It’s 2004 and Shaun (Simon Pegg) is living an aimless existence, shuffling from his job selling white goods to local boozer The Winchester on an infinite loop, much to the chagrin of his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield). When a zombie apocalypse strikes London, he finally finds himself with a purpose: “Take car. Go to Mum’s. Kill Phil, grab Liz, go to The Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over. How’s that for a slice of fried gold?”
Credited with reanimating the rotting corpse of the British film industry, Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead delighted critics and consumers alike, blessedly coming soon after what felt to many like the final nail in the coffin for British comedy: Andy Humphries’ Sex Lives of the Potato Men. As Shaun of the Dead returns to cinemas for 20th-anniversary screenings, it’s hard not to look back and think everything just seemed better in 2004. The average price of a pint was £2.36. You could smoke in the pub (okay, maybe not a plus for most patrons). You could – at least according to Shaun of the Dead – make enough money as a part-time weed dealer to rent a room in Crouch End.
Jam-packed with pacy dialogue, physical comedy, and highly quotable one-liners, Shaun of the Dead is a comedy steeped in references to its British comedy forebears – it’s both an overt critique of an increasingly Americanised British consumer culture and service industry and a light-hearted, perfectly middle-brow zombie film. The comedy coming from the similarities between staggering drunk, chronically lazy Shaun and the zombies acts as a genuinely funny social critique, and it’s easy to see why it was credited with bringing British comedy back from the dead. But 20 years later, it seems we’re on life support again.
It’s an old complaint: nostalgia, it’s not what it used to be. But as we emerge from 14 years of Conservative rule, it’s hard not to look back at those years, rife with political scandal, and wonder what happened to the comedy that turns the knife on the state. Some would say the political disasters of the last decade in particular are beyond ridicule – Peter Capaldi has said you couldn’t make The Thick of It now. But is Britain really beyond satire? Looking at the decidedly milquetoast comedies to come out this year – Wicked Little Letters and Seize Them! – it seems we might be.
Rather than take aim at the current political climate, both films look to the past for their setting, with Wicked Little Letters taking place in the 1920s and Seize Them! set in the Dark Ages. Through this they avoid the tricky business of coming down too hard on anyone who might still exist, instead skewering easy targets that we love to hate: pious old women and bratty royals. By lambasting the respectability politics of the 1920s and medieval queens, both films avoid the murkier waters of class politics today, instead allowing an audience to chortle at the past and reflect fondly about how far we’ve come.
Both films play it safe in the content of their comedy too: toilet humour and excessive swearing abound. Bobik, Nick Frost’s character in Seize Them!, monologues about poo for a minute straight. While Ed – his character in Shaun of the Dead – is fond of fart jokes, Ed’s disgustingness is thrown into relief by the long-suffering Shaun. The joke is not the fart, the joke is Shaun’s life. But in Seize Them! the joke is just…shit.
This kind of twee, predictable humour is increasingly threatening to be our dominant cultural export. Writing about the triumph of twee, James Marriott wrote “A love of childish things is a mark of democratic taste and an aversion to pomposity. Britain, with its long tradition of anti-intellectualism, is especially vulnerable.” Where does this leave comedy? Well, five years ago, Chris Morris identified the problem: we’ve got used to a kind of satire that essentially placates the court. In lieu of satirising the ridiculousness of our times a la Shaun of the Dead or Four Lions, today’s comedies encourage us instead to laugh fondly at our own reflection. By refusing to come down on either side – Seize Them! presents the leader of the peasant uprising Humble Joan as just as evil and opportunistic as the Queen – the films appeal to the liberal middle. If there are any ‘baddies’, these films suggest, it’s anyone who dares to veer from that position.
And it’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s risky to deviate from that dominant cultural position: funding for Belfast group Kneecap (who starred in one of 2024’s better comedic efforts) was blocked by the UK government, in a move that has disturbing echoes of the Broadcasting Ban of the 1980s, which banned Sinn Féin spokespeople from speaking on television or radio. Earlier this year, the Arts Council England changed its wording to remove funding for political artists, before changing it back in response to the backlash.
Who can afford to make political art in 2024? With working-class people being increasingly priced out of the arts, and funding becoming worryingly contingent on your willingness to stay in line, most filmmakers who seek to critique the establishment do so from a position within it. So perhaps it’s not surprising that many of them are more comfortable emulating the elite than truly skewering them. Despite purporting to be “a vicious satire of the idle rich” Saltburn can’t help but delight in its ragtag band of toffs. With national treasures Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike cast in the roles with the best lines, the film seems to turn around and say: yes, they’re a bit eccentric, but aren’t posh people fun?
It’s not that films like Wicked Little Letters and Seize Them! are totally unenjoyable – the box office success of Wicked Little Letters speaks for itself. In fact, they are nice enough to have on in the background and let wash over you. Maybe everything is going to be okay, you find yourself thinking. There’s an argument to be made that in the current political climate, these are exactly the films people reach for: warm, bland, forgettable films that tell you everything will be okay. But you only have to look at Paddington’s appropriation as a Tory mascot to see how easily the twee ideology can become a vehicle for conservatism.
With another Paddington film out later this year, the future looks bleak. But let’s hope that a new government will usher in a new era of political satire – God knows we’ve got enough material to work with.
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