I wrote a book called "Crap Towns". It seemed funny at the time
(samj.substack.com)217 points by url 8 hours ago
217 points by url 8 hours ago
This is what I was going to say. Back then, a book like this would have been perceived as the UK making fun of itself. Now it’s perceived as being cruel to those less fortunate.
I think it’s worth putting into context that the economy was doing great in the era this book was first published and huge progress was being made with things like homelessness, inequality, and poverty. It felt like the country had turned a corner from the lows of the 80s.
Since then, we’ve had the global financial crisis, local councils being bankrupted, and a huge rise in homelessness and inequality. The rich have more and the poor have less.
If you published that book today, the contents might be the same, but the story it tells would be quite different.
The Gini coefficient of the UK is about the same now as it was then:
https://equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed/
What has actually changed? A whole bunch of other economic malaise, but also perceptions, amplified to your personal taste by social media.
Gini coefficient usually only measures income inequality. Wealth inequality is hard to measure for various reasons but…
https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/
“for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%.”
“If the wealth of the super rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP.”
Etc.
Switzerland and Afghanistan have an almost equal Gini coefficient.
My point is: the Gini coefficient might indicate what your country's income distribution looks like, it however does not tell anything about actual life conditions.
“About the same” is not “the same”, and there are tipping points. The gini coefficient has still seen a decent bump.
But anyway, gini is a coarse measure. Look at the chart below that, showing income percentages going steadily upwards for the top 10 and 1%.
Most worryingly, look at the decline of the middle 40%. A healthy middle class keeps countries stable. You need a good chunk of society who feel like the system works for them.
And it’s not just perceptions, it’s fundamental stuff. A teacher could afford a house in the 90s; they can’t now. For all the boomers bang on about mobile phones and flat screen TVs, in the end those are luxuries compared to clean, secure accommodation. The days of getting a mortgage on one income, or having access to nice council housing are gone.
Not sure about homelessness rising versus the 90s. Possibly the rate is similar to 1998. I looked at ourworldindata, but their graph only goes back to 2010. Wikipedia has wildly different figures from the charities Shelter and Crisis because they're counting different things. It then gives government figures: just over 100,000 in 1998, 135,000 in 2003, 40,000 in 2009 and 2010 (so ourworldindata gives a chart that begins with this low), and "record levels, with 104,510 people" in 2023, though that's less than 135,000 so the way in which this is a record is not specified.
In summary, it goes up and down a lot, is counted in different ways, was (counted to be) far lower in 2010 (two years after the financial crisis?), but pretty much the same as now in 1998, although the kind of people who have an interest in saying "homelessness has hit record levels" are saying that homelessness has hit record levels.
This makes me nostalgic for 1991 when the Big Issue was first published, and there were songs like Gypsy Woman by Crystal Waters and Walking Down Madison by Kirsty MacColl.
Edit: was your "80s" a typo for "90s" perhaps?
> in some places they have been replaced by artisan bakeries and pop-up boutiques, while in others they have been replaced by charity shops or nothing at all.
Charity shops, vape shops (used for money laundering), Turkish Barbers (used for money laundering), Automated Laundrettes (used for money laundering), Car Washes (used for money laundering), Phone shops (used for money laundering), Kebab shops (used for money laundering)
What compounding inequality? The UK's Gini coefficient has been trending downwards since the global financial crisis.
14 years of Conservative government made this country more equal, not less, because they flattened the income distribution by making everybody poorer.
The big pattern among rich people in the UK nowadays is not that they're getting richer, it's that they're leaving.
You’re looking at the wrong numbers. Wealth, not income. Wealth inequality is through the roof. Poverty is through the roof. More people using food banks than ever. More people on zero hours and low paid contracts.
If you think the problem with the UK is that rich people are leaving, then you have no idea about the reality of living in the UK. Visiting some of the towns in this book would be a starting point.
Go get an airbnb in a poor suburb for a few weeks and live there, talk to people, and ask them if they think they're more or less equal with other Britons in the last 15 years. Show them your Gini coefficient and see what they think of it. Ask them if they feel the income distribution has been flattened in a way that favours them.
