the baddies: but who ever managed to put the head of a model kit in the right place?

The lyric is full of references to other songs. He’s going to create the monster in the wee-small hours; he’s going to walk a midnight mile; he’s going to say to the willow tree don’t weep for me; and he’s going to bring something — the creature, possibly, or a human head — all the way home. So perhaps Dylan isn’t trying to make a perfect woman or a perfect friend. Perhaps the “you” refers to the song itself: stitched together from memories of other songs. Dylan said that a line like “how many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man” grew out of singing “the captain said to John Henry a man ain’t nothin’ but a man” over and over again. Perhaps this one comes from singing his own songs one time too many.

But it is also a parade of famous people: St John — the Apostle and the baptist — St Peter, St Jerome, and, somehow standing in for Jesus, Julius Caesar. So perhaps the song is about celebrity; about fame. The better version of you is really a better version of me. Old Bob wants to re-create Young Bob: the myth of Bob has become like Frankenstein’s creation; both saviour and destroyer.

want to bring someone to life

want to role back the years
do it with laughter
do it with tears

It isn’t about creating a new life, it’s about rejuvenating an existing one; and it’s really going to be done with perfectly ordinary human happiness and sorrow.

Although still more poem than song, this feels like a performance, not merely a recitation. The word “monasteries” roles around his mouth in the first line, the way place names used to in Theme Time Radio Hour. There is a desperation in the way in gasps out that he wants to create a new version of “hhh…yooo”. He seems to get angry when he says he’s going to create new life “in more ways than one”. And the final evocation of creation has a staccato urgency.

4: Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You

It is late at night: the poet is sitting on the roof of his house listening to music.

He has sat there through winter and spring.

He has lived in different places.

He is lonely.

He has come to a decision: it was an intuitive decision, not a rational one.

It takes him a long time to make decisions.

Either he himself, or the world around him has changed: during his life, many of his friends have died.

He thinks that leaving home and travelling may change the way he looks at things.

But his final decision is to dedicate himself to someone else: or possibly to put himself under someone else’s control.

At one point he seems to be talking to a male friend who he will go travelling with: but elsewhere he seems to be talking to a female love. When he starts to talk about doves and preaching the Gospel, it is tempting to wonder if he is using the language of evangelical Christianity, giving himself to God. But I think this is a simple love song to a woman he hopes to travel with and stay with until he dies.

In the last song, the Frankenstein figure seemed to be wanting to be reborn and to live life again: but this one has a resigned, end of life atmosphere. He is no longer the person he was, but if the dream-woman accepts his offer he may become so again.

5: Black Rider

Dear God….

I couldn’t believe that Dylan really sang that line.

I checked three different lyrics sites, and they all agree.

Black rider, black rider, hold it right there;

the size of your cock will get you nowhere.

Does Dylan see his whole career as a willy waving contest; a bit of adolescent boasting about who is the most macho? Maybe there was a certain locker-room atmosphere back stage in the early days of the folk revival. Guys do sometimes show off about that sort of thing.

Or is he just taking the piss out of a certain US president?

There is a Clint Eastwood movie called Pale Rider. There is another Clint Eastwood movie called Unforgiven. The latter has quite a few references, implicit and direct, to dick-size. That’s the kind of thing we remember in these kinds of dreams.

But the line still seems incongruous. A bit of schoolboy slang in a dark brooding song.

The song is written in the second person. The Black Rider could be death; it could be depression. It could be Donald Trump. But I am pretty sure that Bob is still singing about himself. The black rider has seen it all; he’s been on the job too long; he’s walking away.

He has been on the road a long time; he feels he knows the road but at the same time he feels he does not know it. He doesn’t want to join any more fights; he thinks he may have to stop talking. And at some level, he is ready for the end:

Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how

If ever there was a time, then let it be now
Let me go through, open the door
My soul is distressed my mind is at war.

I think that this song works nicely.

It helps that it is quite short. Size doesn’t necessarily matter.

