Do you find Mrs Brown's Boys funny? If you do I'm afraid I cannot help you. All I can say is that you are not alone. The hit sitcom is currently packing them in at the O2 Arena as part of its sell-out national tour, yet is hated with a fervour on a par with African tyrants. Its crime? Being old-fashioned.
I'm an unashamed comedy snob. I really wanted to hate this predictable, vulgar vehicle for Irish comedian Brendan O'Carroll. It is as different to the work of, say, Alan Partirdge or Armando Iannucci, as you can get. Yet...it still makes me laugh. I just feel dirty afterwards. Like I've just eaten too much fast food. In the live show Mrs Brown puts some LSD tablets from her son Rory, who has told her they are indigestion pills, in the cupboard for safe keeping. With hilarious consequences. You just know that at some point it is going to be Mrs Brown that takes them when "Mammy" gets an upset tummy. As Chekhov wrote, "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."
Comedy does not come much more mainstream than this. From granddad getting a thermometer stuck up his rectum on TV, to daughter Cathy having a boob job in the stage show this is a seaside postcard come to life. Some of the lines are pretty antique – "what's that useless piece of skin on the end of a penis? A man" – but I defy anyone not to chuckle at lines such as, "I was so long in labour they had to shave me twice".
Perhaps the whole thing is a postmodern joke. O'Carroll certainly likes breaking the fourth wall, walking from set to set mid-scene or, in an exchange at the O2 when I saw it, "Hi Mammy I'm home," "I know, I heard the clapping." But this is probably not Bertolt Brecht, it is more about having a smutty giggle about woman faking their "organisms." The cast, who include – holy Oedipus! – O'Carroll's wife Jennifer as daughter Cathy, certainly enjoy themselves, regularly corpsing.
If there is a caveat it is simply the lack of finesse. Just because Miranda Hart gets her biggest laughs from falling over does not mean her show is without sophistication. Mrs Brown's Boys, on the other hand, is all about the falling over, with a little dash of sentimentality lobbed in for good measure. A truly great sitcom combines clowning with a weightier undertow. The Beckett-like bleakness of Hancock, the Pinteresque pathos of Steptoe and Son. With Mrs Brown's Boys all you get are laughs. No amount of "fecks" are going to make Mrs Brown's Boys a classic like Father Ted. But if you don't laugh at it at all you must be dead.
