Russell Brand has resigned from the BBC; Jonathan Ross has said sorry. And what of Tommy Tiernan and his cruel display on RTÉ, asks Fintan O'Toole
WHEN BERNARD Manning, the racist, sexist so-called comedian died last year, it seemed like the end of an era. The style of comedy embodied in Manning's corpulent frame - jokes that didn't need wit because they relied on the pleasures of hatred - had been successfully challenged by the alternative comedy movement of the 1980s. Manning had become a living anachronism long before his death and could be viewed almost as an anthropological specimen of a bygone culture.
Who could have imagined that he would so soon be reincarnated in the unlikely form of Tommy Tiernan? Anyone who witnessed Tiernan's performance on last week's Late Late Show (including, his demeanour suggested, the stand-in host Gerry Ryan) won't need to be told how grotesque it was.
For anyone fortunate enough to miss it, it is enough to know that most of his shtick consisted of putting on funny voices to imitate the way those stupid immigrants talk and the rest was essentially about mocking Travellers, or, as Tiernan insisted on calling them in a calculated gesture of contempt, "itinerants".
The details are best spared, but it is worth knowing that the height of Tiernan's invention was a comparison between his experience of riding his motorcycle and having flies crushed against his visor and that of "riding" an "itinerant". The link between these two experiences was the flies.
It was striking that Tiernan's morphing into Bernard Manning roughly coincided with the extraordinary incident in which two other men who have been in and around the stand-up comedy circuit, Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, harassed a 78-year-old man for laughs on the former's BBC Radio 2 show.
In this case, the wit consisted of Ross and Brand leaving a message on the answer-phone of the actor Andrew Sachs, part of which was Ross's Wildean epigram: "He f****d your granddaughter" and Brand's brilliant sally: "I wore a condom".
These men are not stupid. Tiernan can be brilliantly inventive and genuinely edgy. Ross is clearly a very smart man and often comes across as a sensitive bloke. I've never found Brand remotely funny, but it's obvious that he has real skill with language.
So why is Tiernan reduced to stuff that functions on a level barely above that of the Nazi magazine Die Stürmer? Why do multimillionaire media stars like Ross and Brand think it's funny to make obscene phone calls to an elderly man about his granddaughter, displaying a preening idiocy that would embarrass a 14-year-old boy boasting to his friends about an invented snog? When did alternative comedy become an alternative, not just to comedy, but to basic human decency?
What we're seeing, I think, is the working out of the paradox that art needs boundaries. Modern stand-up, from Lenny Bruce onwards, took pride in pushing against the existing boundaries of official taste, in saying the unsayable. It drew its comic energy, but also its moral force, from the breaking of taboos - about sex, race, religion and politics. That freedom of utterance, made manifest in the freeform improvisations of observational stand-up, was often thrilling because it had a genuine sense of danger.
As taboos crumble, however, the game changes. The energy of defiance has to be replaced with something else. Comedy without taboos is like cinema in the age of pornography. When you can show everything, the depiction of sex on screen becomes literal, witless and strangely unerotic. When you can say everything, the same thing happens to comedy.
Two solutions present themselves to those who can't think of anything else. One is the "I know this is not politically correct but . . ." attitude. This is basically a way of returning to the old, unfunny racist and sexist clichés while packaging attacks on the weak as acts of courageous defiance. It is Bernard Manning dressed up as Lenny Bruce. It is also despicably cowardly. Manning had the courage of his obnoxious convictions. His current reincarnations don't.
The other solution is the "I know I'm offensive, but I offend everyone equally" line. It is just as disingenuous. Even if the comedians who used it actually lived up to this claim (how often do you hear them attack, for example, rich media stars like themselves?) it would be dishonest. Offending everyone equally would be fine if everyone was equally able to take the insults.
Anyone with more social conscience than a mosquito knows that some people can take insults far easier than others. Some people have to carry around a huge weight of prejudice and preconception that determines how others see them, and some people don't. Some people can answer back in kind, and some people can't.
Mockery of some groups might be funny because those groups are usually accorded excessive respect.
Mocking Travellers and immigrants is unfunny because it is merely dressing up as comedy the tired and stupid truisms that you can hear from a taxi driver any time your luck is out.
The smartest contemporary comedy, on the other hand, revels in taboos. In the best recent comedy series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David placed the taboos of race, religion, money and sex right at the centre and drew exquisitely excruciating humour from the doomed efforts of the anti-hero to get through that minefield without causing another explosion. David was able to probe the most sensitive spots in the American code of manners because the ultimate butt of the joke was himself.
It would be nice to think that Tommy Tiernan could take a good look at himself on the Late Late and find a genuine object of mockery in his own descent into the trough of cruel stupidity.