Regular readers will know that my love of Jon Stewart knows no bounds, but it just increased a little more this morning with his take on the Jubilee pageant, and particularly CNN’s Piers Morgan working himself into a lather of deference about it. (Never has a man been more impressed with the sight of a boat turning round.)
But what struck me immediately after watching the clip that is currently doing the rounds on twitter is how this sort of gentle fun-poking has been conspiciously absent from our television screens over the last few days. A strange feeling washed over me when Stewart joked about the Queen spending 60 years “on the throne”: you can’t say that! I swear I heard the delicate tinkle of a taboo being broken, and I didn’t think we had any of those left. Had a British comedian tried the same gag over the weekend, on one of the many interminable live broadcasts over the Bank Holiday, I’m sure that huge sections of the press would have descended on them like vultures. Perhaps that’s why none of them were booked to chat on the sofa with Eamonn Holmes and Sophie Raworth and the rest.
Most of the British comedians who could sell out an arena were in attendance at the Queen’s Jubilee concert last night, and there was a real sense that anything edgy would have gone down with a lead balloon. Perhaps that’s a measure of changing public taste: Britain overwhelming supports the monarchy, and we love Her Majesty in particular (what a change from the times when you couldn’t move for tasteless Princess Diana jokes).
Still, there clearly was an appetite for some relief from Forelockapalooza. Frankie Boyle’s typically scabrous musings on Twitter had the shit retweeted out of them, while other comics live-tweeting the pageant and concert — mostly in a gently non-deferential way — got a lot of attention, too.
Personally, I don’t bedruge royalists a bit of pomp and circumstance. But I do find it odd that in an age where we regularly talk about the idea of nothing being off-limits to comedy, not a whisper of cheek made it on to our TV screens this weekend.
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