Has the internet killed comedy? |
The comedians have bolted. Once, they were confined to underground clubs, scheduled radio, sitcoms and panel shows. But no more. They buck across our feeds, whinny down podcasts and nuzzle our thumbs for ‘likes’.
The old stables are falling into disrepair. Television comedy is contracting. British broadcasters commissioned 41 per cent fewer scripted comedies in 2023 than the year before, making it the most in-decline scripted genre. The BBC has been retreating from comedy for a decade: its first-run comedy output fell from 225 hours in 2010 to 108 in 2022-23. As television’s doors close, comedians are being driven elsewhere.
At the end of July, the British television institution, Live at the Apollo, which launched a thousand comedy careers into the mainstream, was axed. The Friday night favourite is being laid to rest as the BBC explores ‘digital plans’.
This means short-form reels. And the move makes sense. For years, Live at the Apollo sets have been written to create clippable viral segments. They might as well cut the middleman. This practice is known as ‘clip farming’. Jokes are written to reach around a minute, and the set (and long-form video) is just there to be harvested for clicks.
In the digital era, comedy starts with a viral hook. Niche character comedy thrives on social media. ‘Five guests you’ll meet at a destination wedding’; ‘Girl with ADHD cleans her house’. The hope is that you’ll see it and think, I (me, myself) go to destination weddings where I have to meet people! I clean my house! Relatability has always been a comic asset, but like the rise in hyperreal ‘confessional’ literature, the more literal the better.
But hooking people’s attention with a minute-long video, buried among everyone else’s minute-long videos, is different from entertaining an audience in a scheduled slot. If you see comedy live, or even watch it on television, you’ve bought in – no one wants to have wasted their time or the ticket price, or to return to flicking through terrestrial channels.
Who would write a joke like the beloved Four Yorkshiremen today?
Who would write a joke like the beloved Four Yorkshiremen today?
A live Monty Python performance of the beloved Four Yorkshiremen sketch runs to just over three minutes. Four wealthy Yorkshiremen trade stories about their deprived upbringings, each more absurd than the last, satirising the tendency of older generations to exaggerate how hard things were ‘back then’. The first proper laugh arrives at 1:15: ‘Oh, we used to dream of living in a corridor.’ Everything before is groundwork. The sketch becomes funnier through repetition and escalation, continually rewarding the audience for its attention. But it starts small. Who would write a joke like that today?
Finlay Christie is a Gen Z comedian who has never had trouble with the algorithm. His sharp observations about white people who seek cultural validation and spot-on impressions of national treasures, such as David Mitchell, have earned him hundreds of thousands of followers across Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
Finlay has a........