Corbyn cannot play it straight in the age of the humourist

Martin Amis has just struck a telling blow in support of the great cause of humour. In the course of a newspaper diatribe directed at Jeremy Corbyn, Amis scathingly enumerated what he perceived to be the Labour leader’s faults – under-educated, full of second-hand ideas, rigid, slow-witted, vulgar-tongued – before turning his attention to one failing in particular. “He is humourless,” the novelist pronounced, adding with appropriate solemnity that this was “an extremely grave accusation, imputing as it does an elementary lack of nous”. The humourless man was “a joke – and a joke he will never get.”

Amis’s article, published in The Sunday Times, will have converted many to the Labour cause with its unquestioning snobbery and patronising air; if that is how an establishment figure sees things, many will think, Corbyn deserves all the support he can get. The telling blow for humour was not the argument that a politician fails to make jokes, but something far funnier – the spectacle of a rather grand novelist making a chump of himself.

Amis, born into cultural and social privilege, scoffs at a man who chose to leave education with two A-levels. He then name-drops his way through a period 40 years ago when he was personally “close to the epicentre of the Corbyn milieu” while working at the New Statesman with James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens and Julian Barnes (they don’t make lefties like that any more). He makes sneering reference to the fact that Corbyn is vegetarian and teetotal, before accusing him of stupidity, of mugness and of being out of touch with the English people.

It is an unintentionally hilarious piece. Amis lives most of his life in New York and has never exactly been a man of the people himself. Once the funniest of novelists, he has of late become solemn and leaden-footed, and now plays the role of media pundit, delivering his views of political life – that is, of those who do rather than write – in the superior, world-weary tone of a cut-price Gore Vidal. Sadly for his admirers, it is Amis, not Corbyn, who is the joke.

Nor is his claim that humourlessness is a grave charge to be levelled against an Englishman exactly new. In a famous essay called Tread Softly For You Tread on My Jokes, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in the mid-1960s that “humour… is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious.” Muggeridge, another skittish and unconventional writer who dwindled into an ageing chunterer, went on to argue that irreverence and jokiness were an important indicator of a healthy culture. To laugh was to criticise, to recognise the imperfection of institutions and public figures. “A decrepit society shuns humour as a decrepit individual shuns draughts.”

Yet, in the years that followed, it was precisely the humour-shunners who were voted in as leaders: Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher were both baffled by anything resembling a joke; Callaghan and Major tried a little harder but could hardly be described as great wits. Those who were genuinely funny – Neil Kinnock, Denis Healey, Charles Kennedy and William Hague – paid the price. It was as if having a sense of humour made a politician seem lightweight, frivolous.

That changed with the arrival of spin and New Labour. Charm became important. A measured jokiness – almost always scripted – was an essential part of public life. Politicians needed to be able to show their cuddly side, appearing on chat shows, understanding pop culture references and generally being good sports. A capacity for taking and telling jokes was expected; if Ed Miliband had been better at it, he might have lasted longer.

The traditional left has always tended, with some justification, to look down on jokiness. In the epic encounter between Tony Benn and Ali G, a key moment in the history of humour and politics, Benn triumphed because his inability to get the joke, the way he doggedly answered every demented question with po-faced seriousness, was in the end more endearing than seeing a politician trying to play along with a comedian.

It is different now. If Corbyn were ragged by a TV funny-man and failed to see the joke, the press would be merciless, and would trot out the Amis line: out of touch, rigid, slow-witted, humourless.

It is George Osborne’s problem, too. His main opponent in the forthcoming leadership contest merely has to puff out his cheeks, stutter a bit or fall over to win the right kind of headlines. In stark contrast to Boris Johnson, the Chancellor is something of a cold fish. The uneasy smile on his face is that of a man who has just been told a joke but doesn’t quite get it.

A few years ago, when solemnity counted for something, Osborne or Corbyn would gain their revenge at the ballot box, when zanier opponents can suddenly seem a touch risky. But the cultural mood of the moment favours those who know how to laugh. In that sense, Amis’s argument that humourlessness can be a significant flaw in a politician is correct. If Corbyn is perceived to be solemn and prim, he will alienate and annoy voters. Without resorting to quips written by funny-guy speechwriters, he needs to show that to be amused by the absurdities of political life is not to be unsympathetic to society’s victims.

The case for political humour used to be based on the idea that making fun of the serious and self-important is the mark of a healthy society – “Everyone and everything should be open to ridicule,” Muggeridge wrote – but in modern political life, something more primal is going on.

The left-wing politician who treats all issues as being too serious for laughter is behaving like someone who has already lost the argument. There is ample material for mockery and cold-eyed amusement in the way we are governed, as comedians like Mark Steel, Jeremy Hardy and Mark Thomas regularly prove.

A smile, the occasional joke, a light touch of irony: these convey the seductive confidence of a winner.