The rich people living here for the last 40 years all leaving does not bother most people. In fact, it's cause for celebration. They're leeches who don't pay tax on their piles of cash held in off-shore accounts - they just drive up the price of everything, particularly property. Meanwhile there are plenty of people trying to get here from the US to replace them who understand the purpose of capital is to put it to work and create jobs, not stare at it on a screen.
Your kind of thinking is not unusual within centre right politics, but it's also why nationalist populism is a credible threat. Farage is currently favourite with most bookmakers to be next PM because of the kind of defence of Tory policy you're making. Please think on that.
Me: "The Tories made everyone poorer!"
You: "How dare you defend the Tories?"
Learn to read.
I’d argue that your last paragraph has the cause-and-effect reversed:
We’re entering into a populist phase because the managerial class is incapable of addressing the problems experienced by most people — so they’re going to try dismantling the current elite systems and rebuilding them. To say that the problem is elites inability to suppress populism is to miss that the elites own chronic failures is what caused the populist surge.
Similar to populist waves circa 1900, where aristocratic systems were replaced with managerialism via populist revolts. Now, managerialism has failed so we’re again seeing the stirrings of change. At a broad scale, communism, fascism, and progressivism were all different technocratic managerial solutions to the problems and excesses of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
I think it’ll be interesting to see what comes next.
The only issue is that - in the past - weapons had to be wielded by people. The same working people that revolted.
There is very strong evidence that this will not be the case by the time this wave you have imagined gets really rolling.
I hope it does not happen for decades yet, because frankly: I cannot see the working class (of which I am part of) win that conflict.
Currently, weapons and logistics are not automated to that extent; I don’t think it’s meaningful to guess about decades from now, given the current flux.
I’d argue that your perspective means that the time to revolt is now (ie, next few years) — while the technical and social systems are in mutual flux and before a new regime solidifies. A regime that might be more autocratic totalitarian in nature (as you suggest will be the case).
People will reasonably come to different conclusions.
A popular protestantism is not a bandwagon the current political circus troupe will fit on.
Puritanical??? What are you basing this on? People have become completely unhinged. We have girls and women selling photos and videos of their privates and sex acts online, it's almost normalized. We have girls having sex with 1000 guys in 1 day just to become famous.
These are… specific examples. Something on your mind? Puritanical cultures do have an association with being sex-negative lack of a better term because purity culture sounds circular. But they're far from the only aspect of culture that can embody puritan thinking.
Loved the fact that this post didn't go where I expected it to (or at least, didn't remain there). That a book like this probably wouldn't be published today, or would be less popular today, is a point that has been made many times by many people, about many different books, TV shows, jokes, etc. But the author actually moves on from there; the observation is that even in his own opinion, the same joke isn't funny today — in fact, the equivalent thing being done today just looks “grubby”.
So it's something deeper than the usual “political correctness” debate: the question really is, what is it about the world today that trumps the hallowed British traditions of celebrating failure, of moaning, of affectionate self-mockery? Why isn't the joke funny any more, or why doesn't the mocking seem affectionate?
(He points at the malaise that exists today—it was only funny when there was some hope—but I'm not sure that's the only answer…)
Often when someone, especially a comedian, complains about “political correctness”, what they actually mean is: nobody is laughing at the same joke I told 20 years ago
Sensibilities change. The sense of what is and isn’t punching down changes. Even the appetite for punching down changes.
People who whine about “PC” always pretend like it’s the death of comedy or speech or whatever, and yet… there are younger people building great careers!
And yes, there is a real worrying erosion of free speech - but 98% these people could keep saying exactly what they’ve been saying - they’re just not getting the laughs they think they’re entitled to.
This is a good question..it just occurred to me that perhaps its because its so much easier for the people who would be the target of the joke to answer back now?
Social media gives the possibility of instant reply, whereas if you publish a book in 2003 called 'crap towns' how can the so-called chavs answer back? Publish their own book? Write to the local paper?
So its a side effect of how we can all hear each other better now (for better or for worse)
> "I mean: incredibly, governments and local councils didn’t read my work and decide to mend their ways. The UK did not get better. Instead we got more than a decade of Tory austerity, Brexit, and all the accompanying neglect and bad feeling."
