After 1,000 days of negotiations, there are no jokes left.
“What the hell,” I asked my husband at the weekend, “is that awful noise coming out of your phone?” For once, it turned out not to be the kind of obscure Sonic Youth track that sounds like a cat trapped in a washing machine, but a parody song about Brexit. The hee-larious ditty featured a ukelele – the comedy tie of musical instruments – and was recorded in that unbearable sweary-yet-twee style of a Radio 4 regular who is excited at last to be able to say “wanker”.
It made me think that among its other crimes, Brexit has killed comedy. When was the last time that you heard a joke about Brexit that was even a distant second cousin of amusing? After 1,000 days of negotiations, there are no jokes left. I know this, because clickbait newspaper websites regularly run posts of the “best Brexit jokes and memes”. They are about as funny as an embolism. “The B in Plan B stands for bullshit,” went one.
It’s become a cliché to say that the current situation is “beyond parody”, but it clearly is. Last year, one satirical writer told me that he was sticking to period dramas and sci-fi for the moment, because the present was unbearable. In private, comedians despair about the slim pickings offered by Brexit and the absurd reign of Donald Trump.
The first problem is the sheer length of the negotiations. Here topical comedy is suffering the same problem as every department in Whitehall: Brexit has sucked all the oxygen from the room. Since 2016, it has taken attention away from every other policy area, the way a telly with the sound down in a pub mesmerically distracts you from any attempt to make conversation.
“It’s hard to do Brexit-related comedy with originality and optimism,” agrees Andy Zaltzman, who is nonetheless trying with a special Brexit-themed version of his improv show Satirist For Hire at the Soho Theatre in London. “It can be hard to be constructive about it.
