Arts
The Whistleblower We Deserve
It’s not for nothing that the best English-language movie adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama, An Enemy of the People, is the one with the giant man-eating shark. One review of the first London production of the play in 1893 quoted a “distinguished actress” who, during the intermission, complained that “this is my first Ibsen play, and I do not like it! I hate plays all about drains and water-supplies, with dirty scenery and no feminine interest in it.” Steven Spielberg solved the drains problem by making the danger that threatens the prosperity of a tourist town not tiny microorganisms in the polluted waters of the baths but a far more exciting monster that lurks beneath the waves while vacationers frolic on the beach.
Yet in all other respects, the first part of Jaws is a faithful compression of Ibsen’s didactic five-act satire into half an hour of breathless action. For Ibsen’s nameless spa resort on the southern coast of Norway, there is the New England beach town of Amity Island, whose economy is equally dependent on vacationers. For Thomas Stockmann, the medical officer who discovers that the supposedly health-giving waters of the spa are contaminated with deadly bacteria, there is the honest police chief Martin Brody, who tries to insist that the beach be closed down. For Stockmann’s elder brother, Peter, who is at once the town mayor, chief constable, and chairman of the board of the spa, there is Amity Island’s mayor, Larry Vaughn—both put economic interests before public safety. For Ibsen’s corrupt newspaper editor, Hovstad, there is Harry Meadows of The Amity Gazette.
For the raucous public meeting at which the townspeople turn on Stockmann, there is a gathering in Jaws that seems to be playing out in the same way—until the shark hunter Sam Quint takes over the plot and An Enemy of the People becomes Moby-Dick. There is then even less “feminine interest” than in the play, but it has to be admitted that it’s all rather more fun than Ibsen’s original. And Jaws manages what An Enemy of the People can never do: it turns the corruption of politics into an apolitical affair. The shark, not Stockmann, becomes the scapegoat.
An Enemy of the People is one of those plays that, in its original form, feels at once urgent and old-fashioned. It goes on too long and becomes, in some passages, heavy-handed and repetitive. With its elaborate scene-setting and what Arthur Miller called “the dull green tones of Victorianism,” it sometimes puts the turgid into late-nineteenth-century dramaturgy. Yet it explores tensions—between science and politics, truth and self-interest, democracy and individual conscience—that never go away. This peculiar combination of the momentous and the monotonous is, oddly enough, what makes the play live. It is a classic that is not sacrosanct. It is weighty enough to be canonical but flawed enough to be treated with healthy disrespect. It is infinitely malleable.
Even the meaning of its title can be turned into its opposite. For Ibsen, it’s a compliment: Stockmann earns it by refusing to tell politically convenient lies. But for someone like Donald Trump, it is a license to lie. In November 2019 The New York Times calculated that Trump had, as president, by then issued thirty-six tweets calling news media the “enemy of the people.” A year later Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, an “enemy of the people” for obstructing his attempt to steal the presidential election. Likewise, at the height of the Brexit hysteria in 2017, the right-wing British tabloid The Daily Mail ran a front page with the photographs of three judges who had ruled that Parliament should be allowed to vote on the timing of the UK’s exit from the European Union, under the glaring headline “Enemies of the People.” Stripped of Ibsen’s sarcasm, the label has become again what it was before he made it ironic: a way of fixing a target on the foreheads of those who exercise inconveniently independent judgment.
Thus, as the drama is now reconfigured on the right, the character to be admired is not the honest and earnest Thomas Stockmann but his bad brother Peter, the mayor who prefers to let tourists die rather than face the economic consequences of closing the spa—or in the Jaws version, the beach. Peter Stockmann and his cinematic alter ego Larry Vaughn are libertarian stars. One of Boris Johnson’s favorite yarns in his well-paid after-dinner speeches was about
why my political hero is the mayor from Jaws. Yes. Because he kept the beaches open. Yes, he repudiated, he foreswore, and he abrogated all these silly regulations on health and safety and declared that the people should Swim! Swim! Now, I accept that as a result some small children were eaten by a shark. But how much more pleasure did the majority get from those beaches as a result of the boldness of the mayor in Jaws?
Guto Harri, who served as Johnson’s director of communications, wrote that Johnson “clearly believed what he was saying.” This semicomic provocation turned tragic during the Covid-19 pandemic—letting people die in order to keep businesses open became, on the right, a badge of honor.
Conversely, for the left, Thomas Stockmann’s stance has become even more valiant. The pollution of the spa waters can be seen now as a metaphor for environmental destruction. The determination of the town’s bigwigs to press ahead regardless of fatal consequences prefigures the continuation of business as usual in the face of the climate crisis. Stockmann, who says in Amy Herzog’s version of the play that “I have devoted my life to science,” is also an Anthony Fauci pilloried for insisting on scientific facts during the pandemic. In his introduction to a 2010 edition of Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaptation of the play, John Guare prayed, “God forbid we should have a time when Miller’s Enemy ever again does become pertinent. We have to see this Enemy as a reminder of what has happened, what can happen, and what must never happen again.”
Those prayers were not answered. What must never happen again is happening before our eyes. And the more systematically the idea of objective truth is undermined, the easier it is to rally around Stockmann’s insistence on it. The audience at the Broadway production of Herzog’s adaptation can be expected to nod along when in the fifth act the rueful doctor reflects on what is going on in the town:
It is alarming. That we’ve lived here this long, without understanding who our neighbors are, that they turn everything upside down, call the truth a lie and vice versa—and the scariest thing? Is that these people genuinely believe themselves to be free-thinkers.
The contemporary resonances do not need to be spelled out.
Stockmann is of course Norwegian, but he can also be seen as a specifically American type. Guare wrote that, when he first read An Enemy of the People in the 1950s, “Ibsen’s play reminded me of the movie High Noon. Gary Cooper, in a lone battle against the bad guys…” When the drama was filmed by George Schaefer in 1978, Cooper was long dead, but they got the next best thing: Steve McQueen (albeit barely recognizable beneath a luxuriant mop of hair, glasses, and a bushy beard). This Stockmann brings together religious and secular idols: he is both Jesus and a brave scientist. Baited by the crowd in the climactic scene, when he’s trying to present his evidence, he asks, “Was the majority right when they stood by while Jesus was crucified? Was the majority right when they refused to believe that the earth moved around the sun and let Galileo be driven to his knees?” In the final act, when Stockmann has determined that he will stay in town and try to educate a group of young street urchins, he specifies, “We’ll want about twelve of them to start,” that dozen not accidentally adding up to the same number as Christ’s apostles.