6: Goodbye Jimmy Reed

This one is relatively straightforward. Like Roll On John and Lenny Bruce is Dead it’s a tribute to a specific person; part pastiche, part tissue of quotations with a large dollop of myth making on top. It is much more song than poem — it sounds a lot like the kind of thing Dylan was doing in the 90s — and it rattles along in Blues Gospel style. He praises the gospel singer for his “straightforward, puritanical tone”; tells him to “thump on the Bible, proclaim a creed” and references lots of hymnal phrases - “for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory”; “go tell it on the mountain”; “will there be any stars in my crown”; and even, a little obliquely, “mine eyes have seen the glory”. Of course it goes off in funny directions: is the “transparent woman in a transparent dress” the one who leads the Gospel singer off the path; or is it another of the sad-eyed Angelinas who haunt Dylan’s drug-visions?

Except, so far as I can tell, Jimmy Reed wasn’t a gospel singer, and never was especially religious. The refrain and the style may reference Jimmy Reed: but the song is about someone entirely different. Is blues and religion somehow connected in Dylan’s head? Do both harks back to a time of simple religious certainties? Or are we simply in one of those dreams where it makes perfect sense to be telling Christopher Biggens that he is far and away your favourite astronomer?

The case against William Zanzinger wasn’t clear cut. Joey Gailo was a thug in a sharp suit. Rubin Carter was never that great a boxer. We’ve long forgotten the real people who John Henry and John Hardy might have been based on. If Bob wants to call his mythical gospel singer after a real life blues singer, that’s his prerogative.

If the Jimmy Reed of the song isn’t Jimmy Reed the recording artist who is he? The one who sang in a straightforward puritanical tone? The one who wouldn’t do tricks like Jimmi Hendrix? The one who was attacked but only sang songs which were meaningful to himself?

Even when he is singing about someone else, Dylan is singing about himself.

7: Mother of Muses

This is very nearly a song. It is a song I can imagine someone else singing. It sounds like Bob Dylan. Not the young protest Bob; but certainly the Bob who wrote Forever Young.

Yes, he is speech-singing it; he’s always done that to some extent. But the way the whisper goes up and down, the phrasing of it: those five CDs of Sinatra covers have added a new layer to Bob’s performance.

He’s not a folksinger. He’s not a crooner. He’s doing a new thing. His own thing. And it is almost unbelievably sad.

Classical poems often begin with an evocation to the Muses; the gods of poetry. The muse very often just means inspiration. And we sometimes call a poet’s lover his muse: the person for whom he wrote his poetry.

The first two stanzas are directly addressing the muses of classical mythology. He tells the Muse what he wants her to sing about; which is to say; what he wants to sing about himself. First, he wants to sing simple nature poetry about the mountains and the deep dark sea:

Sing of the lakes and the nymphs of the forest

Sing your hearts out, all your women of the chorus

But then he wants her to sing about heroes: military generals; singers; civil rights leaders; artists. It seems that it was the soldiers who won the wars who made rock and roll and civil rights possible. That’s a far cry from wanting the cannon balls to stop sounding because too many people have died; but he was so much older then.

Sing of Sherman, Montgomery, and Scott

And of Zhukov, and Patton, and the battles they fought
Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
Who carved the path for Martin Luther King
Who did what they did and they went on their way
Man, I could tell their stories all day

This seems to to get exactly right what Murder Most Foul got so terribly wrong: rhymes which make you smile (sing/king) and a gentle fading of the high into the colloquial. “Man I could tell their stories all day” seems very much the kind of thing Bob Dylan would have said.

This is not a young poet in the first flush of inspiration. This is an old poet who feels his inspiration has gone away. It’s not too long ago that he was shouting out “I ain’t dead yet; my bell still rings” but now, he’s growling

Mother of Muses, wherever you are

I’ve already outlived my life by far

It’s almost as if the Muse is angry with him, or as if he has some kind of block which is preventing him from singing.

