The League of Gentlemen: Papa Lazarou and punching up

I LOVE the League of Gentlemen. I’ve been a fangirl of all four of them forever, seeking out their solo writing, going to see them in theatre, and I even have a signed (by three of them – curse you, Dyson, living in Manchester) copy of their very poorly-selling scripts book. I’ve watched the show and their live performances often, and I’m even a big fan of the unloved third season. It’s coming from a place of love, then, that I say – some of the jokes are very not ok. I want to investigate how this came to be, how this might be changed, and what we can learn from the ideas articulated by and radiating from some of the more offensive jokes of the series – and from how beloved they always were.

If you’re old enough to remember polyphonic ringtones, you probably know Papa Lazarou. In the days when magazines came with ads in the back for you to text a number and get a pic of the OC hottie of your choice texted to you for £3.50 and the only music a Nokia or Sony Eriksson could play was remastered in a hideous elevator-style chiptune, TV ads ran that offered you the chance to get hit songs and jokes as your ringtone. In amongst the Crazy Frogs and Sweetie Chicks was nestled the irritating ‘Hello Dave’ soundbite of Papa Lazarou, voiced by Reece Shearsmith.

The practise of downloading ringtones might be considered reminiscent of Georgian hawkers selling sheet music and engravings or the predatory loot crates and subscription services of today, but for the couple of years between phones not being internet enabled and ordinary people being able to understand their phone’s hardware, this very specific business model became a multi-billion dollar global industry. That context feels important, as does the lionisation of Frankie Boyle, a British comedian whose crass style was intended to skewer celebrity culture. Boyle was immensely popular, but received such a backlash in 2010 that the BBC changed their policy on the British entertainment stalwart the panel show. Boyle doesn’t belong with Ricky Gervais or Little Britain, because instead of being radicalised by the backlash or becoming more controversial, stupid, and lowest-common-denominator, he has chosen a much quieter life making more explicitly political content on streaming-only services. Somewhere in between these perspectives sit the League of Gentlemen, who still make mainstream content but who have not doubled-down on old jokes.

The League of Gentlemen were, to many people, catchphrases and shock value. As Little Britain had ‘the only gay in the village’ and ‘I’m a lady!’, the League of Gentlemen had the ‘local shop for local people!’ and ‘Scumbelina’. The show platformed Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, a comedian from the old guard famous for being foul-mouthed and racist, and included jokes that were dark, gross-out and adult every week. The main aspect of the show, though, was the characters. It is characters like Pauline, the Dentons and Barbara that endure – clearly demonstrated by the fact that the group attempted to kill iconic shop-owners Edward and Tubbs on at least three separate occasions, every time being pressured to bring them back. The characters all have arcs, albeit sometimes absurd or unrealistic ones, that drive the show forward and create the town of Royston Vasey and the humanity of the show. Having an ‘out’ gay member allowed (and perhaps encouraged) the League to make conscious political statements at moments, and their desire not to offend whilst pushing the envelope can be demonstrated by the group’s first offending (through a joke in their 2001 live show), then appeasing and working with, the Captain Scott estate. Their deliberate claiming of the Northern identity disarms and then interrogates British media and class culture – although it is worth noting that they are now members of the London media establishment and only one lives up north and doesn’t engage with television or celebrity.

The League’s most provocative acts are, like many of their seemingly absurd skits, grounded in mundanity and lived experience: the backstory of Jason Tompkins’ character in Psychoville references a name the troupe discarded in favour of The League of Gentlemen; the dialogue of Barbara, the masc-presenting transwoman cab driver, is largely taken verbatim from a documentary about the trans-feminine experience, and Papa Lazarou himself grew out of a landlord shared by two members of the League who would only talk to Steve. Hello, is that Steve? I want to talk to Steve, please. Lazarou, like many characters on the show, grew from his initial conception to become larger-than-life and embody a nightmarish whimsy rooted in a vintage horror aesthetic that the group adored. There is no set path for how they got to him: just as the character Bernice wasn’t a reverend in her original concept and the village of Royston Vasey was named Spent in the radio show, there is no clear reason that the characters developed the way they did. Like many collaborative writing processes and shows that developed during a long run of live performances, the League of Gentlemen ended up with a complex web of people and relationships whose origin could not be discerned from their final state. What we as viewers need to understand, however, is when we can accept a basis in reality for questionable choices. Royston Vasey is Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown’s real name, and that, to me, makes their platforming of him – which was entirely scripted – a small reference that makes sense. Papa Lazarou, however, has no reason to exist in the way that he does, and the joke that was spawned from interactions in real life could have, and should have, developed in a different direction.