This is not Ibsen; it is Arthur Miller. The movie used Miller’s adaptation of An Enemy of the People, which had a short and unsuccessful run on Broadway in late 1950 and early 1951. That version, written in response to “a swelling prefascist tide running in the United States,” can be seen as an overture to The Crucible—another exploration of the way a drama set in the past could be used as a metaphor for America under McCarthyism.1 In his autobiography, Timebends, Miller recalls the circumstances in which he agreed to adapt the play for Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge:
When [the veteran director] Bobby Lewis came to me with the idea…it bucked me up that these veteran theatre people, whom I had never connected with radical politics, had awakened to the danger. I soon learned that the Marches were suing a man for libeling them as Communists; the charge had cost them film roles, and they saw themselves in the shoes of the Stockmanns, who were also crucified by a mob.
Stockmann as the crucified Christ is a product of 1950s America, not 1880s Norway. And, as such, he is worthy but dull. As anyone who has ever sat through a biblical epic can testify, there is not much dramatic tension in watching a sacrificial victim being nailed to a cross. If you’re going to have Stockmann as a one-dimensional hero, it’s much more interesting to have him go off and hunt a huge shark.
Ibsen’s Stockmann, on the other hand, is a much more uncomfortable—and thus intriguing—figure. He doesn’t quite fit the mold of the good democratic citizen most people on the left would like him to be. He is indeed a whistleblower, a truth teller, a man of science who insists on the primacy of the evidence. But he’s also, possibly, a bit of a fascist. Guare noted that Stockmann can be conceived of as
a new face on the problematic American loner who could just as easily morph into Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. The world of Ayn Rand with Howard Roark, the lonely architect against the crass world…. Couldn’t the defiant, self-righteous loner against the world just as easily become Lee Harvey Oswald or Charlie Manson?
Or, say, Robert Kennedy Jr., saving the world from the pollution of vaccines? In 2021 Kennedy wrote a preface to R. Farquharson Sharp’s hundred-year-old version of the play, in which he hailed it as a parable about “the persecution of scientists and doctors who dare to challenge contemporary orthodoxies.”
Long before Hollywood got around to Steve McQueen’s Jesus-like version, there was a Nazi movie of An Enemy of the People. As early as 1924 Joseph Goebbels identified the play as “an ally against the ‘compact majority’ of Weimar democracy.” In 1937 Hans Steinhoff’s Nazi-approved film Ein Volksfeind had Heinrich George, familiar to German audiences from his roles in antisemitic propaganda films, play Stockmann as a good German standing up against those who would contaminate the streams from which the pure nation sprang. George delivers Stockmann’s big speech with Hitlerian cadences at the town hall meeting where he is being condemned, and rises to a demand that the individual be subordinated to the common good (which means, here, the good of the race): “Revolution against the lie, the cowardice, the stupidity and the egoism of the individual! I will fight so that the individual is prepared to sacrifice himself for the entire general public.” In the end, a Nazi Party official intervenes to vindicate Stockmann and admonish the townsfolk for their doubting of his superior wisdom. Stockmann has the ominous last words: “Thank God, truth stays truth and doesn’t put up with moderation!”
This isn’t Ibsen either, but it has as much basis in his text as Miller’s ideal democrat does. Miller himself was well aware of this. In his introduction to the published text of his adaptation, he acknowledged:
There are a few speeches, and one scene in particular, which have been taken to mean that Ibsen was a fascist. In the original meeting scene in which Dr. Stockmann sets forth his—and Ibsen’s—point of view most completely and angrily, Dr. Stockmann makes a speech in which he turns to biology to prove that there are indeed certain individuals “bred” to a superior apprehension of truths and who have the natural right to lead, if not to govern, the mass. If the entire play is to be understood as the working-out of this speech, then one has no justification for contending that it is other than racist and fascist—certainly it could not be thought of as a defense of any democratic idea.
Ibsen’s Stockmann does not, like Christ, turn the other cheek. He lashes out at those who are silencing and humiliating him in a rant that is not just elitist but eugenicist. This is what makes the play interesting—the wounded hero turns nasty. And we don’t really know why. Is this Ibsen speaking through his mouthpiece or just the master dramatist adding a strange and deliberately unsettling twist?2 Are these even Stockmann’s real views? Or is he just maddened by his degrading treatment into blurting out things he does not truly mean? Miller dealt with this problem by simply excising the nasty bits and convincing himself that, especially after the Holocaust, this is what Ibsen would have wanted. This suppression of the dark side of the good doctor makes the play morally better but aesthetically worse.
The question that arises with any new American version of An Enemy of the People is what it will do about this problem. The dilemma goes very deep because, frankly, there’s no point in staging any version of the play if you don’t want to make a connection to contemporary politics. How Stockmann is written and cast will always reflect the perceived needs of the moment. Sam Gold’s vivid and entertaining new Broadway production puts those needs first—but also takes a narrow view of what they might be. It makes the play more fluent and more effective, and it gives us, in Jeremy Strong’s portrayal, a Stockmann who is neither savior nor fascist. But it essentially returns to Miller’s approach from 1950. In the face of McCarthyism, Miller decided to make the play into a straightforward attack on the far right. In the face of Trumpism, Gold and Herzog make the same decision.
Gold’s production is played in the round. The action takes place on a long, narrow, white-painted platform with period furniture that is deftly arranged to avoid clutter. The scenic design, by a collective called dots, is ingeniously conceived to ensure that changes of location—from Stockmann’s house, to the newspaper office, to the public meeting, and back again—are achieved quickly and smoothly. Speed is of the essence. The play, normally a three-hour endurance test, unfolds here in two. This doesn’t just avoid the usual longueurs. It brings us into a fast-moving psychological world in which all the initial supports for Stockmann’s insistence that the spa must close evaporate in dizzying succession. The pacing makes these shifts of attitudes genuinely scary: all that is solid melts into air as self-interest distorts reality.