This bit made me laugh.
I read the original book when it came out and it was funny and - in some ways - true. I was born and bought up in the town ranked #4 in the original list (Hythe), but when I read it I was living in Hackney (#10 on the list). So I could shove the book in the faces of my friends and colleagues and say: look at me! I've moved up in the world!
The reason I laughed is because around the time of publication (2003?) I was working in the Government's Social Exclusion Unit. Prior to that I had spent time in the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit; later on I'd go on to work for the Lyons Inquiry. Part of my work included meeting people, and one thing I took away from those meetings would be how incredibly proud people could be about their neighbourhoods and towns: however deeply sunk into poverty the area was, they still cherished the place. The other thing I learned was, more often than not, those people often had good ideas about how to fix some of the issues - local solutions for local problems. All they needed was a little help and support from authorities to get those solutions off the ground.
So when the author claims that "governments" didn't read the book - some of us did. We enjoyed it, and we tried to do things to help people make their towns just a little bit less crap. Sadly it wasn't enough, but if people don't try then nothing will ever get fixed.
I was curious - what was the angle on Hythe in the book?
These days Hythe seems like a posh seaside town with a Waitrose, a nice canalside park, a cute steam railway, lots of boutiquey shops and cafes, etc.
I know a lot of places in the area (e.g. Folkestone, Margate, Whitstable) have all been heavily "gentrified" in the last few years, but I sort of assumed Hythe was always this way? Is that not the case?
And even allowing for a bit of gentrification, it seems wild in 2025 to select it for a "crap towns" award ahead of somewhere like Dover or New Romney.
> There’s a website (I won’t link to it) that has kept on running a survey of the worst places in the UK for years and years
I will, it's ChavTowns.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061013053524/http://www.chavto...
Still running as https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/
Also the owner is giving up on it as of the start of this year -- mainly because nobody visits the site; churnalists just freeboot it and they rank higher on google. https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/top-10-worst-places-to-live-in-e...
Now that's an interesting trend. It's no longer feasible to have an independent web site, because nobody will visit it because you don't have the page rank. Journalists that do find your site copy your data and may add a link (that noone vists). Their pagerank is much higher, so they get all search engine links and all the ads, for your content.
Yikes, I spent 15 years living in one of the Top 10 and my summers in another one. I probably agree, though. The rot was showing in most of those by the late 80s and they went very swiftly downhill after that.
To counter those depressing places, these towns and villages seem lovely:
https://www.thetimes.com/best-places-to-live/location-guide/...
> organisations who despite their name, do not give a flying ** about their social housing stock
> and run-down decaying towns in the whole country
You cannot simultaneously have landlords living in Spain and well maintained local housing. Both are expensive. Pick only one. There exists a sweet spot when people are desperate enough to live in a place and pay every rent for any housing, but the sugar coating has washed off.
PS. How could they miss Bedford in the ranking?!
That author on Slough,
> Ricky Gervais encapsulated its brutalist new town grim with ‘The Office’ before giving up and writing lame punching-down anti-woke “gags” for the educationally subnormal
That's a very strange reading on Gervais' post-The Office career. After The Office he did things like Extras, a sitcom about extras on TV and film sets, Derek, an emotional series about a well-meaning care worker who thinks it's more important to be kind than popular, and After Life, a series about a man who loses his wife young and how he deals with grief.
He also did The Invention of Lying, which, 16 years since I watched it in the cinema, is still the answer I give without hesitation to "what's the worst movie you've ever seen?"
For me that has to be High Life. Pitched to me as "Robert Pattinson has to to take care of a baby in space", in reality it was basically a side plot to "serial killers and rapists are stuck on a spaceship together" and all that implies.
There’s also his standup career of being extra atheist as if the world has never seen a famous lapsed Christian Brit
The sense of self importance and overanalysis in this writeup on a silly book called "Crap Towns" is almost as hilarious as the book itself.
I still think the idea of the book is funny. There's a certain art to taking something bad and hilariously describing its terribleness. For some reason this has always made me laugh, but honestly not everyone gets it, and this has always been the case.
