The Prompt by Andrew Eaton

Published on Sunday 1 November 2009 12:49

A WHILE ago the Scottish musician and blogger Nick Currie – aka Momus –proposed an entertaining theory about moral panics. Moral panics, he argued, only happen around a medium – VHS, computer games, the internet, whatever – when that medium is on the up. In other words, moral panics can be used to measure what's "hot" in the arts. If you're an artist and want to make an impact, find the artform that's causing most outrage and dive in.

Momus's evidence was anecdotal and flawed, as he admitted himself, but I'm going to sum it up anyway, just for fun. Books haven't really been "hot" since about 1960, the year of the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial. Pop music was "hot" in the 1960s – hence the furore over John Lennon's "bigger than Jesus" claim. Cinema was hottest in the 1970s, when films like A Clockwork Orange were causing outrage. Then it was video's turn, with the early 1980s scaremongering over "video nasties". And in 2009? As Momus put it: "Computer games: hot and dangerous now, baby!"

In each case, Momus argues, "moral panics correlate to the perceived power of a medium to represent". To represent reality, the theory goes, is what the political establishment wants to do. A moral panic is a positive sign that an artform is challenging their representation of reality, offering a different – and, as the establishment is painfully aware, more "real" – version of the world.

If this is true, maybe stand-up comedy, rather than computer games, is 2009's "hot" artform. Jimmy Carr has been all over the media in the past week, condemned for a joke about war amputees. Stewart Lee was pilloried for a joke in which he imagined Top Gear's Richard Hammond dying a violent death. Ricky Gervais, Frankie Boyle and Billy Connolly have also caused outrage with jokes about prostitute murders, Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington and the hostage Ken Bigley.

In each case, there's an argument to be made that the apparently tasteless gags had a moral purpose – Boyle argued last week, for example, that his Adlington joke was a protest highlighting BBC comedy's reluctance to address more important issues than bland celebrity trivia. Carr's joke has power because its callousness echoes our callous disregard for the casualties of a war fought in our name.

The point, ultimately, is the degree to which the media, and the government, appears to think that what comedians say actually matters. What uncomfortable reality does that represent? Maybe that political and cultural debate is now so shallow that it's indistinguishable from comedy.

This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on November 1, 2009