This rapidity is enabled by Herzog’s intelligently ruthless decluttering of the text. She keeps the five-act structure but sharpens and shortens almost every moment. Her dialogue is crisp. For example, Christopher Hampton’s fine version from 1997 opens with the journalist Billing tucking into roast beef alone at the Stockmanns’ dinner table. Mrs. Stockmann says, “If you arrive an hour late, Mr Billing, you have to make do with cold… You know how fussy Stockmann is about having his meals on time.” Herzog has this as: “Well when you’re an hour late, you get cold food… You know how my dad is about eating at regular hours—he waited almost a minute and a half for you if you can believe that.” The lines convey the idea of Stockmann’s fussiness with more wit and irony and also tell us something about the spirit of the woman who is speaking.
That woman is not Mrs. Stockmann. Herzog has killed off the wife, a major role but a rather thankless one. Her disappearance may seem to reduce the already limited “feminine interest” of the play, but in fact this enhances it. Herzog gives those of her lines that she wishes to retain to the Stockmanns’ daughter, Petra, making this bright young woman in her early twenties a much larger force. In Victoria Pedretti’s excellent performance, Petra is the pulse of the play, her quiet intelligence and toughness of mind acting as a realistic counterpoint to her father’s histrionics. Pedretti’s penetrating gaze seems to see through all the vanities of the male characters, including Stockmann’s. She loves her father and stands by him, but we always know that it is she who will have to deal with the consequences of his crusade. By making Stockmann a widower, Herzog adds poignancy to his backstory, but we also see how he has unthinkingly made his daughter into a substitute for his wife (“You’re more and more like her”) and assumes that she will take care of him and his younger children. She will—and the disaster brought on the family by Stockmann’s truth telling will be much more her burden than his.
Gold’s direction is at its best in his brilliant staging of the moments when the townspeople turn on Stockmann. The action unfolds not, as in Ibsen’s original, in a large private house but in a pub. The bar is a metallic square into which Strong is pushed by the angry mob, like an animal in a pen. He has liquor poured over his head and is pelted with ice cubes. When the bar is raised back up into the ceiling, we are again in Stockmann’s house, and the ice cubes are the stones that have been thrown through his windows. This is a masterpiece of stage violence—cruel, humiliating, hateful, but not striving for excessive realism. It feels all the more terrifying for being concentrated in a single visual image, the ice cubes serving as physical blows, as broken glass, as tokens of contempt, but also, as they start to melt, as metaphors for some kind of cleansing. The clear water that runs off them is a counterpoint to the polluted water of the spa.
What, though, of the Stockmann problem—is he to be another Gary Cooper? Rather startlingly, Herzog cuts his famous concluding line: in Hampton’s version, “The thing is, you see, that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone.” Herzog is having none of this lonely strongman stuff. She replaces the lines with Petra’s expression of fear that “the hardest times are still ahead,” followed by Stockmann’s prayer of collective faith: “And in ten years, or fifty…it will matter that we did what’s right…. We just have to imagine, that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued… We just have to imagine…”
Strong’s memorable performance as Stockmann picks up on this hint that he is not to be seen as the all-American solitary hero. He brings to the role something of the comic doubleness of his Kendall Roy in Succession, a kind of solipsistic sincerity that makes everything seem at once deeply serious and utterly ridiculous.3 Like Kendall, his Stockmann is sublimely free of self-awareness. Strong weaves the doctor’s integrity and honesty into a naiveté that sometimes borders on the childish. While Pedretti’s Petra sees everything, Strong, blinking through his professorial spectacles, has tunnel vision. He fixes his eye on the truth but cannot perceive its consequences. This makes him as much a comic character as a tragic one, and Strong’s achievement is to give Stockmann dignity even when he is behaving like a holy fool.
Which leads us to the great pity of this production. Strong has constructed a Stockmann complex enough to embrace the full oddness of Ibsen’s character—including its dark hints of fascism. But Gold and Herzog seem to have decided, like Miller in 1950, that these times in America call for a less ambiguous political message. Stockmann may be permitted his comic foibles, but he is not to be permitted his flights of eugenic fantasy and violent passion.
The relevant moments are in the fourth act, when Stockmann has been shouted down and denied the opportunity to present his scientific findings to the public. He responds first by attacking the (elected) officials: “I can’t stand leaders.” Which is fine, except that he adds (in Hampton’s version): “And I should like to see them exterminated, like any other vermin.” He then elaborates a biological distinction between those who should be allowed to lead and those who should not. He describes the people of the rural north, among whom he had served as a doctor, as animals who would be more appropriately treated by a vet. And he warms to this theme:
First imagine a simple, common-or-garden dog… I mean one of those disgusting, ratty, vulgar mongrels which mooches around the streets lifting its leg against your house. And then compare the mongrel with a pedigree dog, bred through several generations in a superior house, eating fine food and exposed to the sound of harmonious voices and music. Don’t you suppose the pedigree’s skull is quite differently evolved from the mongrel’s?
In Herzog’s version, Stockmann doesn’t say that officials should be exterminated like vermin. He doesn’t imply that the poor northerners he used to treat are animals but merely admits that “sometimes I questioned whether it was right to treat those people at all, if some of them would be better off left to die.” While he does raise his dog analogy—“there’s a difference between a stray and a poodle, isn’t there?”—Herzog has him specifically disavow any eugenic explanation for that distinction: “I’m not saying those mutts wouldn’t be capable of learning good behavior if they’d had the right opportunities.” His high dudgeon is offensive to his onstage audience—but much less so to an offstage audience of right-thinking New Yorkers.
It’s easy to understand this decision to dial down his verbal violence and obnoxious superiority. The Stockmann who is capable of such thoughts, even under extreme provocation, is much less effective as a warning against fascism—he might even be a warning against liberal self-righteousness. In the face of both McCarthyism and Trumpism, it seems wiser not to blur the separation between the good guys and the bad guys. Nonetheless, two things are lost. One is the opportunity to see Strong’s wonderfully subtle performance stretch even further into moral ambiguity. He seems entirely capable of pushing Stockmann out to the wilder shores of madness before reeling him back in. The other is the opportunity for some liberal self-reflection. Just because anti-elitism is being used to fuel right-wing populism does not mean that there are no questions to be asked about why so many people feel alienated from the language of higher education, science, and rationality. Stockmann is so certain of his moral and intellectual superiority that he makes no real effort to understand why some of the ordinary townsfolk might be worried about losing their livelihoods if the spa closes. He embodies the dangers of a haughty dismissal of the deplorables, and if he is sanitized, the chance to explore them is missed.
