Laugh or cry

More free seats than the shadow cabinetIT IS a case of bad comic timing. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which runs through August, is normally a chance for political stand-up comedians to throw carefully honed jokes to reliably liberal audiences. Yet the speed of events since the June 23rd EU referendum, which triggered a change of prime minister and a leadership contest in the Labour Party, has left comics rewriting shows as they go along. One compares the task to wrestling a lubricated dolphin in a bathtub.Trickiest is negotiating a new ideological cleavage in audiences. Labour's hard-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is disliked by many Labour voters and most of his own MPs (this week the Labour mayor of London and the head of the party's Scottish wing became the latest to withdraw their support). Yet he is wildly popular among young idealists. The lefty Fringe audience is therefore split as never before. Do comics dare to mock Mr Corbyn'Some have been ruthless. One self-described Corbynite gasped as Ahir Shah tore into the Labour leader with an unprintable joke about his fiddling while the left burned....Continue reading
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