Russell Brand and Harassment Comedy

Russell Brand was part of a toxic 2000s trend in British and UK Comedy

My father is a better human being than me and so has always disliked prank comedy. I remember chortling away to Trigger Happy TV as Dom Jolly chased some beleaguered passer-by down the street or screamed about murdering people on a giant over-sized telephone, and he would walk out of the room saying that he didn’t see what was funny about bullying people.

When, last week, the (utterly, grimly unsurprising) accusations against Russell Brand broke, I was struck uncomfortably by a line in a powerful, short article in the Atlantic by Sophie Gilbert:

The Dispatches documentary shows him pulling his trousers down while sitting on a female interviewee’s lap, and running down the street after a man in urine-soaked underwear asking for a “cuddle,” among other antics—employing blatant, aggressive sexuality as his defining comedic mode.

As a teenager and early-20-something who found a lot of social conventions confusing and irritating, I was in love with the idea that comedy was about breaking boundaries by making people uncomfortable. I was, predictably, a massive fan of both Chris Morris and The League of Gentleman, always ready to defend the more offensive jokes in both with reference to the importance of transgression in comedy. Stewart Lee put out a Radio 4 documentary on the Mexican tradition of the pueblo clowns who would turn the moral norms of their village on their heads for the day and throw small children into the river. As such, when his comedic partner Richard Herring force-fed a small child golden grahams in This Morning with Richard Not Judy or else told a 16-year-old girl to take his trout sperm, calling her a “trout whore”, this was part of a legitimate carnivalesque tradition and not bullying or harassment.

Of course, as Herring pointed out on stage, if he said what he said on stage to a 16-year-old child in the street, he’d be arrested. As Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker’s 2005 sitcom Nathan Barley repeatedly pointed out, just putting post-ironic scare quotes around something doesn’t magically transform it into being morally okay.

At that point in my life, I wouldn’t have made a distinction between the viewer who opted to be made uncomfortable sat in the comfort of their home or, say, Chris Morris tricking Claire Rayner into talking about beating him off. After all, like Herring’s audience member, she’d consented to appear on Brass Eye. Likewise, the homeless guy who Vernon Chatman mimed fellatio on with a puppet in Wonder Showzen… or the woman Johnny Vegas assaulted on stage at the Bloomsbury theatre… or David Walliams exposing teenagers' genitals and assaulting them on stage during the early Little Britain tours…

I was in a improv comedy troupe at this time at university. While we never did anything as egregious on stage as Williams or Vegas, we would regularly get audience members up on stage and when we did this a large amount of what we (predictably, largely male) performers would try to do to elicit laughs from the audience was to say things to make the audience member feel uncomfortable. A common game (found in countless university and college improv troupe show) was “park bench” in which the audience member would sit on a chair and a parade of performers would sit next to them and invariably play some kind of weirdo, creep or undesirable and say something weird, creepy or undesirable.

Female members of the troupe would have to write their own article about their experiences, but certainly a lot of our comedy from that time makes me cringe at best in retrospect and feel genuine shame at worst.

A lot of the discourse around power dynamics in comedy over the last decade has focused on punching up or punching down… but I think that is only part of the story. The numerous times we made white blokes (and occasionally non-white blokes and women) on stage feel uncomfortable weren’t okay (or funny) because they were white blokes. Part of the question is 1.) Which social taboos are worth shattering in comedy? and 2.) Is the target structural or individual? I would argue that much of The Day Today is more successful as satire than the celebrity-baiting parts of Brass Eye because they manage to hilariously critique media discourses - whereas Brass Eye at its worst only shows that some celebrities are/were individually pillocks.

Now, this is not an issue of punching up or punching down! I have zero sympathy for either Bernard Manning or Rolf Harris - they are/were far removed from Claire Rayner, let alone the young lads in the Little Britain audience - but the parts involving them in the show always felt in comedic bad faith to me… or, at the very least, a little below the brilliance Morris was capable of. They’re the thin-end of the wedge with Vegas’ and Walliams’ routines at the other end (and Herring’s, who I have a lot of time for, somewhere in the middle, alongside my university troupe’s stupider material). All of it, however, is clearly not okay.

I’d like to say this trend in comedy stopped at the end of the 2000s, but it didn’t. Eric André has got away with much the same of much of the above, harassing or borderline assaulting both audience members and celebrities and framing it as stoner comedy DADA. When Sam Pepper faced a massive online backlash over his “fake hand groping” prank comedy video back in 2014 it occured to me that he would have faced little-to-no backlash just ten or even five years earlier.

Perhaps even more insidious is when the comedy is framed as art, which seems to allow the performer to really step up their level of harassment. Comedian Kim Noble has received rave reviews for years across the Broadsheet press for his performance art style shows which involve him covertly filming an elderly vulnerable naked old man as he’s given a shower, getting arrested for stalking his ex-girlfriend, injecting his bodily fluid into women’s products at a supermarket etc. etc. etc. I can’t help but feel like if de Sade was alive today and filmed himself committing his abuses while vaguely gesturing towards his actions being ironic The Guardian would be giving him 5* reviews.

And the thing is, you can write and perform transgressive, bounary-pushing and shocking comedy without having to accuse harass or assault anyone! Unsurprisingly perhaps, women manage it all the time! Maria Bamford has been doing it for decades. Julia Davis’ and Vicki Pepperdine’s podcast Dear Joan and Jericha is regularly more offensive that Derek & Clive but doesn’t require Peter Cook making Dudley Moore cry about his dead dad!

A lot of the male comedians listed above have improved their acts as they’ve grown older. Richard Herring today would no longer delight in being inappropriate towards young audience members in the same way he used to; Chris Morris’s films are far more thoughtful and nuanced than the prank comedy parts of his Radio 1 show. Both are smart artists and hardly unforgivable. It would be wrong to suggest they’re the same as Russell Brand. While the comedy troupe I belonged to at uni was funnier than neither Morris or Herring, we were also not, I believe, predatory creeps like Brand. However, I hope the young male comedians of today have more sense and respect for their audiences than we did.