What happens in the play after those rants is that Stockmann and Petra decide to take in some street kids and educate them. This is, in practice, an apology for the previous night’s indulgence in social Darwinism: education, not biology, is what will determine their development. But the meaning of this apology is lost if we don’t quite know what Stockmann is sorry for. Perhaps it might be possible to imagine a production in which such an acknowledgment of the failings of liberal elitism might go hand in hand with a condemnation of incipient fascism, but this does not seem to be the right moment for it.
The post The Whistleblower We Deserve appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
Fury After Comedian Kicks Out A Couple Trying To Conceive During MICF Show
Drama has erupted over an incident that occurred at a Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) show this weekend. Where a couple were kicked out by the comedian performing, after being caught trying to conceive a baby during the show.
”We weren’t hurting anyone, the comedian totally over-reacted,” said one half of the couple. ”It’s not like we weren’t paying attention, we were doing it doggy style, with both of us facing forward.”
”These comedians are too sensitive.”
The move to have the couple kicked out of the show has divided the clowns that populate Sky News after dark.
With Paul Murray raging on about woke comedians, Andrew Bolt raging on about woke audience members and Caleb Bond raging on about not being able to get a laugh or a root.
Mark Williamson
@MWChatShow
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Haircut
A self-portrait of Lissitzky from 1924
Tracy next door to the Silver Tree Bookshop gave me a haircut on Friday. We chatted about ceramics, Tracy as it turned out is a member of the Broken Hill Potters Society. The conversation reminded me of my old interests in The St Ives School of artists. I mentioned Barbara Hepworth and Bernard Leach. Tracy mentioned she preferred building rather than pottery, I suggested she look up Sarah Dunstan’s work for inspiration.
I was reminded of my previous obsessions with ideas of those dynamic art movements of the 20th century. I was fascinated by the manifesto’s written in the ruins of war and revolution. The artists and thinkers optimistically offering ways to rebuild a better world. Sadly the world was not always listening. For example The Constructivist Naum Gabo who wrote the Realistic Manifesto built hopeful kinetic negative spaces. Most of his works were lost or destroyed by the antipathy of Stalin. Another victim of Stalin’s antipathy was arguably Lissitzky.
Nikolai Kolli’s construction of the Red Wedge in Moscows Revolutsi Square in 1918
Lissitzky (with Malevich) contributed toward the development of Suprematism.
The story enclosed herein is from my own deeply imperfect memory of this apocryphal passage by Bruce Chatwin:
Bad living conditions inflate the life of the fantastic. Berthold Lubetkin, the architect, who was a student at the Vkhutemas School, recalled for me the winter of 1918. He shared a room with sixteen other students behind the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. They ate hyacinths from window boxes; slept between joists wrapped in newspapers because they had burned the floorboards, had no blankets and no source of warmth other than a flat iron which they heated in the porter’s stove. A fellow student called Kalesnikov was unable to find a room and bored a hole in Lissitzky’s street monument The Red Wedge Invades the White Square, where he installed himself for the winter. The same Kalesnikov submitted to the school a project recalling conceptual art of 1794 or a story by Borges) for converting the earth into its own terrestrial globe by attaching a steel arc from pole to pole, on which the artist could hop off for a day and and night.
From What Am I doing Here by Bruce Chatwin; Viking Press, 1989; “George Costakis: The Story of An Art Collection In The Soviet Union”
As an aside, I read somewhere that Lissitzky was so disfavoured by Stalin’s regime that he had to shelter inside Nikolai Kolli’s hastily constructed plywood construction of The Red Wedge.
Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge 1919
Sleeping in the Red Wedge during a bitter Moscow winter no doubt exacerbated to Lissitzky’s tuberculosis which he eventually died from (if the story is true!). Sadly in later life he spent his time producing soviet propaganda art. The idealism of Suprematism left behind in the practicalities of surviving in Soviet Russia?
Anyway Tracy gave me a good haircut, she invited me to join the Potters Society.
I’ll think about it.
NOTE: The above post has been heavily edited as I navigate my dodgy memory.
I think this sums it up
The Upside Down: That’s The Way to Do It!
Long ago, when I was a student, I found myself directing the summer production at my college. It was my first time directing anything and a combination of youthful arrogance and a visceral dislike of student drama led me to attempt a commedia dell’arte.
For more than 300 years, from the 16th to the 18th Centuries, this anarchic, improvised style of Italian comedy had dominated the makeshift stages and marketplaces of Europe.
It worked better than any of us expected – my basic script offered plenty of opportunities for the cast to improvise and, by the end of the week, we’d begun to feel that odd alchemy that only the laughter of an audience induces.
But by far the biggest laughs and the sharpest intakes of breath were elicited by the episodes involving Pulcinella, his wife, and their unlucky baby.
Pulcinella, the hook-nosed, hunch-backed, cunning bumpkin of the commedia, is, of course, the ancestor of the English puppet, Mr Punch.
The episodes I wrote combined violent slapstick with surreal existentialist monologues; the two actors (and baby doll) and plenty of high-pitched squealing did the rest. On five warm summer evenings, the sinister, liberating energy of Mr Punch carried all before it.
The transformation of Pulcinella into Mr Punch happened in the late 17th Century, with Samuel Pepys recording in 1662 that he had seen an Italian puppet play in London’s Covent Garden that was “very pretty”.
Pulcinella soon became Punchinello, and his companion Joan transformed into Judy (one theory is that ‘Judy’ sounds better when spoken through the swazzle – a device comprising two pieces of metal wrapped in cotton tape that produces Punch’s characteristic cackling kazoo-like voice).
The marionettes evolved into hand puppets so that a single person – the Professor or Punchman – could mount a performance on their own.
By the mid-19th Century, the red-and-white striped booths were a staple in most English street fairs and seaside promenades. But the traditional ‘Punch and Judy Show’, although now mostly staged for children, didn’t start out that way.
From the beginning, Punch was cast as a peculiarly violent species of everyman: deformed, unmasculine in his speech, put upon but cunning, and lethal with his slapstick. He kills first his own baby; then Judy his wife; is unfaithful with Pretty Polly; flouts the law by battering a policeman; tricks Jack Ketch the hangman into hanging himself; and in his final encounter with the Devil, who is ominous in his silence, he either triumphs or is cast into hell.
