Sorry, this humour is no laughing matter

Satire was used to puncture the pretensions of the powerful. Now it's deployed by the powerful themselves

In Double Act, Ira Nadel's new biography of Sir Tom Stoppard, the playwright is reported to have said that, when he was writing his early plays, he would make sure that he included a joke within 30 seconds of the curtain rising. It settled audiences down, helped them tune in and relax, apparently. "Humour is a universal cement," according to Stoppard.

Apart from confirming a suspicion that a certain ice-cold cynicism is an asset when writing for the West End, the insight suggests that, not for the first time, Stoppard has a shrewd eye when it comes to reading the culture. For these days, humour – or at least something that looks and sounds as if it should be humour – is the universal cement of our modern lives.

Until about 10 years ago, politicians ran the risk of not being taken seriously if they betrayed a talent for telling, or even understanding, jokes. Prime Ministers – Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher – were generally humour-free, while the more famous nearly-men, notably Denis Healey and Neil Kinnock, were generally thought to have been let down by their wit, which made them suspect in the public eye, lacking the gravitas of the true statesman.

Now jokes are a central part of the script, the spin. Politicians vie with one another to appear on Have I Got News for You. Comedians are eagerly recruited to head up and promote political campaigns. It is the dead-eyed technocrats – the Margaret Beckett, Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn, Tessa Jowell mob – whose apparent lack of any kind of a funny-bone is regarded as a flaw in their public image.

The obligatory jokiness extends to broadcasting. Radio Four seems to have grown up recently, but, until a few months ago, there seemed to be some kind of BBC rule that any item, link or report should now be presented facetiously or with some kind of pun, however lame it may be. Extraordinarily, Newsnight has caught the humour habit, frequently obliging its hapless reporters to wear silly hats or to prance about jokey graphics while attempting to make a serious political or economic point.

On commercials, it seems to have been decided that laughter sells. Comedians earn a fortune by going through grimly unfunny routines, one of the worst of which saw Griff Rhys Jones wearing a silly beard and acting the fool on behalf of Vauxhall.

This, it appears, is a specifically British development. Recognising that humour is thought to be the only language we understand, the Goethe Institute recently attempted to encourage business folk and schoolchildren to learn German by sending out cards that made lumberingly ironic reference to our favourite German jokes – football, Vorsprung durch Technik, Schumacher, beach towels and so on. The British press obediently reported the initiative, under headlines reading: "We have ways of making you laugh."

Apart from being mildly irritating and patronising, the new facetiousness poses a more serious problem. Because very few people in life are actually funny, it turns out that this universal cement is fake. It holds nothing together and often covers up something rather unpleasant.

Humour, when deployed by the humourless, can be dangerous, as the TV commercial launched this week by the anti-euro campaign has shown. Here the problem was not one of taste – only the most po-faced could, for example, object to the superb Third Reich jokes that propel Mel Brooks's The Producers, with its goose-stepping chorus girls, syncopated howitzers and joke Nazi. Nor is the performance a problem – it was a brilliant idea to cast Rik Mayall, with his mad, dangerous eyes, in the role of Hitler.

The problem is that behind the alleged joke lies a vacuum. The linking of Hitler with the euro, while it appeared to be making a valid political point, was in fact utterly meaningless. James Naughtie, interviewing Sir Stanley Kalms of the "No" campaign for Today, tried to ascertain what the Hitler spoof was attempting to say. Was it arguing that Hitler would have supported the euro, that a united currency would lead to totalitarianism? "It's satire," wailed Kalms, as if no further explanation was necessary.

Certainly, satire in the media has come a long way since it was used in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties to puncture the pretensions of those in power. These days it has become an advertising tool, deployed by the powerful themselves. Those who fail to be convinced are declared guilty of that most serious crime, lacking a sense of humour. Kate Hoey summed it up best with her defence of the anti-euro ad – it was not only very funny, but "anyone who doesn't laugh at it should get a life".

There is something faintly sinister about this bullying jokiness. Like Stoppard's carefully crafted quip included to please the suburbanites in the theatre stalls, it aims to flatter and seduce us all into grinning, unquestioning submission.

terblacker@aol.com