Laid up with flu I did little last night but watch television, including a programme on the top 50 comedians’ comedians. From the top ten I would have picked, in no particular order, Groucho Marx, Woody Allen and Bill Hicks as my top three. The winner, Peter Cook, I confess to regarding as an insufferable bore. What always struck me about Cook was his signature 'bold stare', little different in fact from the wide-eyed buttonholing stare of the coke-head, which will tolerate nothing less than cravenly complicit laughter. This stare is like an empty demand to laugh appended to whatever content Cook happens to light upon: laugh, or be a prude; laugh or be subject to the ignominy of ‘not getting it’. The stare says, defiantly prior to any utterance: “I’m in on the joke – how about you?.” It is as if, to rewrite Adorno’s dictum ‘he who has laughter on his side has no need of humour’.
"Another way to define the trap into which cynicism gets caught is via the difference between the public Law and its obscene underside, the unwritten superego rules: cynicism mocks the public Law from the position of its obscene underside which, consequently, it leaves intact."
Some of the programme’s commentators, in support of Cook, invoked the way he brought to the surface, with audible relief, all the obscene and filthy sentiments which people think silently or voice only in their living rooms. That this is ‘subversive’ or liberating however, is itself rather laughable. These things do not blow open the law but serve as its obscene support, its shadowy double, as Zizek and other have shown. There is nothing liberating or subversive about a man, describing with evident and repellent enthusiasm, kicking a woman repeatedly in the ‘cunt’ as Cook does in one of the Derek and Clive routines. And there is no reason why we should be blackmailed by laughter into obscene solidarity with such sentiments.