Yes, it’s a problem that something like that is insulting to publish.

Be harder to identify the non crap towns tbh.

a comedians biggest fear is that one day everyone starts taking them seriously

The author writes well. Within a few paragraphs the reader entirely forgets that "I couldn't publish Crap Towns today" is a hypothetical.

In my experience there are only a few cities in the U.S that literate people are proud enough to live in, that they would be insulted that you put that into your crap town book.

Thus I wonder what demographic that at one time would have bought this book is not going to be buying this book now.

I remember a Web site, in the early oughts, called “sheppeyscum.com”. That URL now redirects to one that makes Sheppey look good.

The original one did not.

It was all about insulting the Isle of Sheppey (Western UK). I think an ex-Shep wrote it.

Looks like all traces are gone. I understand that death threats were involved.

So it’s not that it won’t be published today.

It just won’t be as popular today. And would, ironically, be crapped on by other people, which is what the author is unhappy about.

Thats what the author means, and represents the entirety of the “Oh I am so oppressed because I can’t say shitty unfunny jokes because other people will make shitty unfunny jokes about me in response” genre of argument.

The difference between then and now is that the people in the “crap towns” have the opportunity to call the author out.

The problem is those towns weren’t crap within living memory when the books were written. Now anyone who remembers otherwise is close to dead

If you're about to write a diatrabe about the harms of political correctness or scold the writer on inventing a victimhood complex for themselves, please read the ending of the OP:

> Much as I’d like to, I can’t just blame the puritans if my old jokes don’t work any more. Nor can I claim that the Crap Towns books were an unqualified success

[...]

> before closing, I should admit that there is a more straightforward answer to the question of whether you can still get away with doing something like Crap Towns.

> That answer is: yes. There’s a website (I won’t link to it) that has kept on running a survey of the worst places in the UK for years and years- and, honestly, when I look at it, I hate it. Partly because I feel like they’re ripping off my project, but mainly because when I read the comments on there about incels and chavs and carbuncles and brutalism it all just seems grubby. Maybe even cruel.

> I could argue that I don’t like this website because their approach and criteria are different to mine - and I hope there would be some truth in that. But I also know that I now also just react against the whole thing. It’s been done. It’s grown stale. It doesn’t fit - especially since so much has changed around it. In short, the world has moved on. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing?

Loved the fact that this post didn't go where I expected it to (or at least, didn't remain there). That a book like this probably wouldn't be published today, or would be less popular today, is a point that has been made many times by many people, about many different books, TV shows, jokes, etc. But the author actually moves on from there; the observation is that even in his own opinion, the same joke isn't funny today — in fact, the equivalent thing being done today just looks “grubby”.

So it's something deeper than the usual “political correctness” debate: the question really is, what is it about the world today that trumps the hallowed British traditions of celebrating failure, of moaning, of affectionate self-mockery? Why isn't the joke funny any more, or why doesn't the mocking seem affectionate?

(He points at the malaise that exists today—it was only funny when there was some hope—but I'm not sure that's the only answer…)

My home town featured (33rd!). We considered it vindication!

> but mainly because when I read the comments on there about incels and chavs and carbuncles and brutalism it all just seems grubby. Maybe even cruel.

There we go. People shift from being the out-group to being more sympathetic and unfortunate, and humour that targeted them moves into being punching down. I was shocked at how less funny Bill Hicks feels 20 years on, because now it just sounds like he's being an asshole about people who are struggling.

One thing that has been accentuated over the past few decades is the idea that you are responsible for your success. When you were poor, lacked means, or didn't have a good job, it was because the god of fortune didn't smile on you. Only the fortunate experienced success.

Now only losers are broke and live in crap towns, and winners drive expensive cars. With this idea in mind, calling it crap towns becomes an attack on the people, rather then the town itself.

This idea is thoroughly explored in Alain de Botton's "Status Anxiety"

I read some guy complaining some podcast complained about his book and elevate it into some weird organized political movement that he's already declared is dead, and he's happy those kind of rancid speech-haters are gone...punchline... they're the illiberals!

Okay then!

Be honest with yourself, O Reader!

Are you sure he's not writing a satire of the same piece you've seen written every year since 1990, just with a shifting name for it?

He is a comedian after all...

Are you sure he's serious?

>One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way.

I couldn't help but keep thinking about this Wittgenstein quote as I read this. I find it harder to say exactly why. Obviously, we felt differently in the past. Not my past, of course: I was a child, barely able to integrate by parts or fold a shirt correctly.