It’s a peculiar sequence to adopt as a national drama and has always annoyed those who feel that domestic violence, misogyny, and sexual incontinence aren’t fit subjects for popular entertainment.
Charles Dickens, a man who knew a lot about what people liked, disagreed. “In my opinion, the street Punch is one of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life which would lose its hold upon the people if it were made moral and instructive,” he wrote. “It is possible, I think, that one secret source of pleasure very generally derived from this performance… is the satisfaction the spectator feels in the circumstance that likenesses of men and women can be so knocked about, without any pain or suffering.”
This is true as far as it goes, but there is definitely the shadow of real pain and suffering that hangs over the character – and this is what makes Punch such a powerful and popular archetype.
He is the hero of his own show; he usually wins; we root for him. But, like all tricksters, there is a darkness or even an emptiness at his heart which repels as much as it fascinates.
In his brilliant Mister Punch, the poet David Harsent presents a Punch who might be both a rapist and serial killer, haunted by nightmares; both perpetrator and victim. He introduces his 1984 volume with a quote from Carl Jung: “The wounded wounder is the agent of healing.”
It is this uneasy paradox that animates Harrison Birtwhistle’s astonishingly violent one-act opera Punch and Judy (1968), Neil Gaiman and David McKean’s pitch-dark graphic novel The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch (2006), and even XTC’s council estate mini-drama Punch & Judy (1982).
My favourite modern deployment of the Punch archetype occurs in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), a dystopian novel set in an England of the far-future after a nuclear holocaust. In this harsh and violent world, a version of the Punch and Judy Show has become the state religion. Riddley, the main character, uses the broken-down language of the novel to perfectly skewer the fascination of Punch – “a character so old he can never die” according to Hoban: “Why is Punch crookit? Why wil he all ways kil the babby if he can? Parbly I wont never know its jus on me to think on it.”
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Pub Trivia Answer Secretly Changed
A shire pub trivia player has admitted to secretly changing the answer to a question before handing over her team’s answer sheet for marking at the end of the round.
“Carol has brought this new guy along who insists that Geneva is the capital city of Switzerland and it was easier just to agree with him and cross the answer out when he went to the bar rather than argue with the prick,” said Marilyn Bartlefrere, designated answer writer for Taren Point pub trivia team Camillas In The Mist. “The worry is that he was so confident about Geneva that I’m now concerned that some of the other answers that he was so sure about might also be wrong. Maybe Nigel isn’t the name of Mandrake the Magician’s evil twin brother?”
“Pub trivia teams are a complex society and the arrival of a newcomer, especially one who challenges the authority of the dominant answerer, can be very disruptive,” said Professor Davis Meharry, head researcher of trivia team anthropology at Sydney University. “To avoid conflict, the dominant answerer will often allow the challenger to supply the answer to a question that he or she is not too sure about themselves. In this case I observed that Ms Bartlefrere allowed the newcomer the satisfaction of saying that the song ‘Safety Dance’ was performed by The Pookah Makes Three when she herself was uncertain of the answer.”
“I’m not competitive at all and love playing pub trivia just for the fun of it,” said new team member Tony Woodroffe. “Then again, I don’t see the point of writing down obviously wrong answers such as when Marilyn wanted to put down that Marconi invented radio when everyone knows it was Thomas Edison. She is cute though. I wonder if she’s single.”
* Bern is the capital of Switzerland. Mandrake the Magician does have an evil twin brother called Derek. Men Without Hats sung Safety Dance. Alexander Graeme Bell invented the radio.
Peter Green
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Why Do Trigger Warnings Make People So Cross?
During a recent interview for Laura Kuenssberg's Sunday morning BBC show, Ralph Fiennes – esteemed actor, director, and producer of both film and theatre – currently starring in a production of Macbeth, was asked about trigger warnings and whether he felt audiences have gone "too soft".
“I think they have, yes," he responded.
"There are very disturbing scenes in Macbeth, terrible murders and things,” he said, with Kuenssberg pointing out that their use had been ‘banned’ from the current production, “but I think the impact of theatre should be that you’re shocked and you should be disturbed. I don’t think you should be prepared for these things. And when I was young, we never had trigger warnings.”
A week later on Kuenssberg's Sunday morning show, actor Matt Smith was asked for his take and enthusiastically agreed. “I worry sometimes that we’re moving towards a sort of sanitised version of everything and we’re stripping the danger and the invention and the ingenuity out of everything,” said Smith, himself currently starring in the West End in An Enemy of the People. “Isn’t art meant to be dangerous?”
It is tempting to dismiss Fiennes’ comments as simply those of another grumpy, entitled older white man feeling threatened by something which barely affects him, particularly when they appear to invoke the idea that simply because something didn’t happen when he was young, that it must be innately bad. But does he and Smith have a point?
Clearly, on the face of it, they do.
Their points about the need, and the right, of art to challenge its audience are perfectly valid and, as high-profile performers, they may feel duty-bound to use their platforms to defend the right of the arts to do this.
But are trigger warnings really the thing the arts need protecting from?
Firstly, we need to be clear what it is we’re actually talking about here.
There seems to be a conflation in many people’s minds between trigger warnings and censorship. Of course censorship is the enemy of art, but this is not what we’re talking about.
A trigger warning doesn’t dictate or censor the content of any play, film or exhibit. Nobody is sitting at the side of a stage with a red felt tip and putting a giant X through huge swathes of dialogue because they might upset members of the audience. They are simply there to make the audience aware of anything that may otherwise have forced them to unexpectedly relive a past trauma.
As an example, I’ve never been the victim of sexual assault, but someone sat with or near me may have been, and if that is depicted on stage, then I’d want them to have been able to have had the opportunity to make an informed decision about whether to view such content beforehand.
Surely any reasonable person would want the same? In this instance, the trigger warning isn’t aimed at me and its presence has absolutely no impact on me. But it may have proved helpful to someone else.
Fiennes and Smith’s points about theatre, and art in general, having the right to be confrontational and dangerous, and to make its audience uncomfortable, are indisputable. But trigger warnings aren’t there to prevent this. If anything, they provide performers with more freedom to tackle difficult and challenging subject matter, in the full knowledge that the audience has been forewarned.
In real terms, it is hard to discern any meaningful difference between trigger warnings and the British Board of Film Classification certificates we’ve all been used to for decades.
Broadening the issue beyond the theatre into a wider cultural context, there is a genuine, grown-up discussion to be had around this.