Papa Lazarou got the show removed from Netflix for being portrayed in blackface, and the character is indeed ghoulishly reminiscent of gollywogs and minstrel shows, but perhaps the most explicitly racist thing about the character is how aggressively he is coded as ‘gypsy’. It is telling that the caricature of traveller heritage and a traveller lifestyle portrayed by the League is still not considered offensive by the British public. Despite portraying traveller people as invasive, dirty, crooked, bigamous and coercive, a nonsense culture that threatens suburban life, and powerful circus creatures with dark magic and curses, these attitudes are not generally felt to be problematic, and traveller people are rejected by mainstream society and the establishment. People still feel not just able but compelled to stop their children befriending travellers, removing options for traveller settlement, and distrusting anybody related to travellers. Whether their thoughts are rooted in the more understandable prejudice of ‘dirty and uneducated’, which acknowledges that travellers have school recidivism and dropout rates much higher than any other groups and are often denied access to facilities like running water, or the frankly ridiculous fear of curses, the show is playing into those tropes and showing something which must be acknowledged as racist. As viewers, we need to learn to recognise that although there might be something obvious that’s no longer a part of our value system, more often than not prejudice is perpetuated by smaller aspects of a culture. For Netflix to remove the show on the basis of Lazarou’s blackface seems like being convicted for shooting the deputy when you actually shot the sheriff: you get to the right point, but for entirely the wrong reasons. Papa Lazarou is anti-black and in blackface, but that is portrayed as a ridiculous prejudice and not put up for laughs by the league; Papa Lazarou is also anti-traveller, and that is a much more deep-rooted prejudice which goes without being examined by the show.

The group’s collective love for horror might help to explain how this character came to be. The influences of Lon Chaney and Val Lewton are all over the group’s oeuvre, and Papa Lazarou is not exempt: rivalling Hammer for his conscious camp, as well as classic Karloff performances like Bedlam and The Mummy for the unheimlich energy present in his scenes, Papa Lazarou is perhaps more of a vector for horror than any other aspect of the show. The show very much frames him as such: he is akin to the Creature from the Black Lagoon or King Kong in his carrying-off of women (which of course echoes cinema’s earliest rape panic: black men in Birth of a Nation), he is the ‘big bad’ of the Christmas special, and he lives in the most classically creepy setting of the show, the haunted carnival – somehow being creepier than the Shining twins parody who keep a sentient scarecrow hostage. Indeed, Papa Lazarou can be placed in a tradition of othering and fear that has travelled down history through the horror genre. Like villains in the stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann or Childe Rowland, Papa Lazarou is inhuman and insurmountable object whose magic is not examined or explained. By series three, the League essentially produce a short horror film in which to put him, developing an otherworldly backstory and locating the comedy the ridiculousness of its premise. This does little, though, to remove Lazarou’s inherent engagement with a racist history. By putting his victims as suburban women, Papa Lazarou is a means for the League to mock the heightened glamour of horror movies and engage with a Northern gothic of rejection, aspiration, and sanitisation – but he does so by being a monster and a caricature whose aesthetic and performance is taken from a history of racially-coded villains. Essentially, the League of Gentlemen’s source material is racist and coded to communicate that racism to their audience; the show may not carry forward that intent, but it does use the selfsame methods. Interestingly, they do not engage with the queer coding that cinematic history, including in the horror genre, has historically had – and therein we see the power of having representation in writers’ rooms and production teams.