Maybe

got a mind that ramble, got a mind that roam

I’m travelin’ light and I’m slow comin’ home

is a direct reference to Leonard Cohen’s final album. But it makes me think of the late-early Dylan, bringing it all back home. And all that talk of rambling, and roaming, and hard travelling must surely take us back to where it all started. To Woody.

The muse he mentions in the poem is Caliope, who is the muse of epic poetry: which is appropriate if he is talking about civil war generals and civil rights leaders. But Caliope is not the mother of the muses. The mother of the muses is Mnesomyne.

Memory.

8: Crossing the Rubicon

Two songs back Bob asked what Julius Ceasar would do. One of things Julius Ceasar certainly did do was cross the Rubicon.

But that almost certainly has nothing to do with this song. The singer is going to cross a metaphorical rubicon. Pass the point of no-return. Make an irrevocable decision. What could he possibly be thinking of?

Whatever he did or is going to do, he is going to do it on the fourteenth day of the most dangerous month of the year. The aforementioned T.S. Eliot once remarked that April was the cruellest month. Passover occurs on the 14th day of the first month; which often falls in April in the Julian calendar. Jesus Christ died at Passover; in some traditions Good Friday is celebrated on 14th April. Bob has previously sung about Titanic, which sank on April 14 1912; and his hero Woody sang about the great dust-storm which hit Texas and Oklahoma on April 14 1935.

I first heard Bob do a live concert on April 14 2007, which is why you should never go down these kinds of rabbit holes.

On April 14 he gets up early to greet the goddess of the dawn. The name of the Christian festival Easter, which coincides with Passover, was named after the goddess of the dawn, Oestre. In the next verse he prays to the Christian cross. Easter and Passover are both spring festivals; about death and new life. Mr Eliot’s poem The Wasteland is about the life returning to the land after a drought, among several other things.

Before making his crossing, Dylan says he abandons all hope. “All hope abandon” is famously written above the gates of Dante’s hell. Shortly after revealing that April was the cruellest month, T.S Eliot compared the commuters crossing Westminster bridge with Dante’s vision of the damned entering hell. Neither of them had realised that death had undone so many. A long time ago, Dylan’s lover gave him a book of poems written by an Italian poem from the fourteenth century.

Dylan clearly has Dante in mind, since the rubicon he is planning to cross is “three miles north of Purgatory”. But he also seems to have cowboy films in mind, because he is going to paint his wagon before setting out on his journey.

The name Rubicon means “a red river”. It is literally red because of the Italian clay mud, but for Dylan it also suggests a woman’s lips, roses, and blood. Red River is the title of a John Wayne movie about a cattle drive: the image of driving cows through the wilderness to their eventual slaughter connects back with the Infernal image of the dead flowing through the gates of hell.

Verse three is about looking backwards and looking forward: he can only see darkness in the future; he thinks he has wasted too much time in the past; and he knows that he does not have very much time left. In verse two, women’s lips were connected with blood and death: but here he is is simply going to hug his lover goodbye before embarking on the journey.

Then the direction changes. He is angry. Possibly he is angry with someone who has raped or otherwise harmed his lover. He is going to kill them, widow his own wife; dismember him with a crooked knife. We haven’t come that far from John Wayne movies and damned souls. But at the same time he is conscious of his own mortality, and of his own sinfulness. He seems to be talking about both vengeance and repentance; exacting payment and paying off debts while there is still time. He is going to miss the person he kills. Possibly he is accusing himself and thinking in terms of self-punishment.

Take the high road, take the low

Take any one you’re on

I poured the cup, I passed it along

And I crossed the Rubicon.

Dylan’s’ second album ended with a rewrite of an old Robert Burns song about leave-taking: “Then fill to me the parting glass, good night and joy be with you all”. And here he is again, passing the cup round before leaving us. And this time he quotes By Yon Bonnie Banks which is also about parting. The spirit of the dead soldier will fly straight back to his home (“the high road”) but the survivor will have to take the long way round. Dylan doesn’t know which road he is going to take. If he is “between heaven and hell” then he must be in Purgatory. But as soon as we think about passing a cup around before dying, we are back to Passover and Easter: and Dylan imagines his skin being displayed on a hill after he is died, which could be a kind of grotesque echo of the crucifixion and the paschal lamb.

