John Lloyd: Blackadder, Spitting Image, QI and a life in search of meaning

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio. John Lloyd, how do people introduce you? You must have heard every line under the sun. it would be easier to list all of the great comedies with which you were not involved than it would be to list the great comedies that you were involved. But not the nine o 'clock, New Spitting Image, Blackadder, and then Latterly, QI, all manner of things in between. This normally works as an investigation of the life before the subject became known to the public.

0:47Very good. Yes, but that doesn't work with you for two reasons. The first is that your work is better known than you are, So people are going to want to know a lot more about some of the stories behind the story. And the second is you won a lifetime achievement award at the age of 38. So where do I start? Yeah, well, it's not good, as I've discovered, to be too successful, too young. It's not good for you. 38 isn't that young. No. It was an amazing surprise and an honour and actually a bit of a disaster at the time because we had, on the same night, won two awards for Blackadder. And so we'd open a bottle of brandy.

1:29We had all our mates. We'd all taken a table because everyone was very successful. Opened a bottle of brandy. And then I heard Princess Anne's voice sing. You started in radio in 1974. And I thought, that sounds... Oh, my God. It is me. It's me. And I got my dickie bow on, you know. And I went past the awards committee and Alan Yentob was there. They were all laughing their socks off because they hadn't told me. Because when you're a producer, you're supposed to get up, say thank you and get off. Nobody wants to hear from you. But if you win a lifetime award, you have to make her speak. So I got up in front of Princess Anne and somehow the words came.

2:10And I said, first of all, Your Royal Highness, may I apologize to you for making a puppet of you and your mother. And bowed. Spitting image. I told you I'd missed stuff out. Anyway, she was so sweet and, you know, laughing at my jokes and things. But, yeah, so it was a wonderful thing. And then three or four years later, I had a massive crisis and I sort of lost my way completely. And you see, well, we'll get to that at risk of sounding brusque, because I hadn't clocked when I was researching this interview that one would be related to the other. But now that you pointed out, it's kind of obvious, isn't it?

2:46Because where do you go from a lifetime achievement award at the age of 30? This is BAFTA for people who don't know. We should begin at the beginning because, I mean, as your name, your full name attests, an exceedingly military background. Well, yes. My great uncle, after whom I'm named, John Hardress Lloyd, was one of the people who founded what became the Tank Corps in the First World War. My uncle Trevor was a major in the army. My dad was a captain. Yeah, so quite a military background and a Navy kid, you know, going all around the world in naval bases. Did you have, did anywhere feel like home?

3:26I actually feel more at home abroad than I do. Even now? Yeah, I'm very happy. We've just come back from three weeks in Canada, my wife and I, because it's one of the places my dad was posted to. and the minute I'm on a ship or a plane I feel, oh this is where I'm from from sort of nowhere really I suppose I hear a Robert Southie line about home being where the love is or something like that would that apply to you or not? I suppose everything that forms you is what you know and so that's what you like I guess you know especially when damaged people it's not good for them because they carry on they get in sort of loop don't they but yeah travel foreign languages different cultures i'm very at home with that you know pick up languages very quickly and um you know i just find i'm not equally at home here i suppose it's just that i don't really make a distinction what about like having to restart again with friendships and stuff like it's quite a recurring theme with military children that you same you know you get used to you you'll make a great friend and after a year your dad's promoted or moved on and you never see them again or went to see them for 30 years.

4:40Which can sound traumatic to people who haven't been through it but as you've just sort of reminded us if that is all you know then you don't know that it's any different from the norm. Well I'm lucky I genuinely like people. I hardly ever meet somebody I don't like so I make friends very quickly. I'm going to take that as a challenge.

4:59Well I'm glad I'm not being grilled by you James. Well it is, I mean it's probably part of the producer's art as well isn't it? To get on, not to be a people pleaser but to be a people enjoyer Yes, well I mean and especially comedy which is a thing that joins people up you know, it's very no I'm very grateful for it it's like I think travel's a funny thing isn't it? Because it can either narrow the mind or broaden it it just depends on who you are but for me it's definitely you know I embrace foreignness very fast What was home like? As in the building or the barracks? Well, they were all different.