The show gets more outlandish in general as it continues, but Papa Lazarou’s storyline in particular seems calculated to diverge as far as possible from real life in an attempt to ‘have your cake and eat it’: to keep the iconic character whose voice clips became ringtones and helped make the creators rich and popular, whilst also acknowledging the harmful stereotypes perpetuated by the character in his first incarnation. I do not want to say that this is successful, but for 2002, this is more introspection than anybody expected. Listening to the commentary on the DVD box sets is strange: the League do not seem to regret Papa Lazarou and his portrayal, and why should they? Their status as members of the arts establishment has long been uncontested, in part because of their early indie cred. Despite this, they seem to acknowledge that Papa Lazarou is uncomfortable, emphasising that he “is not a black man” and that it is an outlandish, inhuman portrayal. Steve Pemberton’s comments on the removal of the show from Netflix are particularly telling: “we didn’t receive any complaints” is an explicit avoidance of engaging with the substance of the issue, and although it places the onus on audiences and commissioners to recognise and reject racism, rather than creators not to rely on lazy stereotypes for laughs, it seems to acknowledge that the recent re-evaluation of the character is in some way justified, and that the changing culture was right to make complaints. These comments – from two members of the League – seem to suggest that the comedy is a product of its time and that it might be considered differently today. Pemberton went on to say that the reaction they hoped to inspire in audiences was “What point are they trying to make?” inferring that, although the optics have changed surrounding the portrayal, the League of Gentlemen never wanted you to laugh at Papa Lazarou, and instead held him up as a (still ill-advised) example of the inherent silliness of media that tells us to fear the other. By placing Papa Lazarou in a northern town where he is about as threatening as the butcher, a white man with ginger mutton chops who serves as a pillar of the community, they felt that they were negating a racist legacy. This might be wishful thinking on my part, however, and it could simply be some rich white men covering their arses by saying as little as possible.

I still think Papa Lazarou is indefensible. Although you are supposed to cringe at him, the character is still a little too racially charged for the cringe to be motivated by anything good, or for any reaction to this viscerally off-putting, inherently violent character to manifest in development of thinking or discourse. What I will say, however, is that the League of Gentlemen inspired me to write a very strange and uncanny comedy series script that I remain proud of ten years on. I find the Little Britains and the Ricky Gervaises boring in a way that I don’t with the League of Gentlemen or Frankie Boyle. Although they’re dated, the jokes skewer a culture I lived through and was part of, a culture which still in some ways informs my thinking. Just a decade later, we expect diverse casts and diverse writers on our comedies, and we expect better of our public figures (although many still do get away with past transgressions without showing remorse). We hold celebrities to a higher standard and see more women, people of colour, and differently abled people on TV and in power. This can only be a good thing, and I hope it continues – but I also hope that we learn to criticise, rather than censor entirely, media, and that we develop a way for media to be available to adults who know what they’re getting into rather than being presented as just entertainment to be flicked through and landed upon unwittingly. Like all things, I recommend following an artist’s progression if you’re a fan of their work – people’s growth over time usually results in better, more fully rendered art.

Crazy Frog had three full albums and several top-10 hit singles, by the way. Just in case you read all this and still want to look on your youth with rose coloured glasses.

On This Topic:

• The work of Sumanth Gopinath: scholarly articles and books on Jamster culture
• What exactly is up with Ricky Gervais’ jokes anyway?
• Jeremy Dyson’s post-League efforts are the least well known but also maybe the best? If you like the legitimately weird, try his shows and books.

To-Do:

• Get a link taken out of my watch
• Send mail
• Finish reading C&K so I can send it back.

Today’s Culture:

• LinkedIn. Ōdī et amō. Networking blah blah.
• I think I’m going to get new glasses for entirely frivolous aesthetic reasons.
• Replaying this very cosy game for serotonin.