I suspect most of us will feel that the 2024 isn’t promising a lot of humour looking around the world, but it came to mind when I was in touch with an older people’s charity in Taiwan which I had visited in 2019. The Hondao Senior Citizens Welfare Foundation might be the most inspiring older people’s organisation I have ever visited. They simply don’t limit their ambitions and keep evolving the most life-enhancing projects, some of them creative but really wherever their hearts lead them. Their latest venture is a three-month course for 20 older people in stand-up comedy resulting in performances in Taipei and Taichung, two of the major cities.
This made me think how little is happening in this regard – as far as I can see – in the UK. It probably doesn’t help that the national arts funders tend not to support comedy as an art form, though at a smaller level the Baring Foundation has.
The largest initiative we supported was a grant in 2019 to Leicester Comedy Festival which thankfully saw fruit just before the first lockdown. Leicester Comedy Festival is long established and can also claim to be the largest free standing comedy festival in the world. The project had two elements. There was a performance strand in the main festival for older stand-up comedians, many new to what might have been seen as a young man’s domain (though comedy has obviously and thankfully diversified immensely since the 1990s). The second strand was carefully selected comics going into local care homes. I attended one of these and was impressed by the audience reaction, the skills of the comedians and the care to make sure people living with dementia were going to enjoy the sessions.
Probably the person to bring most attention to comedy in care homes is Pope Lonergan. Now a professional comedian, he worked as a care worker in residential homes and published a memoir entitled I’ll Die After Bingo: The Unlikely Story of my Decade as a Care Assistant (2022). He also organised The Care Home Tour in 2017.
Otherwise there hasn’t been a great deal. Festivals such as Bealtaine in Ireland have occasionally included comedy and some organisations, such as Women and Theatre (which we have also funded), have worked in care homes in the past.
Comedy and ageing have had an uneasy relationship. There seems to be a trend for setting books or plays in care homes, which have a comic element but seem to have pretty mixed results and aren’t written by residents or care workers. On the one hand, some of the best professional comics in the world such as the Big Yin, Sir Billy Connolly, and Fran Lebowitz are in their 70s and 80s. On the other hand, if you google senior comedy, the top hit you will get is a lazy set on Saturday Night Live about older people and technology with young actors dressing up as old in a way that would be denounced if it was about a different group in society.
Comedy is a powerful art form. It is as essential as food and water. At its best it challenges stereotypes (as well as having the danger of perpetuating them). It isn’t getting the attention it deserves yet in creative ageing. And that’s no laughing matter.