BEN ELTON - THE INDEPENDENT - MARCH 2008

This week, the 1980’s comedian Ben Elton told the Christian magazine Third Way that the BBC is too scared to make jokes about Islam. Apparently, Ben Elton himself even had a line about taking the mountain to Mohammed disallowed by the BBC on religious grounds. Comedy fans may find it ironic that this line vanished when somehow the whole of his recent ITV series, the woeful Get A Grip, was somehow allowed to be broadcast.
But to be fair to Ben Elton, it is true that there are less jokes concerning Islam on television than there are jokes concerning Christianity, but it is a leap of faith to assume this means that existing jokes in existing scripts were removed to protect Muslim sensibilities and BBC staff. It may be that the Muslim comedy Ben Elton would like so dearly to see on our screens simply isn’t being generated at source.

What do we know, en masse, of Islam, beyond the most basic stereotypes of burkas and bombs? Life Of Brian brilliantly used the intimate understanding its audience had of the chronology of Christ’s life to substitute him for a bewildered, normal bloke. But it’s not possible to take people under the skin of Islam in the same way, when it remains largely a mystery to most writers and audiences.
Comedians who are ‘culturally Christian’ at least understand the taboos they chose to break when writing about vicars and virgin births, and do so knowingly. The Muslim world’s response to the Danish Mohammed cartoons remains deplorable, but the fireworks of the gags contained in them were drowned out by unexpected exploding landmines of depictions of the Prophet. Perhaps a rigorous and thorough satire of Islamic themes would be better executed by someone with experience of it?

There are Muslim comics in the stand-up arena, such as the inadvertently totemic Shazia Mirza, who can speak about their culture from a personal point of view, and who have earned both the praise and the hostility of their own communities for doing so. Perhaps we should look to them to fill Mr Elton’s Muslim joke quota?
And there are jokes about Islam in circulation of course. I have a routine based on being asked to leave a weight watchers meeting by a woman in a hijab which has been described as both ‘tediously politically correct’ and ‘ignorant and offensive’. Chris Morris is working on a comedy film about suicide bombers which one expects will be characteristically illuminating. And Roy Chubby Brown’s latest CD includes the following material; “You can’t say anything about religion these days can you? They say you can’t say Protestant, you can’t say Muslim, you can’t say Jew. Which is a shame, because I like to go in my newsagent on a Sunday morning and say, ‘Here’s a quid, keep the change you Paki bastard.’”

Chubby’s wonderful timing and shocking vulgarity mean one can’t help but laugh. But his joke doesn’t mean anything. It sets up the expectation that it will address anxieties about faith, and then jumps into simple racist abuse. It would be difficult, for example, for the BBC to justify broadcasting such a flawed joke. Yet it is received by its enthusiastic audience as if it has heroically exposed the PC establishment’s fear of addressing non-Christian religions, a glib truism that the increasingly disconnected Ben Elton has now also embraced.

At the end of his interview, Ben Elton, whose children attend a Church school, said he believed in “almost nothing”. Anyone who has seen his Queen musical, the most cyncial piece of art ever made by humans, will not be surprised by this. But Ben Elton went on to say that schools should teach the essentials of Christianity, if only for cultural reasons. In making this statement he begins to unravel his own confusion. Schools should teach children not just about Christianity, but about all religions, for cultural reasons. Religious separatism in education encourages the teaching of religions as revealed truths, rather than as various, and often equally valid, mytho-poetic attempts to rationalise existence. This will not build the kind of society where we know enough about each other’s religious and cultural backgrounds to understand them, accept them, question them and, yes, make jokes about them in anything other than the most ignorant manner.