As you can imagine, it is a constant source of irritation to me that I am frequently ridiculed in academic circles for my supposed over-reliance on cultural comparisons drawn from the world of the Native American shaman clown.
And yet, in the light of the ascension of Jeremy Corbyn, I find myself taking familiar soundings once more from the sacred miracle caves of the south-western mesas. But our story starts in north London, last week.
“She corbyned you man,” laughed a teenager on the 73 on Tuesday. On the top deck of Boris’s faux Routemaster, despite being the third most critically acclaimed British standup of the century, I remain anonymous enough to eavesdrop. “To corbyn”. It’s a new verb, it would seem.
“You were corbyned man, well corbyned.” Listening in, I realised the phrase describes a situation where one of the youngster’s remarks had been deliberately misrepresented to some rival youths with the intention of compromising, perhaps fatally, his standing in their social milieu. It had only taken a weekend for the press treatment of the new Labour leader to make its way into the street argot of a younger generation.
“They corbyned Corbyn in the paper last night. They say he done that Diane Abbott once, back in the 70s when she was well fit,” offered a young lad to his chums by Camden tube on Thursday. “Yes, but what’s really appalling is that the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine,” continued a well-scrubbed middle-class schoolgirl, “has apparently been doing Netflix and chill with Michael Gove for decades!”
And with that, the young Corbynistas stood outside the station miming projectile-vomiting into a dog excrement receptacle, until they were forcibly moved on by a uniformed security guard in the pay of a vast property-owning multinational corporation.
Now, none of the above stories are true. But I feel what they tell us about Jeremy Corbyn is true. Post-digital, tech-savvy, and able to Google the sources of Corbyn’s supposed comments, the vibrant young people on our capital’s streets, their veins coursing not with genetically modified skunk juice, but with the thrill of The New Politics™, saw through mainstream media’s misrepresentation of Corbyn immediately.
Why should Corbyn talk to Sky reporters? They’ll only corbyn him. The voters of tomorrow share clips of Corbyn speeches on social media, without having to cut to Andrew Wilson raising his eyebrow quizzically and then making a sneery face, before he slithers away to rub himself on the rim of Adam Boulton’s executive urinal.
There are big questions to be asked about the ethics of many of Corbyn’s fellow travellers, but so far the questions being asked most loudly, and which are calculated by his enemies to do the most damage, are mainly about his top button, his anthem-singing ability, his ex-girlfriend from 1978, and some free sandwiches, which he may or may not have stolen from the hand of a dying Spitfire pilot.
And while Corbyn introduced members of Hamas and Hezbollah to parliament using the ill-judged phrase “our friends”, David Cameron is genuinely real-life friends with both Rebekah Brooks of News International and Rachel Whetstone of Uber, and had Jeremy Clarkson jump out of a cake naked at his 50th birthday party.
It is too soon to say whose “friends” history will judge most harshly. Ex-polytechnics have refectories named after one-time “terrorists”, and commemorative slabs laid by Tony or Cherie will one day go the way of Jimmy Savile’s gravestone.
Leaning over the shoulder of a Daily Express reader on the 341 on Monday, I saw a prune-faced content-provider describe Corbyn as an “absurd Marxist”. As a new philosophical doctrine, Absurd Marxism sounds viable to me, whatever it is. We already live in the oxymoronic era of Caring Capitalism, and that doesn’t really seem to make sense either. If I were Corbyn I would own the title of Absurd Marxist with honour.
Absurdity, with a small a, has attached itself to Corbyn in a way that amplifies the ridiculousness of the world around him. He was mocked for making a vegan shadow environment secretary. Yet under David Cameron we have had an equalities minister who was against equal marriage, an anti-environmentalist environment secretary, and a culture secretary who loves torture porn and wants to dismantle the BBC. The government is ridiculous. Corbyn is its satirical shadow.
In many Native American societies the comedian, far from being a lowly fool who other children’s parents think doesn’t really have a proper job and so could host more play-dates, is considered to have an important, almost priestly, function.
The Lakota clown, the Heyoka, lives his life backwards, washing in dirt, wearing his clothes inside out, shivering in sunlight, violating taboos, and asking questions others dare not ask of those in power. Some plains people even gave their contraries, as these shaman clowns were known, important roles in battle, where their unpredictable behaviour and refusal to follow orders gave them massive advantages over their bewildered enemies. I cannot believe Corbyn has not made a detailed anthropological study of these comic visionaries.
At Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, in 2006, I was lucky enough to attend a massive outdoor Koshare ritual. Clowns ranged through the village, making erotic overtures to elderly disabled women, showing disdain for the beautiful, throwing food in the faces of dining Anglo-American dignitaries, hurling Christian crosses from the roofs of buildings, and doing all this to force onlookers to consider what kind of a society they wanted to live in, and to assess the professed values of the society they already had.
Mainstream media condemns Corbyn’s actions. On social media, free from editorial interference, those same actions receive almost blanket approval. The satirical counterweight of the Corbyn shaman-clown has forced society to enact its own Socratic dialogue. Should we bow to Queens? Should we sing songs that profess spiritual and political beliefs we do not have? Should we speak to Sky reporters?
People on the right shake with fury at Corbyn, corbyning him mercilessly, while people on the old left tremble with anxiety over what further damage he may do to their already ruined party. But think of Corbyn, not as a politician, but as a totemic figure, a contrary, a shamanic clown come to throw the system’s failings into sharp relief, and I promise you can all enjoy his career as much as I am. The wailing. The gnashing of teeth. It’s going to be hilarious! What fun we will have! Maybe some good will even come of it.
Stewart Lee’s A Room With a Stew is at Leicester Square theatre, London WC2 from tomorrow
