FUNNY COW: The Most Unpleasant British Film in Recent Memory

When reviewing a film, it’s important for a critic not to jump to hyperbolic, knee-jerk conclusions that undermine any deeper conversation about a film’s content and the context surrounding it.

After watching Funny Cow, a film I imagine will be quickly added to the pantheon of “British films nobody will remember after opening weekend”, I instantly jumped to the fairly exaggerated conclusion that it’s both racist and homophobic, inviting the audience to laugh at outdated stereotypes instead of merely depicting the attitudes of the period setting.

This Funny Cow is no laughing matter

The truth is naturally more complicated than this, and the offending sequences in question run for less than five minutes of the film’s entire duration (race and sexuality are never mentioned outside of this). And yet, walking out of the film, I couldn’t help but wish that the film didn’t show a passivity when depicting what a working class comedy club in the 1970’s would be like – there’s a lack of cynicism in the way the aforementioned repugnant jokes are depicted, both in the manner they are told, and the hysterical laughter the audience within the film reacts to them with.

On the pages of the screenplay, I imagine this was designed to make modern audiences feel deliberately uncomfortable. And yet, in execution, it merely left me feeling uncomfortable as it seems to ask the cinema audience to laugh along at gleeful racism and homophobia.

Director Adrian Shergold’s film is a fictionalised account of a nameless female comedian (known only as the “funny cow”) who rises from an impoverished childhood to a successful career. Played by Maxine Peake, the funny cow has numerous things that have set her back on the road to fame; a bullied childhood where she realised she wasn’t normal, a physically abusive partner, an alcoholic mother, and the general misogyny of the era that meant women were only given attention at comedy shows if they stripped naked. It’s a rags to riches biopic of a comedian who never really existed, and yet the film follows all the expected beats – but with added unpleasantness in the mix.

At its heart, Funny Cow is a female empowerment movie – a film about a working class comedienne who overcomes a lifetime of poverty and an abusive partner to make traction in the male-dominated comedy scene. A more complex, and therefore more interesting film, would offer a commentary on how a female comedian had to rely on offensive humour to get a response from audiences. Instead, she is depicted as uncynically loving these jokes and takes glee in telling them (when she first hears her mentor comedian tell a racist gag, she notes the audience response and starts laughing with them), with the film asking us to still treat her as an empowered character regardless.

Other reviews have labelled the character of Funny Cow an “anti-heroine”, yet the film never appears to show an awareness to this. The horrors of her home life make her somebody to root for, but the film never paints her as a complicated character even as she spouts inflammatory nonsense onstage. In comparison, even the biggest detractors of Martin McDonagh’s film will be left wishing this had the same deliberate complexity as his Three Billboards when asking you to simultaneously empathise with and be critical of the character’s actions. Here, we’re just invited to laugh with her from the moment she gets on stage, as it offers a tonal counterpoint to the misery of her home life off of it.

I’m fixating on a few tiny moments in the film, that represent an insignificant amount of the feature length running time, but still soured the entire viewing experience for me – although said moments were at least responsible for finally eliciting a visceral reaction, after mostly feeling indifferent throughout. The truth is, the majority of Funny Cow has the essence of calculated misery porn, that’s so extreme in terms of subject matter (domestic abuse, abortion, suicide: this movie has it all!), the lapses into non-offensive comedy can’t help but feel tonally disjointed from the sheer darkness at the film’s core.

Social realism that’s too stereotyped to feel realistic

The end product feels like a derivative attempt at recreating the blend of hard hitting social realism and comic levity you’d expect from a Ken Loach film, but struggling to balance the disparity in tone. On the social realism side, the flashback sequences to the protagonist’s childhood (where Funny Cow is renamed Funny Calf, and played by charming newcomer Macy Shackleton) are the only moments that manage to balance the light and the dark. It’s difficult to not come away from the film wishing more time was spent in these flashbacks, where Funny Calf’s boundless imagination gives her the strength and good humour to face down bullies and a physically abusive father (played by Stephen Graham).

Shergold occasionally tries to make the past meet the present, with Funny Cow and Funny Calf sharing scenes together – and adding magical realism to the mix makes for an even messier film, one where it becomes difficult to accept the lighter moments due to the unrelenting bleakness of the darker ones.

As for a depiction of working class life in Yorkshire, the film doesn’t exactly ring true. In the stereotypical view of this film, all working class men are violent alcoholics, who only find joy in casual misogyny, racism and homophobia, and try to forcibly hold back anybody who aspires to anything greater than the impoverished life they lead. The one middle class character we meet (a love interest played by Paddy Considine) is an equally broad stereotype of somebody higher up the food chain, who possesses higher intelligence, but a lack of grasp on reality.

Not only does this blossoming relationship fail to ring true, it also fails to offer any deeper conversation about the differences in class in Britain – it relies on outsized stereotypes of people of different economic backgrounds to such an extent, when they are placed together, it reveals that there is no relatable humanity to be found within the characters themselves.

Funny Cow: Conclusion

Funny Cow is one of the most harmful depictions of the British working class in popular culture since Sacha Baron Cohen’s Grimsby, in addition to being one of the most mindbogglingly racist and homophobic films in recent memory.

This film’s supporters argue that this is accurate to what a working class comedy club was like in the eras depicted – but in a politically divisive time when far right attitudes are increasingly normalised, we have to ask ourselves, is it ever okay for a film to give audiences the opportunity to laugh at jokes that offer direct prejudice to minorities, regardless of the historical context?

What are your thoughts on Funny Cow?

Funny Cow was released in UK cinemas on April 20. There are no scheduled international release dates at the time of writing.