Today I've been reading a collection of Max Beerbohm's theatre reviews (and what a beautiful writer he was, by the way), which includes a piece from 1898 about the state of the modern Music Hall. Needless to say, Beerbohm is displeased by the way that novelty acts are nowadays getting in the way of the songs, but the bit that I thought was relevant was his reflection on watching a performance by Tom Costello:
'It is one of the old traditions of the Music Hall that the male comedians must make themselves as unsightly as they can. Indeed, ugliness, physical or moral, always seems to be the chief feature of the characters represented by the male artists. The aim of the Music Hall is, in fact, to cheer the lower classes up by showing them a life that is uglier and more sordid than their own. The mass of people, when it seeks pleasure, does not want to be elevated: it wants to laugh at something beneath its own level.'
I'm not entirely convinced by this. I know that Beerbohm went to the Halls a great deal, from a very early age, whereas I obviously never have, but even so it doesn't seem right. Surely part of the point, even of the
coster comedians, like Albert Chevalier and Gus Elen, was to express a reality that much of the audience would have known and recognised and of which they were a part. And it's the stoic response to the hardships of life - as Beerbohm himself pointed out in a 1903 piece about Harry Freeman - that provided the heart of Music Hall.
Anyway, I thought Beerbohm's observations made an interesting historical counterpoint to
Nick Cohen's thoughts on modern comedy.
