Viz has picked the wrong side in the culture war

Comic magazine Viz suffered the humiliation of its account being kicked off Bluesky earlier this month, just days after it had flounced off from X. The kinder, more inclusive social network banned Britain’s leading toilet-humour magazine for posting content deemed ‘harmful’ to the site’s infamously sensitive users. Viz was later reinstated after promising to be on its best behaviour in future.

Time was when this incident would have made excellent fodder for Viz, a comic that’s always been savagely contemptuous of attempts to shame it. But now, this minor culture-war skirmish is unlikely to result in it publishing a scabrous article or cartoon about woke authoritarianism. Because after more than four decades of gleefully slaying sacred cows left, right and centre, Viz has picked a side – and Britain is the poorer for it.

You might expect X, Elon Musk’s ‘free speech’ platform, to be the natural home for a comic that once published a strip entitled The Thieving Gypsy Bastards, and then issued a not-so-sincere ‘cut-out-and-keep’ apology after the resulting uproar. The bedwetters at Bluesky, meanwhile, are exactly the sort of professional grievance-mongers the magazine would have once delighted in offending. Sadly, Viz’s migration to Bluesky is very much of a piece with its editorial drift towards overt progressivism. Recently, it has taken abundant digs at Donald Trump (he lies! he prioritises golf over governing!) and first buddy Musk. The most recent issue features a so-so article taking the piss out of those who criticise workplace DEI.

Traditionally, the great joy of Viz has always been its willingness to be an equal-opportunities offender. Strips like The Modern Parents and Millie Tant skewer Guardianistas and satirise the perceived excesses of feminism respectively. The right also gets its deserved kicking, too. The most reliably hilarious strip is Barney Farmer’s superb The Male Online, which perfectly captures the impotent rage of the white lower-middle class. And it takes special pleasure in insulting its own audience (infamously, the first edition of Viz cost 20p – or 30p for students).

But it’s not so much the lack of balance in modern Viz that’s the problem. What makes it unique is its satire of everyday banalities. It portrays a world of flat-roofed pubs, discount supermarkets and dog-shitted streets, populated by a cast of benefits cheats, confused biddies, randy tradesmen, sex-mad slappers and shed-dwelling alcoholics. The characters are concerned with shagging, shitting, scrounging and getting sloshed. The likes of Musk and Trump simply do not intrude on their lives. Neither do party politics or government policy, except insofar as these affect their benefits payments or the price of beer.

Using Trump and the anti-woke as a punchline is cheap, lazy and indistinguishable from establishment ‘clapter comedy’. Worse, by taking a stand on contentious political issues and personalities, Viz betrays its own heritage.

Forged in the white heat of Thatcherite deindustrialisation, the Geordie comic was never apolitical, but it always approached current affairs obliquely. If it touched on 1980s mass unemployment, it would be something about Shakin’ Stevens spotted in a dole queue. Its contribution to the climate-change debate was a mock article about the mayor of Blackpool planning to turn the city into a giant aquarium. On Covid, Viz chose neither to lionise nor vilify the UK government’s policies. Instead, it had the chief medical adviser touring Britain in a flying pair of breasts, solving the nation’s health problems with the aid of some bivalve chums – purely so it could call the strip Whitty’s Titty Clam Gang.

Viz is valuable because it transcends politics, with an irreverence (and irrelevance) that’s peculiarly British. The French have Le Canard enchaîné, Charlie Hebdo and Michel Houellebecq to help them ponder the nature of 21st-century existence. With Viz, we Brits have something of at least equal value: a puerile surrealism that is inherently suspicious of Big Ideas and focusses instead on ordinary people’s lives – including the poorest, the most disadvantaged and most left-behind.

The real reason Viz has survived for almost 50 years isn’t the quality of the toilet jokes. It’s because the comic really cares about its characters and, by extension, the British people. Even the right-wing ones. Yes, The Male Online sits at his computer, tissues at hand, his trousers around his ankles, raging at the wanton hussies ‘flaunting their wares’ on the Daily Mail website… but there’s also a detectable undercurrent of sympathy for his bewildered disenfranchisement in the face of a rapidly changing world.

People who know Viz only by the names of its characters probably aren’t aware of its capacity for subtlety, humanity and even nuance. The Sid the Sexist strips, for instance, are not overtly political. They do not deal with serious issues like male violence against women. Instead, they focus on a more quotidian, low-level reality: pathetic men objectifying women in the pub. Yet for all this, Viz often has a surprisingly overt moral message. With Sid, every strip ends with the eponymous virgin either getting kicked in the nuts by an irate woman, or soiling himself, or getting kicked in the nuts and soiling himself. Aesop it ain’t. Yet it could be said, without completely exhausting the world’s reserves of irony, that Sid did more to challenge men’s sexist behaviour than anything Andrea Dworkin ever wrote.

By locating itself at the sharp end of current affairs and picking sides, Viz is sacrificing the aloofness that has been key to its success. It is – to employ a metaphor even the Fat Slags would understand – trying to have its chips and eat them.

In truth, Viz will never effect meaningful change in this country, except by leaving it. If it is determined to fade into a printed version of piss-weak satire like Mock the Week or The Now Show, Britain will become immeasurably poorer for it.

I hope it rediscovers its roots, because at its best, Viz is the supreme exemplar of our defining national characteristic: the ability to shrug in the face of fate, and make fart jokes.

Robert Jessel is a communications consultant working in the charity and campaigning sector. Follow him on X @robjessel16.