o add). What is it about alternative comedians that’s so depressing? “Have I Got News For You” used to feature various examples of the type: one I remember in particular some time around the start of the Iraq war expressed with heavy irony the opinion, when the subject was WMDs, that oh yes, the US would be sure to find them, no doubt about that – the implication being of course that they’d plant them. For this lot the world’s just one big conspiracy run by US Business. Pictures of massacres in Bosnia are just a ruse by the power elite to keep the public’s mind off the oppression at home (cue wild applause); it’s only because the passengers in the 9/11 planes were such white middle-class wusses that the hijacks succeeded (more wild applause). It’s just so narcissistic, apart from the fact – problematic, you’d have thought, for comedians – that it’s not funny. Davis blames Chomsky. As he says of Hicks:
Having ploughed his way through the writings of the arch-radical Noam Chomsky, he arrives at an impossibly crude, conspiracy-theory view of American society in which every important decision is taken by a secretive corporate elite bent on preserving its own power. He talks about “totalitarian mind-control government” with a straight face. This sort of up-market left-wing fantasy — Nostradamus for the latte-drinking classes — has become a commonplace in the post-Hicks comedy era.
It’s all done with the straight-faced conviction that they’re being incredibly courageous to speak out like this. Lenny Bruce wouldn’t have been amused.
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