This kind of book can only happen in a place and a community with enough confidence and stability to handle it. Of course you can "get away" with it today, it's easier than ever to publish just about anything - but humor has changed and I don't expect it to go "viral" the way it did. Not all old jokes age well and we have all made products that no longer fit after some time.
But the author, oh boy. Dear sir, your tongue in cheek picturebook from 20 years ago is not as important as you imagine.
If you're about to write a diatrabe about the harms of political correctness or scold the writer on inventing a victimhood complex for themselves, please read the ending of the OP:
> Much as I’d like to, I can’t just blame the puritans if my old jokes don’t work any more. Nor can I claim that the Crap Towns books were an unqualified success
[...]
> before closing, I should admit that there is a more straightforward answer to the question of whether you can still get away with doing something like Crap Towns.
> That answer is: yes. There’s a website (I won’t link to it) that has kept on running a survey of the worst places in the UK for years and years- and, honestly, when I look at it, I hate it. Partly because I feel like they’re ripping off my project, but mainly because when I read the comments on there about incels and chavs and carbuncles and brutalism it all just seems grubby. Maybe even cruel.
> I could argue that I don’t like this website because their approach and criteria are different to mine - and I hope there would be some truth in that. But I also know that I now also just react against the whole thing. It’s been done. It’s grown stale. It doesn’t fit - especially since so much has changed around it. In short, the world has moved on. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing?
If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline. Additionally if you think there are two kinds of jokes: those that were once funny and those that were never funny, then I suggest that your jokes were at best lazy. The human condition is pretty constant throughout the ages and those jokes that are aimed at such universal experiences continue to amuse for centuries or millennia.
Understandably the humor of the inexperienced 20-something will differ from that of the 40+ year-old. The simple and absolute world that we believe to see and understand in our younger years tends to vanish from our grasp as we become older and attain the wisdom of experience. Perhaps the author's belief that "it has been done already" reflects some of that wisdom, and just maybe those of a certain age at the time of the publishing of "Crap Towns" felt exactly the same way about his book. It seems, after all, that every generation believes that it is the first to do or discover a thing without considering that humans have been doing human things for an awfully long time and that the observation "there is nothing new under the sun" has some merit.
The Connections series by James Burke from around the same time posited that politics is irrelevant and progress is mostly due to science. The consumer society of today is much better than when Crap Towns was written although improvement is not uniform. But even the least improved towns are better now than they were due to all the regional, national, and international improvements in services.
The road to Wigan Pier (1937) would be a humourless response. His main issue is the lack of acceptance of current satirical humour, "modern life is rubbish" being 22 years old.
I think he's wrong to say you couldn't publish it now. I think he is right it would be misunderstood and misinterpreted.
Bill Bryson and Paul Thoroux wrote extensively of how shit English towns can be in winter after 4pm when the shops are shut and the pub isn't open.
The problem is those towns weren’t crap within living memory when the books were written. Now anyone who remembers otherwise is close to dead
The author writes well. Within a few paragraphs the reader entirely forgets that "I couldn't publish Crap Towns today" is a hypothetical.
Yeah I kept reading for the part where the author addresses the thesis, but that's not what it's about.
Is it about keeping you reading for long enough to show you a pop-up for his newsletter?
I remember a Web site, in the early oughts, called “sheppeyscum.com”. That URL now redirects to one that makes Sheppey look good.
The original one did not.
It was all about insulting the Isle of Sheppey (Western UK). I think an ex-Shep wrote it.
Looks like all traces are gone. I understand that death threats were involved.
Crazy stuff, you got me curious
https://web.archive.org/web/20040411225059/http://www.sheppe...
> The island was shat from the arse of the Norse god Fuctup whilst he was suffering a bout of diarrhoea as a side effect of his recent withdrawal from scag. And that's true, as true as I'm sitting here. > A large number of policefolk who work on Sheppey are "Specials", which by a startling coincidence is also an affectionate term used to describe people with learning disabilities. > Christian based cults aside, the main religious practices on the island usually resemble primitive tribal type worship. Drug induced trances are a common tool for reaching the spirits beyond. These trances are often extended to include ritual drug induced self sacrifice- a deeply sacred activity known commonly to the natives as "Overdose".