5:38But in terms of the interactions of mum and dad and... My dad once said he had a couple too many at Christmas. He said, you know, ringing up your children was an absolute nightmare. And my mother said, and what would you know about it? That's brilliant. Good line. It's a superb line, yes. Yeah, she was funny. No, it was all different. I remember one of the standout. My dad was captain of a shore base in Portsmouth called HMS Vernon. And suddenly we were grandees. We had a driver and, you know, staff and a butler and all that kind of thing. We spent all the time in the kitchen as kids with the sailors, you know, with the matalows, having bread and dripping, which was just our favorite thing.

6:22so and then the next time you'd just be on a naval estate with you know petty officer on one side and an admiral on the other not probably not an admiral but you know um so it was different every every single year really and what did you like what did young john like what were your enthusiasms um well it was we we laughed a lot as a family there was a lot of giggling and you know um in church and uh particularly particularly in ireland where my dad's from was from um and uh my cousin uh marie lived in a ruined abbey or when she had owned the abbey but she actually then lived in a small house on the estate but her her mum i think lived in the ruined abbey and we used to go to church, Church of Ireland in a pony and trap and the horse was a terrible farter and that would set us off so we'd arrive already laughing in church and the vicar was incredibly short-sighted He'd be reading the Bible like that with the nose on the paper and the Lord said So we would just have such a laugh all the time I don't think I've ever there's a quality of laughter in church because it is so wrong isn't it you're so conscious and when you combine it with flatulence as well because i sometimes at my school there'd only be 12 of us in chapel and our house master was doing mass and if someone lets one go in a room like that there's a quality of laughter i've never achieved since and i never will that that kind of absolute bent double but not but still upright i i love that i've read and i don't know whether it's true or not because quite often things that one reads preparing for things like this turn out not to be but because your childhood was so peripatetic you didn't have that canon of comedy that that one would normally expect from someone who ended up doing what you ended up doing and that you would be watching the the obvious programs as a sort of i don't know the goons or bob bob but i mean other stanley baxter i don't know who the big cop but you didn't have that well i'm a bit uh the goons passed me by it It wasn't really, but round the horn.

8:33Radio, we listened to a lot of radio, round the horn. The Navy Lark, you can imagine, was our favorite. The Clitheroe Kid, that kind of stuff. So that's really what formed my sense of humor, I think. It's quite a formal thing, I suppose, quite silly. But no, very little telly. My parents didn't have a telly until I was probably 10 or 11, I think. Of course. except for the coronation which is my earliest memory believe it or not i must have been under three of being in my high chair and they rented this little tiny box with a flickering black and white you know where were you living at the time can you remember i think probably in kent somewhere okay yeah and you could you recall that moment did you know when you were listening to the radio that people had jobs on the radio or was it just a sort of magical box in the corner No, and it never occurred to me that you could do that for a living or that there was such a thing.

9:28You'd hear, you know, obviously producers announced, you know, in town tonight produced by Alastair Scott Johnson. But you didn't know what they did. And I still don't know what producers do, to be honest. People often say, what do they do? I said, I don't really know. Sort of everything and nothing, really. What were you like academically? Well, I'm very lucky. I've got a very good short-term memory. And I'm, you know, spelling came easily. I never could do maths, hopeless. You know, I went at it continually trying to get a decent mark in maths and it eluded me completely. But if you're literate and you've got a good memory, well, it was kind of boring but easy.

10:08You know, I used to get A's all the time. I never knew why. I didn't think I was particularly bright. Because you're retaining it all and then regurgitating it. But as we know, exams test the ability to pass exams. That's all they test. And was there much pressure at home? I mean, were you expected to perform well academically or were you left to your... No, it was just sort of given, you know, I was just a bright little spark, you know, and did well at school, yeah. But sometimes my father would say, no, dear John, you've come second in Latin again. It's a bit disappointing. No, never mind, I'm going to the shed.

