Papering the Fourth Wall

The fundamental characteristics by which the neat cataloguing of genre (which is in truth just a different kind of packaging for a different kind of commodity) would identify a programme as comedy are increasingly the po-mo staples of self-reference, self-parody and self-deprecation. We are saturated with metahumour; not a laugh track can be played without the accompaniment of knowing wink and a cryptic reference. The shows that stand on such devices breed elitist, inbred cliques, where the audience is made to feel in some way better than the non-viewers because they’re in on the jokes (patently absurd, as it forces the initiate to become a fan before delivering any value). Yet even ignoring this, there is a simple, logical flaw in such performances. Metahumour alone is not enough to carry a show, because, crucially, it is not humour itself.

When all of this was new, back when the world was young and the comic heroes of legend were first turning their attentions inward for humorous effect, these self-references were genuinely funny because they rode on the back of an established pantheon of real comic devices. They exposed the cracks in the comic system and subjected it to itself, shattering the unspoken agreement between author and audience that kept the inner workings of the joke off limits. (Every now and again comedy attempts to utilise shock value by turning its attention to something that was assumed taboo. That’s all that this is; metahumour is no ‘higher’ a form of comedy than David Walliams sucking some woman’s tit. The only difference is subject matter. More on that later.) It worked, and it took off, and that’s where it all went wrong.

Nothing is so guaranteed to exhaust itself as popularity (and this is why much that truly endures earns itself cult status – it never exposes itself utterly, but modestly presents itself to the few who really get it, and thus forms its niche). Like a poor stand-up who retells the material of others without ever really understanding it, the new generation of comic writers, more concerned with success than their own intuitive sense of humour, leapt upon metahumour, but they didn’t get the punchline. Founding shows on breaking of the fourth wall, on running jokes and attacking their own trends, they never appreciated that metahumour was not a joke upon itself, but upon the secret reality of all and any jokes, the archetypal joke. Subtracting the metahumour from the new shows left nothing, they were founded only on self-parody, and so had no self to parody. And what is truly ironic is that, in assuming a device centred upon the self-reference, the self-analysis, they make explicit their own vacuousity.

Enter Howard Moon and Vince Noir to show us where it all went wrong. Watching the Boosh turning their attention on themselves, all of the above becomes clear. Far more inspired than insipid and empty self-parodies, they don’t merely take the piss out of themselves reflexively, they realise their ironies as a separate entity; the unspoken and the unseen is suddenly spoken to and seen. Combined with an episode focussed on the strange quirky ‘crimping’ that has been with the show from the start and jokes about having the wrong scripts, there was a brief moment of doubt where it seemed the Boosh had finally become like everyone else. This was of course folly. The pair’s introspection worked because it had an internality to explore. The past two and a half series of Boosh have been founded on genuine material, substantial characters, settings and devices, and so there actually is something to observe here.

Note that the Boosh has always displayed its nature; for a long time every episode started with Howard’s greeting of ‘welcome to the show’, and the pair have never taken pains to disguise the artificial nature of sets and costumes, quite the opposite. Where they differ from the masses is that this display of the behind-the-scenes (or, perhaps more accurately, the being-a-scene, the scene as a scene) is the way of being. The Boosh presents its nature as a performance not as some sort of secret nod of inclusion to an audience suspending their disbelief (and thus suspending themselves from inclusion), but as the nature of the show’s world. There is no ‘real world’ of the Boosh, which the audience is required to believe as true. The Boosh is always and before all else an act. This is the joke. The Boosh are not breaking the fourth wall, they have never erected one.

So it is that when the pair finally introduce metahumour to their show, there is a base of humour existent; the beyond-humour has something to go beyond, and is substantial. The Boosh have finally recaptured what made these devices so effective when they were popular the first time. And this is in such sharp contrast to the humdrum fakers of comedy, the myriad Flighty Zeuses, that not only does it successfully recapture the comic impact of those classics, it also shows us precisely why it has been a failure since. “Come with us now on a journey through time… And space!” commands the voice of some omnipotent being over the opening credits of the show, but it seems like the world of the Mighty Boosh might be nothing less remarkable than our own world, thrown into sharp relief; the detachment offered us by a temporal and spatial exodus the only way we can view it.

And yet all of this may be bollocks, because metahumour isn’t really a comedic device at all. There is no method of delivery here, no lens through which a particular take on a subject is offered. In fact metahumour is the subject. Humour about humour is no more a device than humour about kittens. The mistake was in giving it its own name. When they named it, people began to mistakenly believe it actually was something.

…And that’s why I can’t go for that.