You go to the "culture" section and there's just a single word, "NO." xD
One thing that has been accentuated over the past few decades is the idea that you are responsible for your success. When you were poor, lacked means, or didn't have a good job, it was because the god of fortune didn't smile on you. Only the fortunate experienced success.
Now only losers are broke and live in crap towns, and winners drive expensive cars. With this idea in mind, calling it crap towns becomes an attack on the people, rather then the town itself.
This idea is thoroughly explored in Alain de Botton's "Status Anxiety"
People in crap towns drive expensive cars too. The inequality between a crap place and a nice place is now enough that people can afford a ghastly Lamborghini SUV thing before they can afford to move out of a crap town.
Great article.
This kind of humor still exists and I think it’s still most popular with young people. I followed an Instagram account in Chicago that mocks local bars and the people who go to them, but they’re all bars for people in their 20s, so I’ve rarely heard of them and don’t fully get the descriptions. There’s also that trend of “cynical maps” (Google it) of city neighborhoods, country regions, etc that peaked a few years ago and still circulates.
I don’t see this selling as a book now, but I also don’t see humorous coffee table books in general as a category the way they were 25 years ago?
I remember laughing at this, my hometown was included it’s worth saying. I suspect the purchasers were largely people who lived in one of the ‘crap towns’
I’m not sure how anyone could have read it and not understood it was a joke. At the same time, I do think that he’s right that it wouldn’t get published today, not because the content wasn’t true, but people are much more quick to take offense over things like this.
A fellow Elbonian made a book [1] depicting the ugliest places in our town.
Despite the tongue-in-a-cheek mood it's a great piece of nostalgia trip spiced with some interesting local history lessons.
He also have an automotive youtube channel dedicated to popular old cars and he loves to film them in these obscure and sordid locations mentioned in the book.
EDIT: fun note - when MS released their first digital encyclopedia in Elbonia, somewhere in mid 90's, the Elbonia entry, apart from having accurate information about the country and up to date statistics had an illustration image subtitled "Elbonians in front of typical dwelling" depicting something like this: https://strojeludowe.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1.3-600x...
[1] https://paskudnik.com/strona-glowna/6--ebook-paskudnik-warsz...
I recently started a subscription to https://www.the-fence.com/ as set out in the opening to this piece and it's truly a lovely object. Highly recommend.
In my experience there are only a few cities in the U.S that literate people are proud enough to live in, that they would be insulted that you put that into your crap town book.
Thus I wonder what demographic that at one time would have bought this book is not going to be buying this book now.
A good way to identify which cities suck is to say to a native "<their city> sucks".
If they agree that it sucks, it probably sucks.
If they get really mad and defensive about it, it definitely sucks.
If they're just bemused or laugh it off, it's probably nice.
It's not about identity politics. It's not about self-deprecation. It's not even about if the material is particularly funny or not.
It's whether you're punching up or punching down.
If the purpose of Crap Towns is to punch up, speak to power, to point out the failures of Thatcherism, decreased social mobility through a perptuation of failing center-right politics thanks to an overly-powerful media and political class that is divorced from reality, the absurd dominance of PPE graduates within policy making, and on, and on, on... well, it's great satire.
If it's just to point at working class people and go "haha, their streets are dirty and they eat bad food", well... you're punching down, and it's rare that can work as comedy. It's just mean bullying.
So yes, you can write Crap Towns today, but it lands better if you draw the line from Thatcher through Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and Starmer, and their acolytes - the PPE mafia on both sides of the House, and point out how their crappy politics has caused all this, not their victims.
Punching up is "look at them, ha ha ha"
Funnier comedy is "look at us, hahaha!"
Note that punching up is the same mechanism of humour as punching down. "look at people who are not like us, ha ha ha"
I always found the funnier things were not about punching up or down but were applicable to anyone. Restricting comedy to only be about punching up turns it into a political tool and not an art form that makes us feel better. Comedy that is only allowed if it sends a political message is firstly propaganda and then humour. It's why most modern comedy elicits a smile at best and no belly laughs any more. It can still be amusing but it has no universality.
The best comedy has truth about ourselves in it. Psychologically "punching up" is a rejection of these things in ourselves. Ideologically, "punching up" is a tactic reinforcing group identity coherence.