A recent screening of Mel Brooks’ classic comedy Blazing Saddles on HBO Max drew ire due to a lengthy pre-screening content warning in which film expert Jacqueline Stewart described not only the frequent racist language in the script, but also the film’s plot and themes, even some spoilers.
While the reaction to this in some quarters was predictably hysterical, it was hard to watch without feeling talked down to. No audience wants to feel like they are being lectured or, worse, infantilised.
But examples like this are the exception rather than the norm.
An A4 sign in the lobby of a theatre describing any potentially triggering content isn’t going to hamper the enjoyment of anyone. In fact, most people probably won’t even notice it, because they aren’t actively on the lookout for it. But they may prove to be a useful tool for the small number of people who are actively looking for such a sign.
That’s all they really are, a useful tool, one which most people probably won’t feel the need to use.
Being upset about the presence of trigger warnings is a bit like being upset by the presence of disabled toilets – if you don’t need them, then they’re not aimed at you. Ignore them, and enjoy the rest of your evening, and let those that need them make use of them as they see fit.
Fiennes spoke for barely a minute about trigger warnings over the course of his nine-minute interview on Kuenssberg's show. Aside from that topic, he talked about his anger over plans to build an energy hub in the Suffolk countryside for twice as long, and became far more animated and impassioned, almost jumping out of his seat to make his point. If you watched the interview, you got the impression that this issue was far more important to him than the one that has been generating the most headlines.
Their brief remarks about trigger warnings have been almost the only things reported that they said – and it’s hard to surmise that this is for any other reason than the fact that they can be portrayed as divisive.
Comments about energy hubs or underfunding of the arts and rocketing ticket prices – the latter two both far more pressing issues which Fiennes also spoke about – simply don’t give as good copy, and can’t be used to stoke the culture war.
An update to Arts Council England’s policies warning organisations it funds to be wary of “overtly political or activist statements”, which came just days after Fiennes’ interview, is likely to be of far more concern to artists and patrons.
There are many things threatening the future of the arts in the UK, but trigger warnings are not one of them.
NSW Police Look Forward To Spending The Weekend Strip Searching Swifties
NSW Police have announced to the press how they look forward to spending the weekend making the State safer, by strip searching all the young Swifties attending Taylor Swifts upcoming shows in Homebush.
”For a lot of young Sydney siders Taylor Swift will be the first concert that they’ve been strip searched at,” said a Police Spokesperson. ”Since the courts stopped us from attending Wiggles concerts..”
”’To all the young Swifties don’t get upset or nervous, just Shake It Off. Unless of course you are carrying in which case be prepared for a Cruel Summer.”
When asked why NSW police still insisted on using strip searches as part of their methods of dealing with concert goers, the Spokesperson said: ”We’re not monsters, we do use gloves after all.”
”Besides, if you’ve got nothing to hide then what’s to be afraid of?”
”We’ve all seen naked butts before.”
”Now, if you’ll excuse me, Barnaby Joyce is in town and I need to be a part of his police escort.”
Mark Williamson
@MWChatShow
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Music in Schools: A Plea
If you went to a state school in the 20th Century and had an interest in or aptitude for music, the chances are you went to a Saturday morning music school run by your local authority, played in your county youth orchestra, band or other ensemble, participated in one of its choirs, and received specialist tuition (often free) in playing or singing.
Like tens of thousands of others, my siblings, cousins, and I all benefited from the Oxfordshire County Music Service. At one point there were five Goodalls in the orchestra. Some of the County Music Services were world class, but even the smaller ones offered a safety-net provision for children who wanted to play instruments, whether or not the local authority school they individually attended had a flourishing music department of its own.
After the change of government in 2010, these services were transformed into 'Hubs'. Part of the rationale for this was that young people’s experience of and engagement in music, in the new century, was itself changing and it was felt that providers from outside the classical orchestral tradition could add a new dimension to the offer. There was a political aspect to the change, too.
Under then Education Secretary Michael Gove from 2010 onwards, the Government’s policies moved to loosen local authorities’ grip on schooling at an accelerated pace, with the diverting of funds earmarked under Labour for the rebuilding, maintenance and renovation of all schools, to the setting up of so-called ‘free schools’ that would answer only to the Secretary of State, in effect independent but taxpayer-funded.
So it was with the replacement of County Music Services to the Hubs which followed a hybrid model, combining local authority involvement (or not) with private sector organisations, businesses and some musical charities.
The mantra that state-provided services were always necessarily worse than anything the private sector could offer reshaped government policy (see also: public utilities and infrastructure, social housing etc.). The Hubs came into existence and set about their task, by and large, with aplomb.
Then, in June 2022, the Government announced its intention to reduce the number of Music Hubs nationally from 116 (roughly analogous to the county music service network they replaced) to 43, effective this year, in April, theoretically. This came after, and in direct contradiction of, consultation in the sector and analysis of the data received from the Hubs over their 10-year existence that this would be the worst of all given options for a restructuring of the network.
In the final year of the last Labour Government, funding for the County Music Services ran at £82 million annually, a figure that the incoming Coalition Government pledged to match, which it nearly did (£79 million) – a figure that remains today. Yet £80 million in 2010 is equivalent to £120 million in 2024, so the continued grant of £79 million is not only, in real terms, a significant cut, but the Government is now asking, for this same £79 million, for 43 Hubs to do the work and reach of the 116.
There is not one shred of evidence that the slimming down of the provision network will improve anything. The reduction of Hubs is a cost-cutting exercise dressed up as rationalisation. Nothing about this change will help a single child’s participation in music, though much in the National Plan for Music Education, of which it was a part, was welcomed, outlining as it did a strong case for musical opportunities and pathways to be made available to all children in English schools.
The transforming of the County Music Services into Hubs coincided with Gove’s radical overhaul of the national curriculum at the Department for Education. Gove was warned by almost everyone involved in cultural education that his pet project – what became the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) – would decimate creative subjects in state schools. His department ignored this advice (he and Dominic Cummings haughtily described the educators who challenged their reforms as "the Blob") and went ahead with the five-subject scheme.
Sure enough, since its introduction (and that of its bedfellow, Progress 8 assessment), the uptake of GCSE Music has dropped from 7% of the overall cohort to 4% of the cohort. The drop at 'A’ Level Music is of a similar magnitude. Ditto other arts subjects. These are stark figures.
