Present Mirth

When the roll-call of Western Culture is finally written, one of the artistic products that will be left like a pair of dragons yearningly watching the departing ark as the waters rise around it is likely to be the British TV comedy. Much as critics like to run the tattered flags of Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, Monty Python and The Office up their flagpole, we salute them with a notably post-Imperial tristesse. Like bottle-caps in mud, their brightness is more a feature of the dismally unfunny vehicles of their era than their inherent value.

Moreover, how many people actually like the finely-crafted farce of Fawlty Towers rather than, say, the Spanish waitor being hit with a teaspoon? How many people value the the dry documentary style of The Office above David Brent's humiliating, iconic dance? The high aesthetic criteria on which critics exalt these comedies are distant from the audience laughter that has seemed to underwrite those critical opinions. And if laughter really sets the seal of greatness on comedy, then reserve a place in the Hall of Fame for You've Been Framed.

Nevertheless, it is untenable to say that comedy is of a lower form than tragedy, and if we doubt this for a second then we only have to consider how few are the great comedies, how many the great tragedies, great string quartets, great serious novels. A great humorist such as P. G. Wodehouse is a lightning-strike amid the steady downpour of serious British fiction.

Is the fault, then, in our stars or in our selves? I don't know when I last heard someone boasting about reading a comic novel or watching a sit-com. If art is the new Top Trumps, then the cards with the highest value always seem to be the ones about: a doomed love-affair; a fatal illness; and, preferably, a high-stakes historical event such as the Holocaust. I hope that people consume this moral fibre purely for health of their image when discussing them afterwards, because its nutritional value always seems to me to be negligible.

Richard Curtis's gentle comedy begins with with the modest but perceptive comment that Love, Actually, is all around. Love and comedy are indeed pervasive in our society, but the fleshless bones on which today's culture vultures seem to feed gives scant evidence of this.