10:44so i said there was no um i mean it could have been quite a a spartan childhood emotionally or but it doesn't sound like that there's lots of laughter there's uh no particular pressure at home to for you to perform everyone was perfectly happy with how you were doing oh i had nothing here for amateur psychologists to dig into i don't think so really i think i'm fortunate i got on very well with my mum and my dad was a very good bloke you know funny and nice but you know he'd been through he'd had a very as they say very good war in most torpedo boats very decorated and so on but he had been at dunkirk and um had as a small boats picking up you know half drowned sailors and soldiers and things and that i think haunted him because he couldn't take everybody for the rest of his life but he buttoned it down he was one of those people who didn't you know wasn't emotionally open at all he was a very decent guy not at all uh not as a severe disciplinarian or anything like that but just you couldn't you couldn't get anything out of him i mean when he was about my age i took him to the pub i thought you know i really have to get to know this guy you know so he went to the local pub in dorset where they and he ordered a half and I ordered a pint and I said so dad in the war were you were you scared or anything and he goes um no not really John we better get back your mother will be missing us terribly oh dear but he later explained that that was you couldn't afford as an officer to be seen to be scared he probably was but he never showed it and you just got used to that you know yes so So it was, I think maybe you're the same.

12:34I don't know. But I think my generation is used to that thing that your dad was not an easy person to talk to, particularly about important things. Not demonstrative. Yeah. So laughter, if I were to indulge in a bit of amateur psychology, laughter was the big emotional connection then with your dad, making each other. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. But as I say, it's not. I think what I feel is, again, I try to not dwell on the past too much. I think you're lucky if you learn self-reliance early. It's a very good quality for a producer because nobody thanks the producer, really not. You know, producers are the annoying people who say, no, there's no time, there's no money.

13:23that's not good enough and and so if you're not getting much emotional feedback um that's fine i'm used to that i'm used to i don't expect to be thanked i don't need to be thanked i've been thanked more than most producers i think definitely and um so there's i have this image because i i'm a show-off but professionally speaking i presume everybody is a bit and that producers must all be frustrated show-offs but you're one of the finest examples of that not being the case because you've had opportunities in your career to yeah a little bit of stepping in front of the camera but yeah but you know you you do the origins of have i got news for you were actually john lloyd's newsreels and you filmed a pilot with merton and hislop and then you decided that it wasn't for you yes i didn't think i was very good um and i'd sort of done it i started the news quiz you know years before and i'd done that format and i was at that time directing ads for a living and making lots of money i didn't really need the work and there's another thing it's good directors for example you would think they would be egotistical people in sort of you know thigh boots with a whip and all this stuff but the directors that i respect are very um it's not about you directing it's all about service it's about helping actors and and you you're supported by amazing crews who all know better than you do about everything so it's really just i often describe it as you're the guy on the back of the trireme you know all these oarsmen all doing this people and you're just the guy beating the drum you know keeping time well i don't know about that i think there's got to be a reason why some producers have a have a midas touch and some don't if it was simply beating a drum then you'd all have comparable careers and all the scenes Well, again, it would be interchangeable, wouldn't it?

15:13Well, you know, I'm, of course, a show off in my private life. I love public speaking. You know, it's my favorite thing to do. And I did my first one man show in Edinburgh in 2013, which is the single most terrifying thing I've ever done. But after the second night, I thought I've been in the wrong job for 40 years. This is what I meant to do, writing and performing. and you know I think you you're lucky if you find something you can do producing is a difficult job but it's something I know how to do and I stopped being a presenter because it was a I thought it's a bit too easy you know okay mainly in television presenting the thing you have to learn is to be able to one it's one of those patting and you know that thing yes because you need to be the the director will say okay john i want you to walk faster but talk more slowly before you get to the door that's quite a thing to learn but otherwise if you can do presenting i mean i don't suppose you get up in the morning going terrified that you won't perform properly do you occasionally but when i come back from holiday it's such an odd way to earn a living what happens if i open my mouth and nothing comes out but not every morning no well i don't know i i mean you've been very nice about my work i love your work you know i watch you often um and i think it's i'm sure you'd agree that the trick of presenting is to be as close to yourself as you can be you are you you seem like exactly the guy i expected to meet good but you're the sort of the best version of yourself yeah you know what i mean i hope so yes when the mic goes on the camera goes on then And I wish that I was the guy who did public speaking.

16:58You know, easygoing, confident, witty, amusing, self-assured, relaxed. Instead of the guys at my desk going, oh, this is this script is terrible. This is awful. What am I going to do?