We are heading, at this rate, back to the situation in the early 1960s when only 5,000 children annually took 'O’ Level Music, virtually all of them in grammar and private schools. The huge steps in access and opportunity in the arts for young people that took place thereafter, especially between 1997-2009, which included funding of new resources and classroom teaching of music technology, have been put into reverse.
Why does it matter how many children take music or music technology as a classroom subject, if they can play in an orchestra or sing in a choir, politicians ask (Gove said this to me at a lunch in 2009 before he did all this).
The reason it matters is that, unlike in independent schools, which can afford members of staff to run extra-curricular musical activities whether or not they teach classes, state schools, by and large, fund teachers according to the numbers of children studying a subject in publicly examined classroom subjects. If you are at a school with few or no children taking GCSE or 'A’ Level music, there simply won't be the staff to organise and run all the other myriad musical activities that every fee-paying school in the country considers essential to attract parents.
If you rank schools by results, as state schools are by Ofsted, according to how well you deliver the five EBacc subjects, giving scant or no recognition to everything else a school might offer, you will inevitably see a decline in ‘non-essential' subjects.
What happened to music education between 2010 and 2022 was a root-and-branch dismantling of a model that expected schools to include music just as they would any other subject.
Historically, there were two types of music education offered in advanced economies in the post-war period. Three, if you include Finland (but Finland is so far ahead on its own in educational enlightenment and high standards that it’s unfair to compare it to other countries).
On the one hand, for example, Germany and France, have not traditionally offered much music inside non-specialist secondary schools but created well-resourced music schools in every town or neighbourhood for use at weekends, and after school, with highly subsidised or even free tuition. These local centres also offer the opportunity to be part of ensembles or choirs.
The UK, on the other hand, developed a different tradition where music in schools would involve the option of studying the subject in class to GCSE/'A’ Level and also a range of extra-curricular musical opportunities on site. Many states in the US persist with this model too, where you would expect considerable musical endeavour to be going on in a high school without the need for children to look for these activities elsewhere.
The County Music Service network was set up specifically to support and enlarge what individual state schools in the UK offered, not to replace provision in schools. Most if not all children accessing the County Music Services network did so through their schools.
The National Plan of 2022 intended to change the dynamic of this arrangement so that the Hubs would now be wholly responsible for ensuring schools in their area complied with the check list of requirements the Government expected them to provide for their students. No additional funding was found to pay for this considerable new burden of responsibility, and the plan's stipulation that schools in England teach all five to 14-year-olds one hour of music a week has no statutory enforcement, nor are there any sanctions for schools' failure to comply.
The Conservatives’ agenda seems to be to hand over the state’s responsibility for music education to independent organisations, outside schools, but with a decreasing level of funding so to do. This feels like a recipe for further decline in music as a classroom subject or extra-curricular activity in any school that does not right now have an outstanding music department, well supported by its senior leadership team.
What worries me about all this is that it is a no-brainer for a fee-paying school to offer plentiful access to musical engagement for its students. It is assumed that parents want this for their children and that there are huge benefits for a learning community that has plenty of music going on within it.
So why must it be such a struggle for the same assumption not to underpin a government providing a rounded education to the children in its care in state schools? Why is it always a matter of how cheaply it can be done? Why can't 93% of our children in state schools receive the same musical offering that the 7% children in private schools take for granted? If it's a good thing for the 7% it's a good thing for the 93%, is it not?
The signal from the Government, time and time again, is that creative subjects are non-essential. Which is weird for a country that has congratulated itself, for the past 40 years at least, for being the world’s second-biggest provider of music after America.
There is now a drastic shortage of teachers in arts subjects. The Department for Education met only 27% of its target for newly-trained music teachers last year. ’Please come and teach a subject we don't value, nor will your school get Ofsted credits for you offering excellent music’ is not exactly the welcoming slogan to a career in music teaching they may think it is.
Headteachers are already under enormous pressure, financially, and may be tempted by governmental uninterest to see reducing musical facilities as a way of saving costs in hard times. Some may think, erroneously, the Hubs will have new money to do the job for them.
Rishi Sunak recently revealed his back-of-an-envelope priority for education – that all children up to the age of 18 should take mathematics. It is an idea that seems detached from our current, urgent reality. How will it address our shortages of health workers, revive our hospitality sector, solve the food security crisis unfolding across the agricultural landscape? How do we avert the worst effects of environmental catastrophe?
All of the above will require ingenuity, teamwork, imaginative thinking, resourcefulness – how are those qualities taught and acquired? How do we help young people to be more open-minded, creative, and community-minded in a period of enormous insecurity and social dislocation? To question, explore, take risks? To perform, to be more confident, to think differently, and to value difference? How do we improve young people’s well-being and mental health?
One answer to these questions is engagement with music and the other arts, from a young age, as part of a rounded, transferable-skills-orientated education. I am pretty sure extending any individual subject, however laudable in its own right, is not the cure. Sunak reinforces the notion that there are ‘essential’ school subjects, and the rest are add-ons, luxuries, agreeable perks.
And, if his idea was solely about our economic future, then riddle me this: what percentage of ‘mathematical’ jobs currently undertaken by accountants and fund managers will be replaced by artificial intelligence in the next 20 years – 80%? 90%?
I’ve met several Conservative MPs who were enthusiastic supporters of the arts in general and of music education being available to young people in particular. They have gone deathly quiet in recent years. Perhaps they were removed in the Great Brexit Purge of 2019. Perhaps they are afraid of being slapped down by libertarian asset-strippers and ultra-nationalist populists, now ascendant in their party, who think the words of Rule, Britannia! or statues of slavers are what constitute our country’s ‘culture’.
In recent years, we have had to listen to a Deputy Prime Minister no less, Dominic Raab, snobbishly mocking Angela Rayner for going to the opera to see Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, and a constant stream of disdainful, ill-informed 'culture warriors’ who cannot conceal their distaste for the people who make art and the institutions, like the BBC, that nourish it.
Britain’s two biggest and most essential exporting industries, by a wide margin, financial and creative, were two sectors conspicuously left out of Lord David Frost’s Trade and Cooperation Agreement withdrawal deal with the EU. For us, in music, that shoddy, negligent negotiation led to a 'no deal’ Brexit. How valued we felt. By our own Government. It fits a pattern that has emerged in the last decade of neglect, bordering on contempt.
