You tend not to associate the word "politics" with the phrase "Edinburgh fringe comedy festival", unless you're talking about the Scottish Assembly. So why am I taking my own brand of Chomsky-lite stand-up to the Edinburgh fringe this month? Political comedy is dead. The ideological battles are over. History has ended. There is no alternative. There is no conflict between the interests of workers and bosses - in fact, there aren't even workers and bosses any more.
If there's one thing comedy loves more than rigidities, authoritarian pronouncements, lies, conformity, ideologues and the views of rich people in general, it is this: a world in which everything has been sorted out lovely and we're all working together like a team. (Two fellers pouring cement together, one fat, one thin. A sunny day. Pocketing his fob-watch, the foreman sets off for lunch, happy in the knowledge that when he comes back it'll all be finished.)
Newsnight editor Peter Horrocks embraced this mood of togetherness when he told his staff in 1997: "Our job should not be to quarrel with the purpose of policy, but to question its implementation." Everything has turned out nice - even if there are still some people who don't realise that the class war is over and believe there is a conflict of interest between bosses and workers. People like the International Herald Tribune, say, whose recent jubilant front-page announced: Rise In Joblessness Delights US Markets. And BusinessWeek with its headline: Thanks, Goodbye - Amid Record Profits Companies Continue To Lay Off Employees. (Two men whistling, and the gentle rumble of an approaching steamroller.)
Everywhere people are angry, betrayed, working longer hours just to pay their bills, and hoping they never get ill or old or have kids who want to go to university. Nowadays political stand-up gets the kind of response in places like Barnstaple, Gravesend and Maidstone that five years ago you used only to get in Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester or Sheffield. In as unlikely a place as the Hampshire market town of Petersfield, for example, I noticed people were particularly angry. I'd only been on stage 10 minutes before many of them were standing up, grabbing their coats and rushing out in a seething revolutionary mass. An insurgent mob demanding money from the theatre-owners themselves!
The past 20 years have seen a rollback of a century's social progress and democracy. This presents politically involved musicians, writers, artists, film-makers and performers with a challenge: how to describe the Hydra of corporate-led globalisation. Or, to put this question strictly in terms of comedy: when the central fact of life is an unprecedented upward transfer of power and wealth from people to unaccountable private tyrannies, where da gags gonna come from?
Well, firstly you can forget about conventional satire. Lampooning politicians is inherently reactionary. By attacking individual politicians, satire implies that were it not for these few "rotten apples" - bunglers or swindlers - then the system of corporate-led globalisation itself would be just fine and dandy. John Pilger has described conventional satire as a handy safety-valve.
Satire has no fire in its belly and believes in nothing. Which is why the producer of a famous TV satire show told me that there is no such thing as poverty in Britain, nor are there "systems" or "class interests". (He then went on to moan how everyone thinks he is right-wing, but really he isn't anything.)
Satire always ends up following the news agenda and replicating its institutional biases - for example, the habit of ignoring issues to talk about power-play, intrigues and the whole wretched soap opera of Westminster gossip. (Quite apart from the fact that separate studies show that 40% of all "news" items are laundered PR messages that come from "issues management" firms like Burson Marsteller and Hill & Knowlton. )
I'm not saying that having a pop at individual politicians or CEOs is always pointless. Just that there's satire and satire. A great political comedian like Roberto Benigni never gives Fiat chariman Gianni Agnelli and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi the legitimacy those feudal lords claim for themselves. When Benigni does Agnelli's walk or Berlusconi's slow head-turn, their arch-grandiosity seems like a bubble they can go around in just so long as they never meet the real world. He gets laughs off them precisely because he shows them to be mere, witless, products of a rigged system. In Italy they call this system appartenenza; in Britain it's called the "public-private partnership". In both countries it means the same: a socialist nanny state lavishing corporate welfare on the rich and "tough love" capitalist market discipline on the poor.
Same with Michael Moore. When the people's champ gives us the dope on corporate bosses and sweatshop kings, he never presents their greed as some kind of deplorable personal trait. Moore never suggests they should be replaced by some other CEO who is less greedy. A nice CEO! A gentle robber baron! To a union-man like Moore they are part of a process of exploitation (and part of that same system that BBC "satire" producers don't believe in).
The Zapatistas define humanity as "the struggle against de-humanisation, the struggle to walk upright in a world that keeps pushing us down". This could be a description of Chaplin's Modern Times, right down to that see-saw floor of his rickety shack. Or Laurel and Hardy, or Steptoe, or Richard Pryor. The modern satirical idea, however, is somewhat different. Instead of misfits trying to conform, we have conformists trying to look rebellious.
PJ O'Rourke, Jeremy Clarkson, David Aaronovich, Richard Littlejohn, Rush Limbaugh - all these self-styled "iconoclasts" are, in fact, high-priests of dominant and fashionable orthodoxy. These brave and rugged frontiersmen want to impress us with their subversive views, but when do we ever hear anything else anyway? All we ever get is the corporate-friendly view. Where are the acres of news space about grassroots alternatives to the free market? Where are the black feminists' syndicated columns? Jeremy Clarkson hurls manful defiance at the new green tyranny of endless eco-shows like, er, Top Gear, The Car's the Star, Grand Prix Highlights and The Farnborough Air Show. Listen, bubblecut: BP is in the_ govern_ment!
Apart from TB, one characteristic that this neo-liberalism shares with other golden ages of political comedy, like the late 19th century, is that the gags just write themselves. At last week's demonstration against tube privatisation, Bob Crowe of the RMT described how a gas company is running the fire station, Virgin is supplying gas, Western Water is bidding for the tube, and non- emer gency ambulances are in the hands of a mini-cab firm. Not only has Dickens's Circumlocution Office been privatised but Podsnappery is flourishing too. In Dickens's description of Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend you can almost see Tony Blair or Clare Short when someone confronts them with one of those words that have been taken out of the dictionary, like "class" or "imperialism":
Mr Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness - not to say a grand convenience - in this way of getting rid of undesirables_ Mr Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish to his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him (and consequently sheer away).
All year BBC economics correspondents and New Labourites have been saying that there is "almost zero unemployment in the US". A quick phone call to the Census Bureau or the American Bureau Of Labor Statistics might give them figures between 12m and 15m. Not including the 2m banged up. But that's not the point. In today's elitist cant, if the facts don't fit, they have to be suppressed for the ideology to survive.
And this brings us to one of the major obstacles to doing a political comedy show: such is the state of British "news media", there is a real information problem. If, for example, you happen to have a hilarious yet rousingly defiant routine on the recent Bolivian water riots, you first have to:
a) convince people that they've happened; and
b) tell them what happened.
And in doing this you run the risk of clogging up your act, over-loading it with stodgy chunks of background data. But the flipside of this is that there is sometimes an agreeable expectation when audiences can't quite see where the next gag's gonna come from - a tension I have been known to let build up for an hour.
Ironically, one of the reasons the public don't have the facts is what Jeremy Hardy describes as the "tyranny of humour". Every news and current affairs show has its gonky comedy bit. I like to think that my stand-up shows are one of the few places people can escape this incessant humour, the wall-to-wall comedy of our chuckle-culture.
Even as audiences queue up, an expectant grin on their vacant maws, I like to watch them through a crack in the dressing room door and think: I'll wipe that smile off your face.
• Robert Newman's new show, Resistance Is Fertile, is at the Assembly Rooms (0131-226 2428) from August 12-17. He will be giving a series of free lunchtime lectures at the Stand (0131-558 7373) from August 14.
