The prisoners receiving stand-up comedy lessons

Despite tabloid outrage, lessons in stand-up comedy for prisoners can yield rewards for society as a whole

Bruce Dessau
From The Times December 15, 2008

Zia ul-Haq is not a well-known name on the comedy circuit. And after recent news stories it is unlikely that he ever will be. Ul-Haq, a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist, was one of 18 inmates at Whitemoor Prison in Cambridgeshire on a stand-up comedy course that was halted in November after tabloid outrage that £8,000 of taxpayers' money was being spent on convicts learning how to make people laugh.

“The whole thing is ridiculous,” says Keith Palmer, the genial fortysomething founder of the Comedy School, which has run prison courses such as this for a decade. Palmer was amazed that the matter made the headlines and that Jack Straw, the Justice Minister, issued a statement stating that the course was “totally unacceptable... Prisons should be a place of punishment and reform”.

Yet there are genuine objections. Money spent on criminals raises hackles. And when it is spent on comedy, which is perceived as trivial, the opposition - from relatives of 7/7 victims to politicians - is understandably vocal. As a result of the controversy a consultation is now taking place - with an announcement due imminently - looking, among other things, into which prison classes pass a “public acceptibility test”.

The Comedy School has plenty of high-profile supporters. Felix Dexter, who played Saffy's boyfriend in Absolutely Fabulous, performed at Whitemoor in October. It was equally an odd gig and a very normal one for this seasoned professional. “The governor warned me that there were murderers and people with disturbed personalities in the audience. That sounded like a typical Saturday night crowd.”

Any suggestion that prisons are holiday camps is quickly dismissed. Whitemoor is a maximum security prison and the inmates are constantly reminded of this. “You only have to hear the doors clanging behind you. The whole thing is very brutal,” Dexter says.

He saw that plenty of prisoners want to change their lives. “Why release them angry? Doing comedy releases them in a positive vein. It rescues them. It is better to do a positive thing to make them feel they have a stake in society than just let them rot. If you are involved in a collaborative scheme and use your creative skills, that's all part of personal development, giving them self-respect that they've been denied before.”

In some respects the Comedy School's very name contributed to this controversy. Palmer's work is not that different from traditional drama therapy, but calling it a comedy course helped to invoke the red-top controversy. No one could object to criminals learning about Shakespeare, but the stand-up tag makes it sound too much like fun. Yet Palmer's stand-up pitch also gives the course its unique selling point, a sexiness that helps with funding and raises its profile. The ethos, however, remains fiendishly simple: “If you think about how comedy works, if you are laughing then you are listening. If you are listening, that's really what all educators want.”

The organisation, which also gives public courses, usually spends about a week taking offenders through classes involving improvisation, scriptwriting, mask work and role play, culminating in a performance in front of fellow inmates. Teachers, including Rudi Lickwood, the star of The Real McCoy, treat every student the same, with the aim of getting even the toughest lifers to make themselves vulnerable by creating characters and finding the funny side of their lives.

Their jokes might not always be top rate - though Palmer points to a nice Grand Designs-type gag about a prisoner going to see the governor to apply to have an extension built on his cell - but the process is more of a transformative journey than appearing on The X Factor. It is about learning to empathise and communicate. Palmer points to numerous alumni who have become youth workers or given talks in schools. Performing has helped them to gain the confidence to speak publicly.

At the moment Palmer is concerned that, depending on what the Home Office consultation concludes, his and many other arts courses could be in jeopardy even though Straw supports “constructive pursuits”. Ultimately it comes down to the perennial debate about whether prison is about punishment or rehabilitation. “If you are interested in locking people up and not doing anything with them, then cut to the chase, bring back the death sentence and bring prison figures down. It would save on the paperwork,” Palmer says.

Alternatively, you could motivate convicts to turn their lives around and change negatives to positives. After all, surely it is better that ul-Haq comes out of prison making jokes rather than bombs?

Original article from The Times: entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

Stand up for comedy in prisons

Mark Fisher, Monday 24 November, Guardian.co.uk

They say Tony Blair was obsessed with how his government was perceived, but his legacy appears to live on: what else but tabloid headlines could justice secretary Jack Straw have had in mind when he pulled the plug on [The Comedy School's] standup comedy course at HMP Whitemoor last week?

Comedy classes have been on the go in high-security prisons since 1998 – presumably without dangerous outbreaks of levity – but in a knee-jerk reaction, Straw has asserted that "prisons should be places of punishment and reform". By suggesting that standup is incompatible with rehabilitation, he seems to misunderstand not only the nature of reform, but also the nature of comedy.

Last month, I visited Polmont young offenders' institution, where Edinburgh's Traverse theatre was running a playwriting workshop. Prison governor Derek McGill told me he supported music and theatre in all the prisons he had worked in. He believes participation in the arts triggers behavioural change among inmates and affects the mood of a whole establishment. These are surely the criteria by which such work should be judged, rather than Straw's undefined declaration that the courses "must be appropriate".

I'm reasonably certain the minister would not have deemed the five plays I heard in Polmont appropriate, reflecting as they did the inmates' experiences of knives, drugs and broken homes. However, the act of writing gave the young playwrights a moment of freedom and a sense that they could change their world. That experience is invaluable.

Even if it were vaguely possible, do we really want to forbid the UK's 90,000 inmates from laughing? A better suggestion is that Jack Straw takes a look at the Comedy School website, where he can find eminently sensible comments from inmates and prison education managers, describing how such courses foster cooperation, self-esteem and confidence. Or would he rather we had a prison system that damaged the inmates even further than they have been already?

Original article at www.guardian.co.uk

Writer Mark Fisher's website: markfisher.theatrescotland.com