The final stanzas take us back to the beginning. He believes in God; he believes in light and freedom. He believes that everyone can be sanctified. He said at the beginning that he was going to get up early to greet the dawn: in the penultimate verse it is still dark and the dawn hasn’t come yet. Or possibly autumn is giving way to winter.

As so often in Dylan, his real religion turns out to be romantic love. Perhaps human love is the only metaphor he has with which to talk about the love of God. (Dante, again.) At first glance, he seems to be saying that his human lover is the only person who has accompanied him to the threshold: we have a simple, Bunyanesque image of one lover crossing the river of Death and the other staying behind.

“Morning, baby...” We started out greeting the goddess of the dawn: surely Oestre and the Morning-Baby are aspects of the same figure? An imaginary, spiritual figure — “...are you still in my mind?

The day is over; it is nearly winter; but he is still looking for Easter. He quotes the old folk saying about how the darkest hour is the one before dawn. He could also have quoted the old poet who asked “if winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

9 Key West

Key West is placed between Crossing the Rubicon and Murder Most Foul. Crossing the Rubicon is about death. Murder Most Foul is about the death of President Kennedy. Key West is about heaven; but heaven is located in Florida. And it begins with the assassination of President McKinley. Crossing the Rubicon ended with autumn leaves and the first frosts of winter: in Key West it is hot. Very hot indeed.

Someone is listening to the radio. They are hoping to find a love song: but they hear the news of McKinley’s assassination instead. Radio didn’t exist in 1900. Radio Luxembourg certainly didn’t.

Someone is hitchhiking to Florida; and identifies with the beat poets who wrote about life on the road. He picks a flower and puts it in his button hole.

Someone arrives in Florida: which is different from Australia. It is hot. There are lots of flowers. There is a sea-turtle conservation project and also religious music and Indian ceremonies. It is very hot.

Someone is still trying to find the romantic song on Radio Luxembourg…and suddenly we are in a weird, pedophile nightmare.

Someone was the victim of a forced marriage when they were still a minor. They can remember the brides wedding dress. They have separated, but he is still attracted to her. She is dying; or possibly under sentence of death; or possibly it isn’t the girl but the President; or maybe the President’s assassin, who is being allowed a last request.

Key West, Florida is un-fallen (“the gateway key to innocence and purity”) connected with fairy tales or Walt Disney (“the enchanted land”). It is a place to regain mental and physical health (“if you lost your mind you will find it here” “the healing virtues of the wind”.)

These four claims are repeated at the end of the song:

Key West is the place to be

If you’re looking for immortality

Key West is paradise divine

Key West is fine and fair

If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there

Key West is on the horizon line

The poem is subtitled “Philosopher Pirate”. Pirates probably did hang out in Florida Keys: but the “pirate” he is talking about is the pirate radio station. Somehow he is listening to the radio; wishing he could go back to Florida; and thinking of spiritual rest at the same time.

10: Murder Most Foul

For no very good reason, this song is set apart from the rest of the album and given a CD of its own. I have already written about it at some length. It is very long. And very irritating.

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Sunday, October 18, 2020

Britannia perdere!

Currently only available to Patreon's: an essay on P**** H*******, conspiracy theories and the D**** M*** that THEY don't want you to read.

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Sunday, October 11, 2020

It Is Finished

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Friday, October 09, 2020

This month I have published about 10,000 words on this blog.

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Not as Funny As He Used To Be....

The Joke Proper, which turns on sudden perception of incongruity, is a much more promising field. I am not thinking primarily of indecent or bawdy humour, which, though much relied upon by second-rate tempters, is often disappointing in its results. The truth is that humans are pretty clearly divided on this matter into two classes. There are some to whom "no passion is as serious as lust" and for whom an indecent story ceases to produce lasciviousness precisely in so far as it becomes funny: there are others in whom laughter and lust are excited at the same moment and by the same things. The first sort joke about sex because it gives rise to many incongruities: the second cultivate incongruities because they afford a pretext for talking about sex.