17:15I'd completely forgotten about this. I've mentioned it in quite a few interviews, which means I should really have mentioned it in this one. But you're here partly because the meaning of Lyft, the collaboration you did with the late, great Douglas Adams, the sort of words that don't exist but should is being happily reissued. He had a saying. I think he applied it to writing. But I often think of it in terms of performing that the feeling you get when you throw yourself at the ground and miss. That's perfect, isn't it? And if you're lucky enough to have that feeling when you're working, then you're probably among the luckiest people in the world, aren't you?

17:53Yeah. Well, it's banging your head against the wall, too, isn't it? Yes. It's great when it stops. I mean, it's a very particularly, well, most jobs I've done have been very hard at the cliff face. but QI every day researching something you've never heard of, trying to understand it and distill it into something that you can reduce to a series of one-liners. It's very, very satisfying, the neatness of it. And The Meaning of Live is also a neat book, isn't it? It's a bit like what all comedians do is they think, that's funny, that's an odd thing, and they notice things that the rest of us don't notice.

18:36there's a very I was just reading yesterday there's a term called hypocognition it was coined in 1973 by an anthropologist, American anthropologist who went to Tahiti for the first time and he was astonished that Tahitians in the 70s anyway never showed any grief no matter how terrible they'd become ill if somebody died but they wouldn't grieve and hypocognition is the idea that unless the concept for something has been invented you can't express the emotion. Wow. Wow. And in this same article, James, it mentions a word from the meaning of Lyft, which is shoobariness. Oh, wow. Shoobariness in Essex or in the meaning of Lyft.

19:17Shoobariness is defined as the vague, uncomfortable feeling you get from sitting on a seat still warm from somebody else's bottom. You know that? When you sit on a tube and you go, oh. That is perfect. And the thing is that if you know the word shoebriness, you're more likely to get it than if you don't. That was the point about the article. That's absolutely brilliant. It's wonderful. That's perfect. We could jump around because people may be surprised to know how hands on you are with QI. I mean, it's very much your labour of love. And again, to hark back to what we were talking about a moment ago, you could be a massive fan of QI without necessarily knowing who John Lloyd is.

19:59and you're supremely comfortable with that. Yeah, I mean, I know you went to a Catholic school, so I don't know if you're still a practisinger, but I'm definitely a prod. And I like the Presbyterian attitude to things, which is slightly, you know, slightly self-punishing, I guess. I like the fact that people don't really know what I do or they don't know that I make a difference. And particularly when editing writers, what I try to do is they don't notice the edit so you've changed it but they go, that's my line yeah, well it's not really but you know, that's what I try to do That takes self-reliance to an extraordinary level doesn't it?

20:41That's a sort of self I don't know quite what the word is self-satisfaction makes you sound smug and it's the opposite of smugness it's that the joy is entirely personal Well, it's a private smugness Private joy, shall we say. I don't think you can be privately smug, can you? I don't know. That's very good. That's probably, that should be a word in the meaning of lift. I wasn't going to say that. I'll let you, I think. So to hark back, what were the seeds then of this combination of mischief and curiosity that has defined much of your work, but which most obviously describes things like the meaning of lift and latterly QI?

21:25Were there early signs of that? Were you fascinated by things that fascinate you now as a smaller person, as a younger man? I think, again, I think my dad was never one to praise you. He was, you know, so you got used to doing it. One of my favorite words actually in English. Is this a real word? Is this a real word? It's autotelic. Do you know what that means? No, I don't. Sell something. Yeah, it means worth doing for its own sake. Oh, I love that. which is what I try to live by. I'm doing the job because it's a good thing to do, because it's of value in itself, not because I want to win prizes, but because it's, yeah.

22:06I really envy that. That's a wonderful thing. I'm going to write that word down, autotelic. That's a thing of beauty, isn't it? It is beautiful, yeah. Because is it Buddhist? I mean, has it got a sort of spiritual dimension to it? Well, it comes, where I uncovered it, there's a wonderful book called Flow have you come across this? yes I haven't read it but I know the book by the guy, I think he's was he a Czech or a Pole or something very long, Milos something and that's what it's about being in the zone although I've done a few good things, there's a few that I haven't done that didn't happen for any reason that I really miss and one of them was a thing with a director called Mike Slee we wanted to make an IMAX film about the zone, about being in the zone, which is what I, if you meditate, that's what you aspire to be in, to be a place where there's no motivation, there's no regret, no anger, just stillness and purpose.

