Ben Bankas And The Lady In The Labour Ad

In this post, I brought up the Canadian-born current Texas resident standup comic Ben Bankas, whose stage persona is in-your-face working class. One of his routines is embedded above (language warning). In a typical segment, he imitates an angry liberal lady podcaster:

"F--- the Constitution. I don't care what a bunch of white men from 200 years ago.. . ."

J---- C-----, they were right. Back then, they were like "Do not let these women vote. If you care about freedom of speech, you'd better not let these women vote."

And now we did, and they're f------ screaming in their cars after they go to Sonic.

The reason for his growing success is slightly puzzling. As I noted at the link, he plays to bourgeois, heavily college-educated audiences. He omits it from any thumbnail, but I strongly suspect he has a four-year degree himself; he knows his audience too well. Some -- maybe most -- of his audience have conventionally liberal views, but they'll pay up to over a hundred bucks a ticket for something like prurient excitement, maybe catharsis, in hearing this stuff spoken out loud.

Maybe one or two people in any show will make a big show of being loudly offended, but Bankas works it into his routine. The thing to keep in mind is that this is comedy. Whether the well-dressed, well-coifed ladies and their escorts in the audience agree with the slob with a big belly, jeans, and a scruffy beard on stage, they laugh, perhaps even in secret sympathy.

But another point I've been making lately is that the UK has an entirely different attitude toward the working class. Nothing about the working class is funny, there's no possibility of cameraderie of any sort with the bourgeoisie. This dates back at least to the General Strike of 1926, but I think it goes back even farther to the Fabian Society, in which prominent avant-garde bourgeoisie developed a program to termporize with working-class demands via their own creation, the Labour Party.

A conaservative UK lady YouTuber who calls herself Grannyopterix brings up a Labour political ad for the upcoming May 7 UK elections:

She says,

It's been put out for the election next week, and it's a humdinger of Labour Party contempt for the working classes and its belief that anyone who doesn't think like them is the very devil. It also shows once again just how old-fashioned and out-of-touch socialism, any socialism, is. I actually had to look twice to make sure this was a video made by the Labour Perty[.]

She introduces the scene of the ad:

A dark pub, with atmospheric sounds in the background and harsh lighting on the woman sitting at the table with a glass of beer in front of her. Right. And that tells you a whole lot about her, or rather, what the Labour Party thinks about her right from the get-go. What they're telling you is that the people who have these opinions that this actress is going to be repeating, well, they're the sort of people who frequent pubs and drink beer. Well, sorry Labour Party, that covers about 85% of the British population.

The actress then proceeds to give what, mutatis mutandis, would be a pretty good Ben Bankas routine, except that in saying her lines, she's dead serious. As Grannyopterix notes, she's quite attractive, but she's badly made up, and she's particularly good at twisting her face to look ugly. In other words, this is the equivalent of an actor dressed as Hitler reading Ben Bankas lines straight out serious, whereas Bankas uses timing, rolled eyes, smirks, and pauses to make his comic points.

At the end of her set,

Notice how she's put the glass of beer down. She's hidden it, because now, she's turning into a "reasonable person". Just look at the message that the Labour Party is giving the public here. Anyone with any of those ideas is a beer-swilling bigot, and tney're all the same.

The actress then speaks directly into the camera and declares, "I don't believe any of what I just said." This is something Ben Bankas would never do. The idea of canceling women's suffrage in this day and age is ridiculous, nobody would seriously propose it, but it's part of the comic alternate universe he's set up, and the audience goes along. Nobody would ever expect him to renounce a single thing he said at the end of his set; that's not what they paid for -- not even the people who stomp out in indignation in the middle of the show would pay for that.

But the Labour Party has its roots in the UK Victorian avant-garde bourgeoisie. These were serious people. They're just as serious now. They were frightened of the world proletarian revoultion, and they're just as terrified of the working class now. There's not a single funny thing about it.

Something's deeply wrong in the UK, but it's nothing new. I think Benamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the others understood something very similar, even way back then.