When bad taste is no joke

ANN Winterton has a low opinion of her fellow Tories' sense of humour.

In after-dinner speeches, she expects them to find other people's miseries funny. Her latest quip wiped the smile off Michael Howard's face.

The Conservative leader sacked her for making fun of the deaths of Chinese immigrants drowned at Morecambe.

The punch-line?

Shark to hungry shark: "Fancy going to Morecambe for a Chinese?"

Political insensitivity can be refreshing in a politician, but Winterton's is a sick joke - a gag to make you gag. It's unfunny not because it's politically incorrect, because it mocks the afflicted - or in this case, the dead. It's afterdinner jollity for diners who can't tell a laugh from a belch.

Winterton is part of a depressing trend in humour.

Bad taste is breaking out all over Britain. Television screenwriters think it's cool to be cruel. The latest hot sitcom, Little Britain, ridicules the handicapped, homosexuals you name it. Julia Davis's new comedy series Nighty Night relishes the whoopee of a couple who are cheating on cancer-ridden and paraplegic partners. Current reality television makes Eurotrash seem like an arts programme.

The gutter press has swapped the gutter for the sewer. Red-top writers seem to have been educated in urinals and get their gags from the cheapest smears on the wall.

The Sun recently excelled itself by faking up a Page Three-style picture of a topless Clare Short looking old, fat, and ugly alongside a couple of characteristically meretricious, boob-bulging babes.

There's no shortage of crass celebrities, gripped by personal vanity, who ought to act their age, admit their girth, siphon out the Botox and let their wrinkles sag. They would be fair game for The Sun's photo-graffiti. But there is no point in mocking Clare Short for not being sexy. The joke fails: once again, not because it is off- colour, but because it is off-target.

Does it matter? Is it all just puerile excess - fun for the feebleminded which no one can take seriously? British humour has always had its sick side, teasing the tensions which arise from race and sex. Seaside-postcard naughtiness, What the Butler Saw,

because what they say doesn't matter. Headlines won't quote it back at them after the hangover. In the same way, office smut and schoolboy scatology are pitiable but tolerable efforts to raise a laugh.

Politicians, however, are power-seekers. Even over the after- dinner coffee cups, they always play to big audiences.

Their jokes have to stay funny in the cold light of the Today programme.

Responsibility is a peril as well as a privilege of power.

Humour is targetless when directed at the defenceless.

It's mere cruelty to mock afflictions we can do nothing about - because we're maimed or crippled or poor or deformed, let alone dead. If you want to raise a laugh at others' expense, choose victhe one about the Scotsman and the Jew: these are all part of a motley continuum. Ann Winterton - along with a few other antiquated gagsters still attracting catcalls in the shabbier kind of club - is just part of the last, decadent phase of a dying tradition in British comedy: a sad, cackhanded clown. FOR the essence of real humour is timing and judgment: get it wrong and you raise not a laugh but a groan.

Winterton's repertoire of jokes seems to have been borrowed from the stand-up racists who tour the clubs.

They can get away with it, partly because their audiences are drunk, and partly

tims who can afford it: the fat cats and celebs, the prosperous and powerful.

This doesn't mean there's no room for bad taste in comedy.

The best of bad taste is licensed by wit or deployed in the exposure of human failings.

Once, tasteless headlines were redeemed by self-mockery and outrageous wit -"One's bum year" when the Queen confessed her Christmas melancholy, "Stick it up your junta" when Galtieri invaded the Falklands. And, with careful crafting, bad taste can be sympathetic.

The Farrelly brothers have attracted politically-correct criticism for a comedy film about Siamese twins: but the predicament of Siamese twins is touching, and humour can enhance the poignancy. The real victims of the Farrellys' films are Hollywood hypocrites who turn one twin into a star by digitally erasing the other. SPEAKING of Siamese twins, here is a joke. A bloke chats up a girl. Then he realises that the stunner on the next barstool along is her Siamese twin; despite initial misgivings, he takes the girl home; her sister comes too, and you have to suspend disbelief here - plays the trombone in the bed while the happy couple round off the evening.

Next day, the sisters see the bloke on the other side of the street.

"Let's say hello," suggests one. "Nah," replies the other, "he'd never remember us." This joke is in bad taste, but, if well told, it's funny. The butt of the humour isn't the twins' affliction, but that familiar weakness: female sexual diffidence.

There is something new and disturbing in the current brutalisation of British bad taste.

Well wielded, bad taste can be deliciously destructive. Now, it seems to be losing its power along with its charm. Ann Winterton, the sick screenwriters, and other witless comedians are overdoing it to death.

There's good bad taste and bad bad taste and the British - though once paramount in the art - no longer seem to know the difference. Great Britain is becoming Gross Britain - a land of dulled minds and blunted sensibilities.

So, if you want to preserve the great British bad-taste tradition, use it sparingly and well. Don't give bad taste a bad name.

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