Where are the heirs of Michael Wharton? Right-wing satire and the philosophy of humour
C. Roger Taylor
For several decades, Michael Wharton (pictured) was the comedic genius behind the Daily Telegraph’s Way of the World column. Writing as “Peter Simple”, Wharton wrote into existence a cast of apparently absurd characters. Through them he constructed an alternative universe, in which the follies of progressivism were ruthlessly satirized.
I remember those creations with some fondness. They were comforting, because they were caricatures, and in caricature lies truth. Wharton’s talent was that these grotesques were, bizarrely, relatable. Meeting them on the page was fine.
He introduced us to Mrs Dutt-Pauker, the Hampstead millionaire socialist, perennially offended by the vulgar habits of the lower orders and their grubby preferences for “oppressive” products such as the South African orange. Sat next to her, at an imaginary (and yet plausible) Whartonian dinner party, you might find Neville Dreadburg, avant-garde artist and campaigner against the cannibalistic habits of the Ulster Protestants.
The (secular) grace has been offered by Dr Spaceley-Trellis, the progressive, “go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon”, for whom the existence (or not) of God is a matter of supreme irrelevance.
I’ll make the obvious point first: the Wharton universe has come to seem less exotic now that the forces of progressivism have pretty much completed their long march through the institutions. Dr Spaceley-Trellis has been reincarnated as our current Archbishop of Canterbury; and Mrs Dutt-Pauker doubtless has a counterpart in charge of your local NHS Trust. Or, possibly, has decided to spend a millionth of her income on increasingly forlorn journeys to the High Court, in order to reverse Brexit.
Michael Wharton died in 2006, and he’s very much missed. Humour is a natural mechanism of subversion, and the contemporary culture of “wokeness” provides rich material for the competent satirist. So where are the right-wing subversives?
We had Roger Scruton, of course, who for some years used his wine column to smuggle various conservative heresies into the pages of the New Statesman. But he was eventually rumbled, sacked, and is sadly no longer with us. Craig Brown has the occasional good day, but has never topped his 1992 parody of the Alan Clark Diaries in which he has the late, libidinous politician attempting to “get off” with a “foreign looking” woman who turns out to be the Queen. Geoff Norcott can be good value, but is increasingly the token “right-wing” comedian and when that is your schtick it has a limited shelf-life. You end up as the patsy right-winger on Have I Got News for You, a career graveyard unless you are launching a slow-motion campaign to become a Tory Prime Minister.
Is there something about satire – or humour generally – which is antithetical to the right-wing temperament? It’s hard to see why there should be.
“Amusement” (at a joke, a state of affairs, or whatever) is a complex and distinctively human phenomenon. It involves a capacity which forms part of our repertoire as uniquely rational creatures. To find something funny is to think of it, or imagine it, in a certain way. To understand what humour is, is to conduct an inquiry not into the philosophy of politics, but of the mind.
And that’s a depressingly “under-described” aspect of the philosophical literature. It’s deeply ironical that the best account of why something is funny was proposed by the personally humourless Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgement.
Kant suggested that central to humour is the concept of incongruity. When we find something funny, it is because the world refuses to behave in the way we think it should: “amusement” is the pleasurable way of resolving thwarted expectations.
On this view, the “way of the world” is absurd, and humour is an appropriate response to that absurdity. The universe is intelligible but in the end unknowable. Which is, when you think about it, pretty much the conservative view. Conservatives, such as myself, should enjoy the rhythm of nonsense that life throws at us. We should also find solace in the antagonistic possibilities of satire.
So, I’ll ask again, where are they, these contemporary inheritors of the Wharton legacy? Is there something invasive about the “woke” culture that makes it dangerous to announce that you are against it?
Well, yes. But I doubt that Wharton would have cared. He didn’t then, after all. We are living through a time of enervating political conformity. It’s time to start laughing again at those who are enforcing it.
Take up your pen!
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