ANOTHER VOICE
Punch must be funny from cover to cover and that's a depressing thought
AUBERON WAUGH
It should have been good news for the world of letters and for the bourgeois, edu- cated, humane civilisation to which nearly all Spectator readers belong when it was announced last week that Punch is to be revived and the New Statesman has been saved yet again. I never read Punch during its last, disastrous attempt to capture the youth market, and cancelled my order for the New Statesman in 1978, when Tony Howard gave up the editorship, but the tra- dition of intelligent, topical weeklies is surely one of England's finer points, and might be one of the few things that nur- tures an awareness of an older, sceptical England, not dead but gone into hiding until the new class has been able to discred- it itself.
Even so, I find the news strangely depressing. One wishes Mike Molloy, the new proprietor and editor of a relaunched Punch, the best possible fortune, but what readership is he aiming at which is not already covered by Private Eye and The Spectator? The English have always prided themselves on their sense of humour, but that has meant they invested every aspect of their lives with a keen sense of the ridiculous, not that they kept an area of their minds open as a receptacle for any- thing marked 'humour', as Americans tend to do. Alan Coren, a previous editor, makes the point: 'Punch must be funny from cover to cover, and I am sure Mike Molloy understands that.'
Perhaps he does, but what a depressing task to set yourself! It is the ultimate expression of the American habit of keep- ing humour in a separate compartment, to be activated by pressing the appropriate button in the great control panel of modern life. Another button will promise sexual excitement, another the joys of compassion or social indignation, terror of ghosts or the peculiar American pleasure of seeing cars burst into flames, people shoot each other and fall from great heights.
In time, no doubt, television channels will organise themselves so that one will cater for each of these moods or require- ments, even as we already have channels (or so I have been told — my television set does not seem to be capable of identifying them) devoted to soft porn. Star of the humour channel will be Clive James, who has only to raise his eyebrows or twitch his nose to excite gales of hysterical laughter from his moronic studio audience, no doubt echoed in many households through- out the land, where the simple-minded or the humourless hold sway.
Without exception, all the people who have told me that they missed Punch since it closed down in 1992 (many of them appeared to believe that I wrote regularly for it) have been nice but simple-minded. They liked a laff but did not find it in their daily lives. They were grateful to Alan Coren and others for providing it. There is nothing contemptible in that role; indeed, it is entirely admirable. But it does not rep- resent the English sense of humour, which used to permeate every aspect of English life, from Trooping the Colour and Times first leaders (as written by Rees-Mogg never the old fourth leader, which had the abysmal task of hying to be funny), to the sad business of retrieving pieces of dead fellow-citizens from the devastation of the Blitz.
The other role of a weekly magazine devoted to being funny on every page is to reassure the pompous, the humourless, the socially unacceptable that they, too, have a sense of humour. I am not sure that this is a useful role. Private Eye discovered that the only way to sustain a humorous role in topi- cal journalism is to adopt a posture which is not so much satirical as often plain nasty. It works very well. Sixteen years of my younger life were dedicated to advancing it. Anything is better than the fate of the humorous columnist required to produce pleasant, light-hearted, jocular commentary on the world's oddities. Past masters like Beachcomber and Michael Wharton (Peter Simple) could get away with it, but even Wharton relied (and continues to rely) on an all-consuming rage, whether genuine or adopted for the purpose.
The same objection applies to a revived New Statesman. In all the hundredweight of analysis, comment and putative entertain- ment which falls through the letterbox every Saturday and Sunday, virtually free of charge, it is inevitable that the old weeklies should concentrate on a small, specialised market. But what is left for the Left? It can point out the crasser stupidities of govern- ment, particularly when they seem to be inspired by the free-market ideologies of Redwood or Portillo, but even this role will be lost when Labour comes to power. It can cater for Britain's traditional hatred of the rich, but this function has been largely undermined by the National Lottery. For the rest, history has shown that socialism doesn't work: it is an unprincipled system of wishful thinking, rather as many see organised religion. Why should we rejoice that a left-wing manufacturer of cars and lorries called Geoffrey Robinson (not my old friend the left-wing lawyer, who turns out to be called Geoffrey Robertson) has decided to spend good money keeping a few eccentrics happy and self-important?
By the same token, it would be a minor tragedy if The Spectator allowed itself to become the spokesman of the Thatcherite, anti-European Right, but I see no other future role for it. The times require that it finds a particular corner of the market. My objection is not so much that the Conserva- tive Right is wrong, or silly, or odious, although it may be all those things. It is not even irritation with those who cannot see the obvious absurdity of Mr Redwood or his plan for an international alliance of the Right, embracing Americans with ridicu- lous names like Newt Gingrich. Last time I left The Spectator, in 1973, it might have been for the idealistic reason that I thought it had no business to be so boring about Europe. But I have been writing the `Another voice' column for 20 years, and my only reason for leaving it now is greed for money. That is all the New Conser- vatism has to teach, and I have learned the lesson too well.
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