When I’m walking my daughter’s small dog, a cute little Maltese Terrier/ Bichon Frise cross, and she meets a big dog in the street she often starts having a go, puffing herself up and acting like a scary canine. On a good day everyone laughs. (On a bad day they are very annoyed and think I’m a bad owner, but that's another story).
Why do we laugh? We find something inherently comical in the big and the small coming together. Here it’s the small dog contrasted with the big dog and what’s more the small dog acting as if it’s a big dog. It’s the same effect as when a small child tries to ape grown up behaviour. For example a toddler attempting to sing and dance like a pop star. The result is (affectionate) laughter.
So there’s something fundamental about the collision of big and small that makes us laugh. Technically this is known as ‘bathos’.
For example, satirical comedy is built around bathos. The bigness of the powerful people and situations you are satirising can be rendered comic by the smallness of the references and contexts you bring to them. For example, in Private Eye from 1997, the pious guitar playing Tony Blair became a trendy vicar addressing his congregation in the weekly St Albion Parish News. The whole government was reduced to the scale of a church parish with the Reverend Blair being assisted by the likes of church warden Peter Mandelson, who was in charge of the Millennium Tent on the village green.
The Tory-Lib Dem coalition government then saw David Cameron portrayed as the headmaster of the New Coalition Academy, then the 2015 election saw the Conservatives gain a majority in their own right, Private Eye now portrayed him as head of Cameron Free School. His successor, Mrs May, was portrayed as headmistress of St. Theresa’s Independent State Grammar School for Girls (and Boys). All of these examples are taking the bigness of government and putting them into a small context, creating that big/small friction.
Perhaps less successful was their parody of the next PM, Boris Johnson, responding to questions from the public on “Fakebook” Live. It’s often said that the news has gone beyond satire, or in Marina Hyde’s memorable phrase is that politicans are now ‘auto-satirical’. This Johnson example shows how, for bathos to work, there has to be a seriousness to undercut – which was conspicuously lacking with Johnson. Indeed his whole career seems to be an act of bathos, undercutting the seriousness of the roles and offices he occupies.
Even he, however, is satirisable. For example, in a superb New Statesmen prose piece ‘The death of “Boris” the clown’ where Edward Docx brilliantly reimagines Johnson’s entire political career as that of a slapstick performance clown. For example, he wrote, ‘His breakthrough show, “Mayor”, opened in 2008 and ran for eight exhilarating years. He was already highly accomplished at a kind of low moment-to-moment physical comedy and he would seek to engage the public with sudden calamities, tumblings, losing of directions. He would, for example, strand himself on the high wire and simply dangle there with his flags – oddly pointless, ever-present, grinning.’ It's an amazingly sustained parody. Read the whole piece here.
Stand-up comedians who satirise the powerful, often use the same device. Here’s a Frankie Boyle joke about Boris Johnson from when he was foreign secretary: "He's just there to divert us from the horrific things the government is planning, like a nodding dog stuck to a serial killer's dashboard". Firstly, this is an analogy gag. (A favourite device of Boyle’s) He is in effect answering the question: why on earth is he even in government? He comes up with the horribly plausible answer: he’s there as a distraction. And then the idea gets it’s comic kick from the bathetic payoff: the friction between the big horror of a serial killer and the smallness of a nodding dog.
Meanwhile, Matt Kirshen talking to an American audience about Brexit discusses how shell-shocked Gove and Johnson looked the morning after the referendum when they’d won. He observes they don’t look like winners, they look like people who’ve got something they didn’t really expect or want. He then illustrates this with an analogy. He says (to his American audience) that they looked like construction workers who’d shouted out to a passing woman ‘get your titties out’… and she did. He then pulls a startled face. So this is taking the big geopolitical decision of Brexit and putting it into the small context of a building site.
Now read on for the next homework in which you can work with BIG/small. And below is the aforementioned Faith going after a big dog.