The Screwtape Letters

When Alf Garnett said that we should send the fuzzy-wuzzies back to fuzzy-wuzzy land, we laughed at him, because his opinion was so awful and he expressed it so badly. We were supposed to laugh at him.

Warren Mitchell said that people sometimes recognized him on the street and said “I enjoyed you having a go at the immigrants on TV last night”. He used to reply “I wasn’t having a go at the immigrants: I was having a go at arseholes like you.”

You can’t satirize a bigot without actually saying bigoted things. You probably couldn’t show Till Death Us Do Part on TV today, because Alf sometimes used the kinds of words that people like Alf sometimes use. We have rightly decided to stop using those words. No one can have the slightest doubt that the Major in Fawlty Towers is a ludicrous idiot: but I think that the BBC has made the right call in dropping the episode where he uses the n-word.

Steve Coogan is a clever man and Alan Partridge is an idiot. But I don’t particularly enjoy the Alan Partridge shows: Coogan’s comic re-creation of the most cringe-making TV disasters actually make me cringe; his satirical caricature of dreadful TV is often, to me, simply dreadful. But there is no question about where Coogan stops and Partridge starts.

His portrayal of Stan Laurel was more like Stan Laurel than Stan Laurel was.

If a comedian tells a cock joke we don’t imagine that he doesn’t understand basic human taboos and that he would expose himself in public given half the chance. It’s often rather buttoned-up and coy people who laugh most when the man on the stage talks about men's willies: it is funny precisely because the comedian is saying things they would never say. There are no streakers on naturist beaches. But some people think that there are things (indeed, Things) that you mustn’t mention ever, ever, ever, except maybe to a doctor or a nurse when Mummy and Daddy are also in the room. There is nothing funny about Rude Words and even if there is that is no excuse.

A lot of people would also say that about Jimmy Carr’s rape gags. Exactly that.

If I say “I am showing Karloff’s Frankenstein as part of my scary movie night” I do not expect you to say “I don’t find Frankenstein scary: it’s actually pretty tame.”

If I say “I don’t think parents should dress little girls in sexy outfits” I do not expect you to say “I certainly do not find six year olds in leotards sexy”.

If I say “That was a racist joke” then it is not very much to the point to say “That comedian is not a racist.”

"Scary", "sexy" and "racist" are qualities that a film, a dress, or joke can possess: regardless of our reaction to them, or the intention of the film maker, dress-maker or joke-teller.

If you grant that racist words might be a legitimate component of comedy there is a danger that racists might pretend to be comedians simply in order to say the bad words.

Or that common or garden street bigots mights use the bad words and say “oh but I didn’t mean it I was just making a joke: you libtards don’t have a sense of humour.”

Or that very unfunny people might think that standing up and saying bad words was funny in itself.

The line between a witty political speaker and a comedian who jokes about politics because politics is sometimes funny is quite a wobbly one. It used to be said that Alternative Comedians could get laughs just by standing up in front of liberal audiences and saying “That Mrs Thatcher! What a cow! Know what I mean?” You couldn’t do that nowadays. Except maybe on the Now Show. But very many comedians use comedy to make out a case that they deeply and sincerely care about. Does Nish Kumar talk about his personal experience of racism because he wants to get laughs and living in a racist country sometimes gives rise to funny situations? Or does he want to make a serious point about racism and use funny anecdotes because they help him get his point across?

(A little from column A and a little from column B)

Jonathan Pie is a fictional TV news reporter portrayed by (checks notes) comedian Tom Walker, who is perhaps best known for portraying a fictional TV news reporter named Jonathan Pie. His portrayal is sufficiently convincing that not everyone realises that Jonathan Pie is a fictional character. The material is either ad libbed on the spot; or else Walker sufficiently inhabits the role that his vocal mannerisms, repetitions and verbal fumbles are part of the act.