A lot of hope in the music and education worlds is being pinned on an incoming Labour government, enhanced by the fact that the Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Thangam Debbonaire, is herself an accomplished musician.
Both she and Labour Leader Keir Starmer have spoken forthrightly about the need to restore music and other arts to their place in schools in England and Wales. The weight of expectation on a new government, if elected, will be to find quick fixes to problems that have been years, or even decades, in the making, with a gigantic national debt and public sector funding crises everywhere you look. Right now, there are nine million children of school age in England, and the current funding for music services that support them in school, the Hubs, get £79 million a year from government. That’s less than £9 per child, per year.
Don’t our children deserve better than this?
Music Fans In Uproar As ‘Bound For Botany Bay’ Wins Hottest 100 Of 1788
Music fans throughout the colony of New South Wales have gone into an absolute snit of complaint after the catchy ballad Bound For Botany Bay took out first place in the Triple J Hottest 100 for 1788
“I’ve never heard such a boring collection of bland-arse sea shanties in my life,” wrote blogger Watkin Tench. “I was really hoping that On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand by Samuel Stennett would make the top ten but I guess Triple J listeners no longer go in for those edgy hymns like they used to.”
“There seemed to be a lot less home grown acts this year,” tweeted local music aficionado Benelong. “And what’s with all this tooralie ooralie bullshit? Though I’m glad to see a few opera numbers managed to make the list. I like opera.”
There were the usual complaints about too many jigs and not enough bawdy drinking songs. The highest ranking female performer was Madonna whose pop song Holiday came in at number 45.
“I have to admit I’m more a fan of 1750s string quartets,” said governor Arthur Phillip. “I didn’t recognise any of the tunes in the top ten and had to get a convict fiddler to play them all for me.”
After listening to the full broadcast, Governor Phillip has decreed that any convict caught whistling a Lana Del Ray melody will be flogged and put on half rations.
Peter Green
http://www.twitter.com/Greeny_Peter
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‘As Soon As Comedy Feels Controlled, It Loses Its Power’: The Comedians Afraid of Lawyers
Just the idea of having lawyers pre-approve her jokes makes comedian Rosie Holt break out in a cold sweat. It’s understandable. As Holt says, “intimidation is like poison to comedy” – and legal threats are a particularly insidious form of intimidation.
“You never see them, the public never knows about them, and yet few threats are as powerful as the threat of losing all your money in a lawsuit.”
Holt is writing in the new issue of Index on Censorship, alongside her brother Charlie, a lawyer. The magazine highlights the myriad threats comedians face, from arrests in Uganda, China, Vietnam and Belarus; to comedians being killed at the hands of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The risks of a good roast landing badly – usually invoking the charge 'offence’ – are high, something we knew when we started to commission this edition. But what we didn’t expect was that some of these risks would come via lawyers. And yet there they were, lawyers, at the centre of several pieces.
In India, for example, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and others within the political establishment appear unable to take a joke, so stand-up comedians are showing scripts to lawyers before performing. “What does it take to be a stand-up comedian?" comedian Neeti Palta mused. "Quick wit, quicker legs and a lawyer on speed dial.”
The UK’s comedians do not have lawyers on speed dial (that we heard of at least). Still, fear of legal repercussions is alarmingly close.
Just say the name Louise Reay to anyone in the UK’s comedic scene and watch their reaction. In 2018, Reay mentioned her estranged husband in a show at the Edinburgh Fringe. She was then sued by him for defamation, breach of privacy, and data protection to the sum of £30,000 plus legal costs. Before the case came to an end – he dropped the charges – comedians throughout the UK were rattled.
The case "raised serious concerns about the perils of drawing on individual experience for artistic purposes,” Andrew Doyle observed. For David Baddiel, “it would be a pity if the outcome... meant that comedians’ versions of their histories would have to be constantly checked by lawyers before they could be told on stage”. Sofie Hagen confessed to legal concerns ahead of the show Dead Baby Frog, which was about her abusive grandfather.
Even in the absence of a courtroom drama, what Reay’s case highlighted was that the supposedly sacred, safe space of a dim room serving cheap drinks to a chortling crowd was not, in fact, quite so sacred or safe.
Reay’s case was personal and some may dismiss it as irrelevant to other comedians. Except comedy is often deeply personal. Mining one’s own experiences and repackaging them for comedic effect is standard practise.
Doyle has described comedians as “parasites”. "If you choose to associate with us, don’t be surprised if some of your more egregious behaviour ends up forming the basis of a routine,” he wrote as he imagined a scenario in which his exes pressed charges too.
The personal is one thing, the political another.
Plenty of sets go beyond riffing bad relatives to public interest stories riffing bad people. And thank goodness for that. In the words of Shalom Auslander, another contributor to this Index issue, comedy “masquerades as folly, but it can take down an empire”. The problem is that, today in the UK, the emperor comes with an army of lawyers.
Our courts are not in the best place, having garnered a global reputation for claimant-friendly libel and defamation laws. The rich and powerful take up lawsuits here with little to no legal merit, their only real purpose being to silence journalists and civil society players from exposing wrongdoing. It would appear comedians are no less immune. Only they’re arguably even more exposed – journalists at least have editors behind them.
“All the best comedy is either unfiltered or appears unfiltered,” said Holt in response to the idea of sets being written in the abstract. “As soon as comedy feels controlled, forced or affected it loses its power.”
In Holt’s article, she describes how, for years, comedians had been whispering about Russell Brand, who in September 2023 was accused of rape and sexual assaults (allegations he denies). Two of her friends had even included Brand in their routines. Both received threatening legal responses.
Holt said she could give countless examples of comedians having “whole passages from stand-up acts, articles or books about celebrity misconduct” scrapped due to legal concerns. Except she can’t say who. She’d be sued.
Comedians peddle in the uncomfortable and ideally take aim at those most deserving of being pilloried. Sometimes they punch up, sometimes down, sometimes sideways, sometimes inwards. Whichever direction they’re punching, fear of lawsuits will and has made some soften their blows.
A concerted effort is underway to close the loopholes that turned the UK into such an appealing place for litigation, and we can only hope the campaign for legal change wins – for comedians as much as others. To paraphrase the great American humourist Erma Bombeck: when humour goes, so too does civilisation.
Jemimah Steinfeld is the Editor-in-Chief of Index on Censorship. Editions of the magazine can be viewed here