The taxpayer-funded ‘UK in a Changing Europe’ held a panel discussion on Friday on the subject of ‘Brexit and Comedy’. How the host, Professor Anand Menon, squares this with it being ‘an independent organisation created to make the findings of academic research easily available’ is beyond Guido. The panel was one of those all left, all remain, type of independent panels. It was in many ways no different to your average impartial BBC Radio 4 comedy panel…
On the panel were Nish Kumar – who made no bones about his left-wing comedy goals – Marina Hyde who at least cracks jokes about right-wingers that have other right-wingers laughing and Andy Zaltzman, whom Guido has never heard of before. Wikipedia says he’s your standard-issue Oxbridge-Edinburgh Fringe-Radio 4 cliche left-wing comedian. The most interesting thing he said was that the Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy called him up to ask him to write jokes for David Miliband. We have reached out to Krishnan to ask him if this is true and for some kind of explanation. We await the impartial news broadcaster’s explanation…