Isla Campbell Investigates: Which Politicians Are Actually Funny, and What Do the Royals Think About All This?
By Isla Campbell | Bohiney Magazine & The London Prat
I have spent this week in the company of politicians who are funny and royals who are trying to be, and I can report that the gap between these two categories is not as wide as protocol would suggest.
The Unwritten Rule: Royals Don’t Do Comedy
The monarchy’s relationship with humour is, constitutionally, one of careful management. The royals may smile. They may indicate appreciation of wit. They may, on ceremonial occasions, demonstrate what courtiers describe as “warmth.” What they may not do is be actually funny, because actual comedy requires the risk of failure, and the monarchy does not do risk. British class system satire has always known this: the highest class is the one that cannot afford to be ridiculous. Everyone below can. This is why the lower orders produce more comedians.
The Prat’s list of Britain’s funniest politicians is revealing in the same direction. The politicians on the list are almost entirely people who have lost something: an election, a cabinet position, the will to maintain dignity. Comedy arrives in politics at the moment of liberation from the necessity of being taken seriously. Boris Johnson’s funniest period was before he became Prime Minister. His worst comedy was during. Correlation suspected.
This Week in Royal Adjacent Events
I attended a briefing on royal diary commitments this week. The protocol around royal engagements is so elaborate that the engagement itself the ribbon, the building, the handshake, the approved smile is basically performance art. The difference between a royal engagement and a Monty Python sketch is that the Python sketch acknowledges what it is. Monty Python and the art of British satire was, in many ways, a parody of precisely this: ceremony for ceremony’s sake, maintained with complete institutional commitment, questioned by nobody inside the system.
From Bohiney this week: US foreign policy in 1956 retro phase relevant to royal watchers because 1956 is the year that remade the monarchy’s relationship with national power. Post-Suez, the Crown became decorative in new ways. The politicians retained the comedy of power. The royals retained the power of decoration. The arrangement has held. Barely. Decoratively.
I found the week’s most genuinely funny political moment in the Prat’s coverage of the Strait of Hormuz nodding initiative. No royals involved. Pure political comedy. The Crown, one imagines, noted this with appropriate restraint and described it internally as “a development.”
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Crown-adjacent comedy also at NewsThump
