Modern comedians? They're not funny, sniffs Julie Burchill

Julie Burchill’s transformation from Hip Young Gunslinger to Reactionary Old Bore is finally complete. Her latest Spectator column is something your grandad could have written anytime since about 1983: these modern-day comedians aren’t funny, aren’t they?

Under the headline “Why modern ‘comedians’ like Romesh Ranganathan aren’t funny”, the one-time enfant terrible of British journalism bemoans the fact that the comics currently dominating TV and radio tend to be liberal, educated types who don’t love the stuff Burchill loves, like Brexit and Donald Trump.

Modern comedians “make me feel smug and superior because – while I’m not going to pretend that I’m part of any contemporary Algonquin Club – my mates and I are funnier over lunch than 99 per cent of professional paid comedians on radio and television are,” moans Burchill, who compares them unfavourably with Dave Allen, cruelly snubbed by the BBC since dying 21 years ago.

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She goes on to identify Brexit as “the point where modern comedians basically gave up bothering to work at being amusing. In the grip of the Brexit Derangement Syndrome which affected so many poor souls in show business, they fell instead into public self-soothing by uttering the B-word and receiving the affirming groans from their audience. From there it was the slippery slope that led to the current woeful state of state-sanctioned comedy.”

Fortunately, Burchill has discovered BBC Radio 4 Extra, “my escape from Radio 4, when I’ve finally had enough fun looking down on the clowns; it’s where ‘heritage’ comedy shows are given extra enjoyment by being prefaced with the warning that: ‘The following comedy reflects the broadcast standards, language and attitudes of its time.’” (Shows on the station’s Comedy Club strand this very evening include repeats of the pioneering British Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me and My Teenage Diary, presented by the very left wing Rufus Hound).

Still, Burchill has hopes for the future. “I’m looking forward to that time in the future when we are warned the same way before the re-broadcasting of the Nattering Classes’ ghastly output,” she says. “Will we look back, from a sunlit hinterland when we have come out the other side of The Capture, and laugh at what happened for a few decades to comedy in a country which, ironically, prides itself on its sense of humour?”

Who knows? Meanwhile, look forward to upcoming Spectator columns from the ever-challenging Burchill, in which she gets her piercingly satirical claws into supermarket self-checkout machines, how the police are getting younger every day and where she might have left her keys. Oh, Julie!