23:09And, well, perhaps even not purpose, but the zone, you know, I used to get it when I was a director, is you go to work, and 14 hours later you go, oh, I'm back, I'm back. It's not about you. It's all about you're so focused on the work, you forget who you are and it's very good for you, like meditation is very, very good for you. You might get it in gardening or painting or that kind of stuff. Athletes get it quite frequently. Seb Coe, apparently Lord Coe, as he now is, when he was winning his, what was it, 1500 meters or something like that, he had an out-of-body experience and found himself at the top of the stand watching himself press the tape.

23:50Good grief. So that zone thing is, this is a thing that my thing since starting QI, really before QI, is a search for meaning. What are we doing here? What's the point? That's what happened to me in my early 40s. I woke up and I thought, what's the point of anything? It was awful. So I spent the second half of my life pursuing that, And the zone is very key to it because that's what consciousness is. Consciousness is infinite, has no dimension. It's not in a place. It doesn't weigh anything. It doesn't have any motivation. Sure. And that is bliss, really. It sounds a bit woo-woo. I don't know that it's that way.

24:38It's because it's very practical. Part of my, you know, I'm not a conventionally religious person at all now, but I've read a great deal of comparative religion, lots of theology and lots of psychology.

24:54If you like, that's my version of God, is consciousness, which infests the universe. And the zone? The zone is the same thing. The communing. Or being in a state of flow. Yeah. When you, there's two of you in your head, I think. We call it the monkey in my house. Yeah. there's two of you there's a the the little guy who's yakking on all the time you know going oh no i've done it again and oh i'm frightened of what's going to happen tomorrow i wish i hadn't said that yeah everybody's got that interior monologue yeah and then there's the big you which is part of everybody else that the you know that is connected in some strange way to everything i don't want to ask a silly question but and because you've been so sort of weapons grade modest about the role that a producer plays but but do you think that having an eye on bigger things actually helps you deliver what you deliver do you i mean do you think being cut because i know it was a horrible time for you in your 40s and and that search for meaning has obviously defined an awful lot of what has followed but it speaks of a depth doesn't it it speaks of a of an interest in the really really big stuff that perhaps helps you deliver the i want to say the little stuff but just gives you a the the human condition or the universal experience even when you didn't realize it part of the reason why your early projects were so successful was because you were actually speaking to something quite universal i think that's that certainly would have been unconscious then but the thing is comedy is such a mystery you know i've been offered a few jobs as professor of comedy and i said i can't do it because i don't know how it works i know that works and I know that I can do it but why nobody knows why one thing's funny and another isn't and it is one of the great mysteries or why the same thing is not funny when he says it and really funny when he says it that's even more mysterious it is very mysterious and it's one of the things I don't think I've ever said this to anyone James you've come right up now you're in my top three interviewers ever because you are able to winkle things out of people they didn't mean to say but i have a list of things called the toms the ordinary mysteries okay and they include comedies one art is another one music is another one life did you know for example that uh biologists can't technically tell the difference between a live hamster and a dead one no we don't know what life is consciousness we've been studying it like crazy for over 100 years, and nobody has got any further in science to describe how it arises, where it's from.

27:40And the weird thing is that the ordinary mysteries are the things we are most familiar with, you know, our own thoughts, the fact that we exist at all, and we take them for granted. I mean, to me, the oddest thing about life, the strangest thing about life, bar none, is that we don't generally find it strange. You know, every time somebody dies in a car accident who's a friend, you're totally taken by surprise. Oh, my God. Yeah. Why? How has that happened? It's so unfair. All that kind of thing. We are going through life, most of us, with a bag over our head, completely unaware of how astonishing everything is.

28:20And that was a thing that happened to me in my midlife crisis of sitting on a park bench in Fulham, you know, wondering what else to do with my life. and a pigeon walked by and I looked for the first time I actually looked at a pigeon and I thought that is amazing just that one thing that's more complicated than the Boeing 707 and it's walking about and looking and it's you know got a strange form of consciousness and look at all the colors on its feathers it's not gray it's full of and it was like oh I've woken up just briefly you know and that's the thing it's it's what what QI does for you which happens to all the researchers i mean every day you are surprised by things yes every day every hour probably i don't i think isn't barred flight still something that no one can actually explain as well because otherwise we'd have replicated it one of the very lsqi facts i think was that there are three theories of why a plane stays up in the air none of which agree with each other I mean it's one of the things that I used to tell this story about my son Harry who was another person who because when he was tiny he would ask all the questions I didn't know the answer to and I used to get annoyed and irritated I didn't know.