> It's whether you're punching up or punching down.
I disagree with the idea that one is "OK" and the other is "bad", "wrong" or, even worse, "problematic" (i.e., the bien-pensant's own "blasphemous"). It just makes one an eternal sacred cow, and the other the eternal punching bag, no matter either's virtues or vices.
And this, in fact, has already been the case for a long time. In the US, producer Dick Wolf's five Law & Order TV shows (and, now, his three Chicago shows) taught us over 30 years that the "wealthy CEO" or "high-powered corporate lawyer" is always guilty, and the large companies they own/work for are just as crooked. The only upscale demographic that is never the criminal is, strangely enough, the famous TV-show producer.
There is no way Tropic Thunder would be made today
My home town featured (33rd!). We considered it vindication!
the book author says "There’s a website (I won’t link to it) that has kept on running a survey of the worst places in the UK for years and years- and, honestly, when I look at it, I hate it. Partly because I feel like they’re ripping off my project"
this is why we should cherish the [indie] web. we can still almost publish anything in incredible detail, keep it alive for a long time and not worry about being canceled.
plus i have low opinion of people that wont share a link they know is relevant to the topic.
>One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.
I couldn't help but keep thinking about this Wittgenstein quote as I read this. I find it harder to say exactly why. Obviously, we felt differently in the past. Not my past, of course: I was a child, barely able to integrate by parts or fold a shirt correctly.
There is another possibility. The usual complaint is that oversensitivity has constrained humor. The usual retort is that what we did before was harmful and we're better off not doing it. But the problem with logical-seeming dilemmas is that existential propositions can only seem logical. The world, unlike logic, is malleable. Perhaps the jokes really are worse today than they were in the past?
Twenty years ago, our crap towns were something we experienced with the other townsfolk first and foremost, and only to a lesser degree did we bear the weight of the outside world's eyes upon us. Today it is not like this. Communication across great distances has gone from difficult to convenient to pervasive and unavoidable.
Locality has frayed in more domains than the spatial. Recently /r/MedicalPhysics had a spat with /r/sysadmin about hospital IT policies. Such a civil war would have been unthinkable in the 2000s. Humans used to spend much more time socializing with their friends or at least comrades-in-something than with almost complete strangers. Our egos are exposed to the elements in a new and phase-changing way.
I think that the social fabric has already begun to fight this trend from the bottom up. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement, Discord has made non-discoverability its greatest feature. The gladiatorial aspect of modern discourse has never sat well with me. I don't want to have a conversation for the audience. But here I am. Please clap.
It's exactly this kind of structuralism induced fatalism that makes more towns than ought shit.
If you know a town is shit, it's your moral obligation to tell them so that their kids and smart residents move out. Post 2000s progressive seem to think that Towns, religions and culture can form opinions. They are trying to be "empathetic" and so get tricked by scammers who personally benefit from these horrible situations.
Great article with links to others, like this one:
https://arena.org.au/stay-in-your-lane-the-oxymoron-of-authe...
With quotes (re cultural appropriation) like “the ultimate endpoint of keeping our mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction… All that’s left is memoir”
We’ve been suffering under the yoke of the intellectualization of deliberalization, censorship and oppression of ideas via our leading thinkers, institutions and platforms who have been acting out of fear. Fear of being strung up on the town square and fear that not signaling support for what has been happening signals disapproval.
What I find infuriating is that our youth have been driving this conformist, enforcement, rule making and rule following mentality and trend. Our youth should be questioning the rules, not forming up as a conformist jack booted militia and persecuting those who don’t follow the rules. History has shown that the latter ends in tears.
We saw this in Germany in the 30s, in China in the 60s and 70s where the red guards in the cultural revolution were mostly teens, under the Khmer Rouge in the 70s where kids were police, and with the Young Pioneers and Komsomol in the early and mid 20th century Soviet Union.
When youth stop questioning and start enforcing, it often marks the end of a healthy society and the beginning of something much darker.
Personally I see it the other way around: the youth's increasing intolerance of politically incorrect ideas is caused by the increasing power of the "jack booted militia" on the right. It's not surprising that people try to suppress intolerant ideas when there is a very real risk of them being adopted by those in power.