There is another possibility. The usual complaint is that oversensitivity has constrained humor. The usual retort is that what we did before was harmful and we're better off not doing it. But the problem with logical-seeming dilemmas is that existential propositions can only seem logical. The world, unlike logic, is malleable. Perhaps the jokes really are worse today than they were in the past?

Twenty years ago, our crap towns were something we experienced with the other townsfolk first and foremost, and only to a lesser degree did we bear the weight of the outside world's eyes upon us. Today it is not like this. Communication across great distances has gone from difficult to convenient to pervasive and unavoidable.

Locality has frayed in more domains than the spatial. Recently /r/MedicalPhysics had a spat with /r/sysadmin about hospital IT policies. Such a civil war would have been unthinkable in the 2000s. Humans used to spend much more time socializing with their friends or at least comrades-in-something than with almost complete strangers. Our egos are exposed to the elements in a new and phase-changing way.

I think that the social fabric has already begun to fight this trend from the bottom up. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement, Discord has made non-discoverability its greatest feature. The gladiatorial aspect of modern discourse has never sat well with me. I don't want to have a conversation for the audience. But here I am. Please clap.

Without a definition of a shit town I can't make much sense of what he wrote here. I'm tempted to define it myself but I won't fall for the trap.

> And when hope was actually something people might consider voting for?

A link to an American politician, of course.

Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged to the same broad spectrum of bland mediocrity.

Today, I think it's clear who would be being laughed at by whom. The fates of places have so radically diverged that we no longer have a sense of collective identity. All of the places listed in Crap Towns are now unrecognisable, for better or worse. Those familiar shops are now gone; in some places they have been replaced by artisan bakeries and pop-up boutiques, while in others they have been replaced by charity shops or nothing at all. Half the leisure centres have shut and we all know which half.

The upper middle class might have become more humourless and puritanical, but I think that's a subconscious self-defence mechanism, a manifestation of noblesse oblige without real obligation. The working class are too angry to laugh and certainly aren't willing to be laughed at. We all know that we're teetering on the brink of a populist wave, but no-one in a position of power seems willing or able to do anything about it.

I think this is awesome! Should be done more often, gives people perspectives on areas they wouldn't otherwise know or think about.

Maybe now the crappiest places have something common that should not be mentioned.

If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline. Additionally if you think there are two kinds of jokes: those that were once funny and those that were never funny, then I suggest that your jokes were at best lazy. The human condition is pretty constant throughout the ages and those jokes that are aimed at such universal experiences continue to amuse for centuries or millennia.

Understandably the humor of the inexperienced 20-something will differ from that of the 40+ year-old. The simple and absolute world that we believe to see and understand in our younger years tends to vanish from our grasp as we become older and attain the wisdom of experience. Perhaps the author's belief that "it has been done already" reflects some of that wisdom, and just maybe those of a certain age at the time of the publishing of "Crap Towns" felt exactly the same way about his book. It seems, after all, that every generation believes that it is the first to do or discover a thing without considering that humans have been doing human things for an awfully long time and that the observation "there is nothing new under the sun" has some merit.

Great article.

This kind of humor still exists and I think it’s still most popular with young people. I followed an Instagram account in Chicago that mocks local bars and the people who go to them, but they’re all bars for people in their 20s, so I’ve rarely heard of them and don’t fully get the descriptions. There’s also that trend of “cynical maps” (Google it) of city neighborhoods, country regions, etc that peaked a few years ago and still circulates.

I don’t see this selling as a book now, but I also don’t see humorous coffee table books in general as a category the way they were 25 years ago?

It's not about identity politics. It's not about self-deprecation. It's not even about if the material is particularly funny or not.

It's whether you're punching up or punching down.

If the purpose of Crap Towns is to punch up, speak to power, to point out the failures of Thatcherism, decreased social mobility through a perptuation of failing center-right politics thanks to an overly-powerful media and political class that is divorced from reality, the absurd dominance of PPE graduates within policy making, and on, and on, on... well, it's great satire.

If it's just to point at working class people and go "haha, their streets are dirty and they eat bad food", well... you're punching down, and it's rare that can work as comedy. It's just mean bullying.

So yes, you can write Crap Towns today, but it lands better if you draw the line from Thatcher through Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and Starmer, and their acolytes - the PPE mafia on both sides of the House, and point out how their crappy politics has caused all this, not their victims.