In a commendably shameless attempt to promote their comedy slate, the good folk over at Sky recently conducted a survey of 2,000 great Britons to find out when the last time was that they, ie we, had laughed out loud. Their findings were no laughing matter: “42% of Brits admitted that they cannot remember the last time they laughed out loud, with 32% of those surveyed believing they haven’t as much as giggled in the last month.”
Laughter, merriment: it’s a serious business. It brings immense health benefits: it helps relax the body, boost the immune system, release endorphins (our natural feelgood chemicals) and burn calories. Laughter may even help you live longer. If I were confident it would not inspire this government to dream up further budget cuts, I’d max out and say laughter could ease pressure on the NHS.
So where are we supposed to turn for humour in such straitened times?
Laughter is, in the main, closely associated with happiness. But it can be linked to adversity and misery; a need to defend one’s sanity.
A 2011 Gallup poll found Nigeria, a place plagued with problems but home to highly motivated and progress-driven people, to be the happiest nation on Earth. Two sayings you regularly hear in Nigeria may help explain this: the self-explanatory “if I don’t laugh, I will cry”, and “I can’t come and kill myself”. This is not about self-harm; it simply means “you shouldn’t over-stress yourself about things that are not going well”. Might as well laugh at it. This laughter is omnipresent in places such as Lagos and Abuja, in a way that it is not always in, say, London and Aberdeen. Perhaps we Britons have something to learn from the Nigerians in, as Fela Kuti put it, looking and laughing, at finding hilarity in misery and decline.
We might laugh, without spelling it out in full, at the “B-word”. In democratically choosing to erect an imaginary wall in the Channel, Britain joined an elite group of nations that have sanctioned themselves into economic peril. How could you not find the funnies in the fact that the sanctions we inadvertently placed on ourselves turned out to be more effective than the sanctions much of the west placed on Russia?
The fallacies, fortunes and forays back into politics of failed prime ministers (that is, prime ministers who failed us) could be a source of immense hilarity. In 2009 Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, suggested that the £250,000 a year he received for his second job as a newspaper columnist was “chicken feed”. It turns out this was no empty brag – in the months since leaving office Johnson, a moonshine Churchill whose actual full-time job is campaigning to get his old job back, has “earned” an estimated £5m in fees for writing and speaking. Meanwhile, the unstoppable Iron Lady Liz Truss, our 49-day fling, returned to politics, apparently intent on reminding people why our fling lasted only 49 days. After reading her 4,000-word excuse for trashing the economy, we can all prepare to laugh at whichever publisher shells out more than a packet of crisps for her memoirs.
With the highest electricity bills in the world we have helped ensure that those patriotic friends of the British people and the environment, the great British oil companies, are belly-laughing all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, rapidly rising interest rates in our debt-heavy nation – one in which the average person’s wealth is in mortgage-funded property ownership – means the banks are laughing at all of us.
In dead white men news, Britain’s most iconic blue-chip racist Enoch Powell, who died 25 years ago this week, may be chuckling in what he would consider hell (ie a diverse room in which he or at least someone else white does not “hold the whip hand”), as he watches his legacy supposedly disowned but then effectively upheld by some ethnic minority members of the Conservative party.
By appointing Lee Anderson as deputy chair of the Conservative party, Rishi Sunak was surely crafting his tilt at 2023 joke of the year. Sadly for Sunak, Anderson bested him, observing that the death penalty enjoys a “100% success rate” as “nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed”. Lee’s a gag machine.
We have Nadine Dorries, ululating despair on Murdoch’s TalkTV, and a Fawlty Towers reboot from anti-woke warrior John Cleese, to be set on a multiracial Caribbean island. Already that’s hilarious, in that everything about it, especially him, sounds so unfunny.
So if there is a laughter deficit, perhaps the problem is us. Pretend you’re a careworn Nigerian in Lagos, then look at Suella Braverman. OK, stop now, you’ll do yourself an injury.
Nels Abbey is a writer, broadcaster and former banker. He is the author of the satirical book Think Like a White Man
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