If you can't be bothered reading a book, or if you find it funny and want more, https://loudribs.com/product-category/postcard/ has a "Rubbish Seaside Postcard" series.
a comedians biggest fear is that one day everyone starts taking them seriously
> but mainly because when I read the comments on there about incels and chavs and carbuncles and brutalism it all just seems grubby. Maybe even cruel.
There we go. People shift from being the out-group to being more sympathetic and unfortunate, and humour that targeted them moves into being punching down. I was shocked at how less funny Bill Hicks feels 20 years on, because now it just sounds like he's being an asshole about people who are struggling.
Maybe now the crappiest places have something common that should not be mentioned.
I read some guy complaining some podcast complained about his book and elevate it into some weird organized political movement that he's already declared is dead, and he's happy those kind of rancid speech-haters are gone...punchline... they're the illiberals!
Okay then!
Be honest with yourself, O Reader!
Are you sure he's not writing a satire of the same piece you've seen written every year since 1990, just with a shifting name for it?
He is a comedian after all...
Are you sure he's serious?
So it’s not that it won’t be published today.
It just won’t be as popular today. And would, ironically, be crapped on by other people, which is what the author is unhappy about.
Thats what the author means, and represents the entirety of the “Oh I am so oppressed because I can’t say shitty unfunny jokes because other people will make shitty unfunny jokes about me in response” genre of argument.
The difference between then and now is that the people in the “crap towns” have the opportunity to call the author out.
Eh, he goes out of his way to say
> The good news is that I don’t think that the illiberalism of identity politics will endure much longer. Especially when it comes to the literal policing of humour - and cancellation of comedians for telling the wrong kinds of jokes.
I think it’s still his point.
Yes, it’s a problem that something like that is insulting to publish.
It's not just acceptability. Jokes written even just five or ten years ago often fail to land on modern audiences. That taste in humor changes is neither morally positive nor negative. It's easy to look for deeper meaning in the notion that what once was funny now isn't, but often, there isn't a deeper meaning to find. Life is different now; so too must humor change.
When I re-watch comedy like ‘The Young Ones’ or many other funny series from the 80s or 90s, I don’t find it funny any more. It’s not that the jokes weren’t good and that I didn’t find it funny at the time, it’s just that humour changes. In that case, it’s nothing to do with the jokes becoming ‘unacceptable’.
> pretty upset if the value of my home was harmed because someone decided to make it common knowledge that the town I lived in was crap
I could argue this for the journalism disclosing Flint’s lead problems. The root cause isn’t the commentary. It’s the reality. Balancing one’s property value is the fraud conveyed on a prospective buyer.
Not necessarily. I think the interesting idea the article dances around is changing attitudes and sensibilities. In many ways, I think media of the 90s and even 2000s had a different balance of optimism and cynicism. Critical commentary was an edgy (or in this case humorous) counterpoint. 1999 saw dark edgy and dystopian films like the matrix, fight club that felt like a warning, criticism of a future to be avoided.
Similar subjects today are noticably darker without the buttress of social optimism. Films like The Joker seem less like a cautionary tale and more like a documentary. Is the joker now the protagonist?
The question is: "what are we laughing at now that in 20 years we won't think is funny?"
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I have hope that we might see that laughing at our neighbours for their political views might be seen as inappropriate.
Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged to the same broad spectrum of bland mediocrity.
Today, I think it's clear who would be being laughed at by whom. The fates of places have so radically diverged that we no longer have a sense of collective identity. All of the places listed in Crap Towns are now unrecognisable, for better or worse. Those familiar shops are now gone; in some places they have been replaced by artisan bakeries and pop-up boutiques, while in others they have been replaced by charity shops or nothing at all. Half the leisure centres have shut and we all know which half.
The upper middle class might have become more humourless and puritanical, but I think that's a subconscious self-defence mechanism, a manifestation of noblesse oblige without real obligation. The working class are too angry to laugh and certainly aren't willing to be laughed at. We all know that we're teetering on the brink of a populist wave, but no-one in a position of power seems willing or able to do anything about it.