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Sorry, but that really isn't funny, Johnny...

Jackie Clune
Sunday May 4, 2008
The Observer

Stand-up comedy, like rape, is mostly about power. No wonder men dominate it. A good comic, even a really gentle, seemingly chummy one, comes on stage with all the inner swagger of a confident sexual conquerer. Make no mistake, they have come to win us over, make us submit to their comedic world. That's the joy of it. The lexicon of comedy is by its very nature combative, and the language comics use to describe their performances is often adversarial - at a good gig they 'stormed it', they 'killed', and at a bad gig they 'died'. It's us or them. Always. There can only be one winner. The audience is there to be 'taken' - a metaphor that became all too real for a young woman at a recent Johnny Vegas gig.
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Vegas, well known and loved for his shambolic and spontaneous stage persona, came on stage (at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London) in his normal bitter and emasculated, pissed-up state and proceeded to select a giggling woman from the audience to molest. He press-ganged six other members of the audience into carrying her aloft on to the stage, and told her she was to act dead so that he could kiss her back to life again. He then stroked her breasts, warning her that if she moved he would kick her in the ribs. He lifted up her skirt, pinned her down and kissed her, and some reports even suggest he touched her in a very intimate way. She, by all accounts, looked nervous, unsure and shocked, although she never said 'Stop' or expressed any overt extreme discomfort. Many of the audience roared with laughter. But since the gig a number of the people who saw the show have sought to retract their tacit approval of Vegas's actions, claiming that they found it vile, ing and inappropriate. An abuse of power by a household name.
There has been a small flurry of media interest and a storm of blogs and comedy message-board postings fiercely debating the nature of the incident - was it a transgression too far? Did Vegas cross the invisible line? Should there be a line in comedy? At what point does audience participation become abuse? Was it misogynist? Clumsy? A searing comment on the desperate loneliness and disempowerment of 21st-century masculinity?

My response to the whole affair is tempered by the fact that I wasn't there, but that needn't preclude me from being fascinated by what the reportage has thrown up. As a sometime comedian, a feminist and an ex-academic the discussion has intrigued me.

As a performer and a lover of taboo-breaking comedy I found myself laughing at the description of the night. I've seen Johnny Vegas many times and remember with great fondness the Bacchanalian carnival atmosphere of his often wholly improvised gigs. One particularly memorable show involved Johnny deciding to sing 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' to the audience. For about 20 minutes. Half the audience joined in and the other half bottled him. The dogged way in which he dodged the missiles and continued through to his screaming finale - 'Let them know it's Christmas time!' - had me in stitches. I'm a big fan of his shuffling, disingenuous buffoonery.

As a feminist - and I flinch at the inevitable silent tut that word procures these days (offer a feminist critique of a lovable, working-class comedian? Get a life. Get a sense of humour, bitch) - I am appalled. How could I not be? It's no good invoking the popular argument that the young woman involved went to the gig freely, sat in the front row and didn't say no - that's just 'She was asking for it, M'Lud' in a theatre setting. Is it consent if you feel you would be ruining everyone's evening, and be labelled a humourless, ball-breaking cow if you got up and walked off?

As an ex-academic I am very interested in all the frustrating and often wrong-headed discussions about taste in comedy. Many comedians buy into what Freud so unamusingly posited, viz, that a good joke should act as a kind of psychological pressure valve. By saying the unsayable, doing the taboo thing, discussing the forbidden issues, a comedian releases the audience's repressed, socialised and most base responses, and is thus only giving public vent to what we all feel and think but are too ashamed to express. We laugh when someone in the front row gets picked on (it's not us), we cheer when the fat man knocks the young bird down a peg or two (wish it was that easy in real life), we secretly delight in the lynch mob baying for comedic blood (we are a pack and it feels good).

Maybe the real reason for the outcry after the gig was the fact that many of the audience members felt ashamed that they had not intervened to stop this misjudged routine. Of course there are boundaries - would an actual rape be funny? - but sometimes as an audience it is thrilling not to really know where the comic will draw the line. At the time it is easy to get swept away in the moment - that's how soldiers end up carrying out the most barbaric orders - but in retrospect it can become clear that something rather ugly has taken place, and the shame kicks in.

Vegas's gig sounds like any night at an ordinary brothel - a fat, sweaty bloke getting his jollies with a captive young woman way out of his league. Except it was he, and not she, going home with a fistful of cash.