29:36Because I say so Exactly, that's what my dad used to say Look it up John, look it up But you, if you ask questions at the bottom of every string of questions I used to call them Y-strings. And you say, oh, Dad, who's that man? Which man? The man getting into his car, Dad. I don't know. Where's he going, Dad? Well, he's probably going to work. It's about this time. Why is he going to work, Dad? Well, because he's got to, you know, or carry, he's got to eat. If he doesn't go to work, his wife and children will all starve to death. Do you understand? And then he said, Dad, yes, why do things want to live?

30:17This is like a three-year-old. You think, oh my goodness, that's the deepest question you can ask, isn't it? Yes. Absolutely fantastic. And that, the Toms, that imbues comedy with a seriousness that it obviously deserves and yet doesn't always get. Well, you know, people say the cliche is, you know, comedians are miserable. That's not true. No. I mean, some are, but I wouldn't think. Same with accountants. Yeah. Yeah, there's probably a slightly higher incidence of ADHD and bipolar, I would think. But I would say most of them are serious people. Yes. Most good comedians are seriously clever. I mean, you know, a guy like, say, Lee Mack, you know, or Joe Brandt or Shranganathan.

31:06These are smart people. They think a lot about things. Arthur Kursler, who I think has been cancelled now, hasn't he? but he wrote a wonderful book called The Act of Creation, which compares comedians and comedy writers to creative scientists. They're doing exactly the same thing, looking at things and saying, that's odd, what does that mean? And scientists turn it into hypotheses and comedians turn it into jokes.

31:34Did you make people laugh at school? Did you become... Yeah, I started, my first professional foray into comedy was starting a school magazine, a sort of underground magazine called School Buzz by the Chatters. It was based on the Molesworth books. Remember them? It could do worse, yeah. And we did this little Roneo cheat that went round. So I was about 11, I think, when I started that. And it was a proper pleasure. I mean, you got something out of that. Yeah. And I used to write for the school magazine, poetry generally, and did sort of comedy turns and, you know, end of term things Things and was an actor and all that kind of thing.

32:12Yeah, and I was just talking to someone stranger yesterday about Kings Canterbury She's was an archdeacon there long after my time and She said I'm sorry. I had a bad time and I said the odd thing is I was on a show called I've never seen Star Wars. You heard that show on the radio you undertake do five things you've never done And one of them was a two of which you have to not want to do and one of them was to go back to school which I hadn't been to for 40 years. And it was terrifying, walking around the precincts of the school and then eventually going in the gate. And the minute I went in, I thought, this is absurd.

32:48I didn't hate school that much. There was lots of bits I didn't like, but not all of it. You know, it's funny the stories we tell ourselves, isn't it? Yes, it is. Again, you're just going, even your whole life, you tell yourself a series of stories. Well, it's an absolute QI principle, James, which is the core of my philosophy, is what QI teaches you is there is more to everything without exception than meets the eye. Every person, every hedgehog, every geranium, there's much more to it than you think, including yourself. And that's the journey we're on, really, is to try to understand yourself and who you actually are.

33:28That is the central question of philosophy. Who are you? Of course. and I suppose it's a bit of shorthand isn't it what you've just described is the opposite of shorthand you tell a story about your school days to yourself just so that you can file it away, that's what happened but it's not, you had wonderful times at school, we all did we had friends who we laughed with in ways that were uncontrollable but then some man would come along and beat you and that is what is in the forefront of your mind I find that anyway I mean that's a shocking thing isn't it, were you beaten? Yes I was I mean the thing is why, last time I was beaten I think it was 15 it was an outrage it was for something I hadn't done yeah I had a couple of those and why I didn't say to my house master if you hit me I'm going to hit you back yeah by that I was a rugby player at school I would have beaten him too but you take it you know like if you know the people in if that wonderful movie my all time favourite film so if I'd met you when you were 15 just after you'd been beaten and I'd said what do you want to do when you grow up what would you have said well I certainly think I want to be a house master beat I certainly think I spent a long time in topical comedy, as you know, political comedy.