Why comedy deserves public funding like music, theatre and dance |
The issue of funding for comedy has intensified recently, discussed from radio shows to government roundtables, but all too often presented as a series of ragebait headlines. Too frequently, these debates generate more heat than light, reducing a complex cultural and economic question to easy provocations designed to inflame rather than inform.
At the core of the problem is a lack of fundamental understanding of what comedy is, how it is created, developed and staged. The result is a reductive, one-dimensional view. Comedy is still widely perceived as effortless — the spontaneous quip, the natural wit — rather than as a disciplined craft honed through time, failure and iteration.
Central to the issue is the commonly repeated assertion that comedy is subjective, while theatre, music and visual arts are not. On the contrary, all art contains both subjective and objective elements. Personal responses to art — what we find beautiful, funny, meaningful or melodic — are inherently subjective. That is not a weakness but a strength. It allows each audience member to take what they need from a piece of work. Isn’t that the very point?
At the same time, the relevance, historical and cultural context of a work are objective, as are the technical skills and quality standards required to produce it. This is as true for comedy as it is for painting, theatre or music. There is not an absence of these objective elements in comedy rather a lack of organised, expert assessment of such. Countless further education courses teach the semiotics of theatre or the critical analysis of visual art. The absence of formal academic pathways in the study of comedy says more about institutional blind spots than it does about the rigour of the discipline itself.
This vivid........