The twist is that Pie is a news-reporter for the BBC, standing outside 10 Downing Street or Parliament, giving a very neutral, balanced report on some debate or controversy, and then handing back to the studio. Once the mic is off, he says what he really thinks, which invariably develops into an angry, sweary rant.

Here is Pie reporting on Jeremy Corbyn’s re-election as leader of the Labour Party in 2016. He says that although Corbyn appears relatively popular with ordinary people, the media have deliberately attached the label “unelectable” to him. He says that Corbyn appears to sincerely want to change the country. He says that people who write for the papers are by definition in positions of privilige and would therefore have something to lose if the country changed. He says that the Labour Party should not sacrifice integrity and principles in order to gain power. He says that Corbyn’s opponents are supporters of Blair, and that Blair was a bad thing. He says, in fact, the kinds of things which any political pundit might say. The humour, such as it is, is in the delivery. It’s not what he says it’s the way that he says it.

He starts out talking calmly “Who decided he’s unelectable? I’ll tell you who did, the media did, we did”.

He becomes more and more agitated as the speech goes on “this is about missing the good old days, the good old spin-doctoring war-mongering, Bush-fellating, Tory-imitating good old days”.

Is the joke that a person from the media is saying about the media what the rest of us think — in the way that a very boring Richard Dawkins argument would be funny if it came out of the mouth of a Vicar? Or is the joke that he gets angry about this kind of thing: is passionate political engagement funny in itself?

At one point, contrasting Jeremy Corbyn with Tony Blair he rants “fuck honesty! fuck integrity! we just want power!” Someone might say “Yes, that is correct: power without integrity is not worth having.” Someone else might say: “No, that is not correct: principles are worth nothing if you are only ever in opposition.” These are both positions that people might, and in fact do, hold. Is the joke that an angry sweary man is saying the kinds of things we normally only hear calm, polite men saying? Or is it simply that a posh man said fuck?

As a recovering Corbynite, I cannot deny that at the time I lapped it up. I forwarded it to all my friends. Ha-ha-ha the funny man is shouting about all the people who are being horrid to nice Jezza ha-ha-ha.

Here is a more recent video about (oh god) cancel culture.

Background: Rebecca Long-Bailey, a Labour MP, allegedly tweeted a link to an interview with an actress that allegedly referred to an Amnesty International report which allegedly drew a connection between the killing of George Floyd and techniques allegedly used by the Israeli secret service. Kier Starmer, the alleged leader of the Labour Party, judged this to be anti-Semitic and removed her from her allegedly important position as (checks notes) opposition spokesperson on Education. Some people think that Kier Starmer, by acting promptly and decisively, showed leadership and the potential to be Prime Minister, bringing to an end five years during which the anti-Semitic Jeremy Corbyn had become a greater threat to the continued existence of Jews in Europe than Hitler had been. Some people think that largely concocted accusations of anti-Semitism had been weaponised by the Right to undermine Corbyn’s Prime Ministerial ambitions, and that Starmer had opportunistically smeared Corbyn’s de facto successor with the same mud. Where you stand on the issue has everything to do with where you stand on Corbyn’s and Starmer’s leadership, and almost nothing to do with what the offending article actually said. You may not find it too challenging to work out where I stand.

The Jonathan Pie character draws a link between the sacking of Long-Bailey; the Black Rights Matter campaign; and “cancel culture” more generally.

Once again, he makes a perfectly mainstream political argument: that it is hypocritical of the Left to complain about Long-Bailey being penalised for what was, at worst, a fairly minor deviation from the party position because the Left frequently penalise people for even more minor deviations from their own orthodoxy. Where the Corbyn monologue made the kind of case you could have found in any Guardian op-ed, the Long-Bailey video says exactly what any number of Daily Mail pundits say on any day of the week.

Once again, I am a little puzzled as to where the “joke” occurs. What humour there is comes from rhetorical exaggeration. He starts from “people are losing their jobs for tweeting the wrong opinions” and builds up to “a society where a tiny but very vocal majority of perma-offended woke twats with an extraordinary amount of power have penetrated every aspect of our culture.”

