The death of the comedian

There are no comedians anymore, tv and pc killed them all.

Television and Political Correctness that is.

Television killed the comedian because the comedian makes his living from standing in front of a small live audience in a venue somewhere where they have paid to watch him, and he tells them a succession of often unrelated and very short tales that have a funny ending, here is an example…

A man goes into a Hardware shop,
“I’ll have a bag of nails please” he says
“Yes Sir, how long would you like them ?” the man behind the counter asks
“I’d like to keep them”

Ken Goodwin told that joke on The Comedians, a weekly prime time tv slot in the early 1970′s, I thought it was the funniest joke ever when he told it and I laughed and I laughed at his comic genius until I cried with laughter, yes it really was that funny.

And then the next day I went to school and I told all of my friends the joke and they all said “It was funny when Ken Goodwin told it last night on The Comedians” and none of them laughed when I told the funniest joke in the world.

Worse than that, Ken Goodwin couldn’t tell the joke anymore either, wherever he went to earn his living after he had been on the tv his audience wanted him to tell them jokes that they hadn’t heard on the tv so when he told them the bag of nails joke they’d boo and shout at him to tell them one they hadn’t heard before – an almost impossible task.

Would an audience in a theatre boo Pavarotti when he sang “Nessum Dorma” and shout at him to sing one they haven’t heard before ?

Yes I know he’s dead, but still.

So tv killed the comedian.

Political Correctness also killed the comedian, just ask Bernard Manning…

“Whats the difference between an Iraqi woman and a pilchard ?
One’s ugly and greasy with bulging eyes and the other’s a fish”

You see, its just not funny anymore to tell jokes about ethnicity, disablement, sex, or anything else that may make the subject of the joke feel bad about themselves and given that that just about kills any form of joke whatsoever, it explains why you no longer see stand-up comedians on tv anymore, paradoxically this single action has brought about a revival in the art of the “small club” stand-up comedian and all over the land now you have to pay upwards of £20 to get into small clubs where two or three stand-up comedians will ply their trade in your face, stand-up comedy has gone underground into “Comedy Clubs” and you now pay dearly for your laughs.

So when a 13 year old boy named Charlie Wernham appears on “Britains Got Talent” and proclaims himself to be a comedian in the old fashioned stand-up stylee then you know you’re in for a toe-curling two minutes, and indeed the act was toe-curling, it was awful.

Lets be fair – when your children come home from school with the funniest joke that they’ve ever heard you are going to stand there and listen to it and then roar with laughter even when its actually not a joke at all, even when it contains not one shred of humour, because its your kids and you’re not going to tell them that they are not funny, it’ll ruin their confidence for life if you did that and when you’re dead and they are speaking of you at your funeral they’ll tell everyone that you once told them that they were not funny, well you old bastard we’ll see who’s not funny now, they’ll say,  as they set fire to your coffin.

Charlie Wernham told jokes that were not funny in the slightest and as such he failed, however because the audience laughed he was told that he was funny by the judges, even though they then admitted that none of his jokes were funny, its a strange paradox, you’re not funny but people laugh at you, probably because you’re a kid who thinks he’s funny, even though he’s not – this act cannot survive much further beyond his fifteenth birthday as by then the attraction at laughing at a childs jokes will be no longer relevant for Charlie.

Another magic act died a death last night but not because of the magic act, “your magic act is very good” the judges told the husband and wife team (why are all magician acts husband and wife teams ?), but you are rubbish because your wife tries to sing during the act and she cannot sing, she is a rubbish singer, you must leave the stage unless she stops singing – its gripping stuff, the rubbishing of people live on national tv, where will the husband and wife magic act find work in future ?

But two singers went through to the final, at long last the judges stopped sending dancers to the final, stop they cried, for we have enough dancers int he final, we need singers, so they sent a 12 year old girl who sings opera like she was in her fifties and they sent a Scottish plumber to the final who is actually very good but who will not win the final because the 50 year old opera singing midget woman masquerading as a child will win it.

Or a dance act.

So far …

A Dancing pair of Asian Guys
A Dancing Dog
A Dancing Pair of Eight Year Olds
A Dancing Pair of Karate Kids
A Dancing Kid
A Boy Soprano
A Girl Soprano
A Singer who can Sing