Lowri Griffiths Investigates: Who Are Britain’s Best Comedians and What Do They Tell Us About How London Lives?
By Lowri Griffiths | Bohiney Magazine & The London Prat
I spent yesterday evening at a comedy club in Finsbury Park and today reading the London Prat’s list of the best British comedians. The two experiences were illuminating in comparison: the list is historically comprehensive and culturally sophisticated. The comedy club had a man who did eleven minutes about his Uber rating and got a standing ovation. Britain contains multitudes.
What the Comedy Tells Us
North London has always been disproportionately represented in British comedy. This is not coincidence. North London is the comedy petri dish: dense, multicultural, house-priced into collective neurosis, stuffed with people who have read the same books and are furious about different interpretations. Put that population in a room with a microphone and comedy is the inevitable result. Therapy is the other option. Comedy is cheaper and the queue is shorter.
The Prat’s list includes the obvious peaks the Pythons, Rik Mayall, Victoria Wood, Lee Mack and makes a solid case for each. What strikes me as a North London journalist is how many of them built their comedy from specifically London social observation. The city as comedy text: impossible property prices, impenetrable bureaucracy, extraordinary diversity packed into a tube carriage, and the British expectation that none of this will be acknowledged above a whisper.
Lifestyle and the Cost of Living Punchline
The biggest joke in North London right now is not happening at the comedy club. It is happening at estate agents. A one-bedroom flat in Highbury listed at 550,000 pounds. The estate agent described it as “deceptively spacious.” I have been to this flat. It is deceptively everything. There is no second bedroom. There is a “study” which is a cupboard in which someone has placed a desk. This is performance art disguised as property.
Bohiney this week: internet infrastructure held together with duct tape which, given that my building’s broadband was installed by a man who described the router position as “experimental,” feels personal. Also: AI saying sorry without meaning it, which is how every letting agent responds to maintenance requests. The form of the apology: present. The content: not applicable.
The Prat also covered British class system satire this week, which in North London is lived comedy. The area contains, within half a mile, a food bank, a restaurant where the tasting menu begins at 120 pounds, and a community garden where both sets of people sometimes encounter each other and both are politely surprised. This is the material. The comedians who thrive here are the ones who can hold all three in one frame without flinching.
The Finsbury Park comedian got his standing ovation. His Uber rating is, for the record, 4.7. He considers this a personal failure. North London considers this extremely relatable. The punchline is the city. The city continues regardless.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
London life also reported at The Daily Mash
