‘Positively rowdy’: the hysterical ‘lockdown laughter’ sweeping BBC radio

In a recent edition of Radio 4’s The News Quiz (Series 104, Episode 6 to be exact), compere Andy Zaltzman presided over an outbreak of drollery concerning a story about goats for hire. At the start of this month, a Lancashire farmer revealed she had made £50,000 by renting out her goats for Zoom meetings to cheer up attendees.

Listen to the episode on BBC Sounds and you’ll hear a lot of goat-based banter (“What I want to know is ‘Why are you clicking that link in the first place, what's your motive?’ [laughter]; ‘I’ve got a good goat fact – they’re not waterproof, did you know that?’.” And so on).

What you won’t hear is the baa-nter, the moment many of those attending the recording from the Covid-secure comfort of their homes (a thousand people in all) burst into goat impressions after a panellist chance-remarked: “I hope there are no goats in the audience today.”

As the programme’s producer Richard Morris says, in amusement rather than anger: “It went on for several minutes. It was difficult for anyone to say: ‘Can you stop doing goat impressions now?’” The programme-makers made the necessary cuts afterwards.

Like many of the BBC’s radio comedies, The News Quiz is now a “Remote Virtual Audience Event”. This technological innovation was developed, at speed, to enable select (successfully applying) members of the public become a crowd for the panel to play to, providing the show with that essential ingredient of spontaneous reaction. As Morris says: “The audience is vital. It makes a difference to the performers, because they’ve been starved of this thing that makes them tick. You see the look on their faces when they get a laugh. Without that dynamic, it’s literally like a dinner party.”

After the pandemic first hit last year, there was no audience; it was then-host Angela Barnes’ task to keep the panel’s spirits up in the face of silence. Now, where once the public would have trekked to the Radio Theatre in Portland Place (capacity 550), they come from all over, barely moving a muscle; they log in via Zoom, and also get given a link (opened in Google Chrome) which enables the “Virtual Audience Recording system” access to the mic on their computer, to harvest their guffaws.

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Some may assume – because there’s a tinny quality to the laughter, distinct from an auditorium-based acoustic – that this is ‘canned’. But Morris is adamant: “All the laughs are real, there is no canned laughter”. Editing and some volume adjustment (to ensure panellists are heard) is inevitable.

It’s the closest thing the country currently has to live-attended comedy gigs – and the act of gathering online, and vocalising amusement in sync, seems to deliver an endorphin rush of its own, a very giddy-making one at the moment by the sound of it .

“Last week’s crowd was positively rowdy, as rowdy as an online recording can get,” Morris continues. He puts it to down to the sheer number of people the technology lets into the topical mirth-fest and also thinks “people are much more comfortable with the idea of laughing on their own in a room wearing headphones – they might have been a bit more self-conscious before. Now it feels like a more normal thing.” And is there an additional factor, too: a growing need to grab any dollop of happiness amid so much gloom?

“I think that’s very true,” he concedes. He has noticed a surge in demand for ticket requests. “For example we had 7,000 ticket requests to join Just a Minute in the first few hours [of availability], which is incredible and as soon as were able to increase the bandwidth, we hit a thousand people on each News Quiz episode this series.”

“During our last series and the beginning of this one, in January, a lot of people got in touch to say what a lifeline it was to watch these recordings, how much of a release it was. People are finding any light in a monotonous day in lockdown. If you’re not allowed out of the house and get a couple of Radio 4 tickets to see a performance then there’s this ‘all in it together experience’ that provides laughter in lockdown.”

Is there even a phenomenon here, ‘lockdown laughter’? The final episode in the current series of the widely adored sci-com panel show The Infinite Monkey Cage (devoted to “A History of Rock”) may contain wilder sounds of merriment than usual, co-host Robin Ince reckons, though he stresses he and the team strive to rein in anything that might alienate listeners at home.

“This one, right from the start – before we even began recording - had corpsing and mucking about. I like it when we get too ridiculous. Brian [Cox] starts to look like Syd Little trying to play his song – ‘I just want to do me physics!’. I could see him going ‘Can we get back to the science?’ and the audience like that even more – because the scientist is going “Not enough science!”. It has become more unhinged, I think.”

“It’s nearly a year [of the pandemic] now. Some people’s days have got so samey. Normally when people came to see Monkey Cage, on previous nights they might have gone to a music gig or out for a drink down the pub. Now there might be nothing else that has any semblance of a live event. January was the hardest month – what with the terrible rates of mortality and the darkness of the days. And certainly for performers, people were thinking ‘We’re moving into the second year of crossing out events, this is the second time I won’t be playing that festival.’ I’m sure some people listen to these radio shows and think ‘Did they really laugh that much? Are there really a thousand people all laughing on their own in their attics and it comes together to sound like that?’”

It does, he says, and adds: “Because of the technology it’s as if we’re talking to lots of individuals eye to eye, there’s a different excitement. It’s as if Brian Cox is looking at you as you have a cup of tea.”

Ince has written well on the nature – and science – of comedy in his book I’m a Joke and So Are You (as well as covering the subject on Infinite Monkey Cage last year). Citing the neuroscientist Sophie Scott, he wrote: “Scientists know now that spontaneous laughter has its source in older areas of the brain – areas where we share characteristics of communication with other mammals. [Scott] explained that ‘There are lateral motor areas – you have voluntary control over them, and you can control speaking from there. When that goes, due to a stroke, you can still laugh.’”

In “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” Freud quotes with approval Herbert Spencer’s essay on The Physiology of Laughter (1860) – in which laughter is described as “a phenomenon of the discharge of mental excitation”. To those thoroughly briefed in psychology and sociology, one should probably leave considerations of what is at play when laughter erupts amid a pandemic. Ince himself doesn’t venture – surprisingly perhaps – down a theoretical route, concluding simply: “The laughter comes from the delight of having something to do, where you can all laugh together [and] where you can hear a room full of people even if it is a virtual room.”

He argues that the virtual incarnation of Monkey Cage has reaped clear benefits. The audience reach has grown – “It’s a delight that you could have someone from Inverness and Aberystwyth and Truro all in the same audience”. And the sky’s the limit in terms of contributors, from a clutch of astronauts to the likes of Steve Martin. The format makes the panel far less inhibited and “the way an audience can be a hindrance has gone, it’s only an advantage that the shuffling and rustling is gone.”

Not that he doesn’t dream of the day when he will be back in front of a flesh and blood crowd, especially doing stand-up. “The first proper gig back I think we’ll all be weeping. The trouble is my delivery has become more insane. I don’t know where it can go. It might just be white noise.”

The latest episodes of The News Quiz are on BBC Sounds, as are all episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage

Have you been part of a virtual audience? Share your experience in the comments section below