I know how to respond to this as an argument. It only works if you accept some pretty massive false equivalencies. It’s a common enough rhetorical device: ludicrously understate one side of the argument and therefore portray the contrary position as ludicrously extreme. “If you even suggest that there might be such a thing as biological sex you will be labelled a transphobe”. (Compare: Poor Enoch Powell only dared to suggest that maybe white people have some rights as well and he was labelled a racist.) He paints a picture of a world in which poor silenced J.K Rowling and poor martyred Graham Lineham just want to have a sensible, nuanced conversation but instead…some very bad thing has been done to them, which is somehow analogous to being put into a gas chamber.

No-one is saying that biological sex does not exist. Some people are literally saying that trans women are male fetishists who get off on wearing women’s clothes because they have a thing about toilets.

At one point in the piece Pie starts to shout “I AM NOT JOKING”. Indeed. And responding to a joke as if it were an argument is obviously a category mistake: I would hardly criticise Monty Python by saying that the advertising standards authority didn’t record a single case of pet shops selling pets which were already dead in the whole of 1969. But the ludicrous Jonathan Pie is saying the same things that the perfectly serious P*t*r H*tch*ns makes in the Daily Mail on a weekly basis. “From the lockdown to the destruction of statues, these febrile weeks show the pillars of our freedom and civilization are rotten. As the Left now controls every lever of power, we face nothing less than regime change.”

But perhaps H*tch*ns is not serious either? Perhaps The Right never are? Perhaps Conservatism is only ever a grotesque self-caricature intended mainly to annoy the libtards? Perhaps I should not be saying "Jonathan Pie is no funnier that H*tch*ns? Perhaps I should be saying "H*tch*ns is just as much a wind-up as Jonathan Pie".

Joanthan Pie is a caricature of the kind of person who says the kind of thing Jonathan Pie says, in the way that Alf Garnett was a caricature of the kind of person who says the kinds of things that Alf Garnett says. I am supposed to laugh at Jonathan Pie because he thinks that “losing your Twitter account” and “being ushered into an incinerator” are roughly the same thing, when I can see quite well that they are not. He is funny because he is wrong.

And I now see that that was also the joke in the earlier, apparently left-wing monologue. The joke was that the Jonathan Pie character was such a big fool that he thought that Jeremy Corbyn was a good Labour Leader and that he had some chance of becoming Prime Minister. Only a big fool could believe anything so silly. Pie said “the trouble with Jeremy Corbyn is that he tells the truth…”. I reacted as if he had made a good political point. I was supposed to react in the same way I reacted when Ali G asked Buzz Aldrin if he was ever jealous of Louis Armstrong.

The joke’s on me. I forwarded the Corbyn rant to all my leftie friends because it was saying things that I agreed with; not realising that the whole joke was that they were things that only someone as stupid as me could possibly believe. I was in the same boat as the American right wing news outlet who thought that Pie was an example of what left wing British journalists were actually like. This time, the joke is on P*t*r H*tch*ns and the Daily Mail who continue to nod and say “Yes, that’s a good point” even as the rant gets more and more extreme.

I think it was Mark Steel who stuck up his hand in a Tory fringe meeting and suggested the restoration, not just of hanging but of crucifixion, to see if anyone present would agree with him. (They did.) I think I may have walked into a similar trap.

But this kind of thing is double edged. Alf Garnett couldn’t satirize racism without being racist. Jimmy Carr tells jokes about the ways in which audiences react to very offensive jokes as part of an act which includes jokes which are very offensive. Someone suggested that we should apply a version of the Turing Test to on-line trolls: if you can’t tell whether the poster really has ludicrously extreme views, or is merely pretending to have ludicrously extreme views then he has ludicrously extreme views. There isn’t much difference between a man yelling right wing fallacies for comic effect and a man yelling right wing fallacies. Jonathan Pie is a sufficiently clever parodist that he is no longer a parodist: he is become the thing itself.