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August 21, 2024 - 1:00pm
Next month there is to be an exhibition of the works of Led By Donkeys, the politically-inspired jokesters who have delighted us all over the last five years by putting up a few big billboards. Or in the words of the plug for the accompanying coffee table book, using one of the most tedious phrases of our time, ‘hold(ing) the powerful to account’. The exhibition is to take place at 17 Midland Road in Bristol — a ‘multi-purpose space’, apparently — and will feature big photos of the big billboards in situ, often with people walking obliviously by.
Led by Donkeys have given us half a decade of outrageous guerrilla antics, with that exclusive, bespoke, boutique brand of humor that already fills every single platform and outlet, pours from every single modern media device, marches in lockstep with governments and corporations, but which still — incredibly — considers itself anti-establishment. Their work offers only an irreverent take on the week’s news, a sideways look at the headlines: nothing original or insightful, just boilerplate conformism when it comes to issues such as Net Zero and immigration.
Of course, humor is famously subjective. But where Charlie Brooker and Marina Hyde have a marvelous turn of phrase and real flair, Led By Donkeys possess a total lack of distinctiveness or originality. Even Banksy has more wit and capacity for thought-provoking material. Led By Donkeys’ stunts, though impressive on a technical level, are so dreary, projecting Tory MPs’ inane tweets onto billboards or an EU flag onto the white cliffs of Dover. It has the rictus grin of approved, partisan regime output. There is something akin to North Korean kids TV about it.
The group’s very name screams of the naff Sixties ahistorical remembrance of the First World War, and its lazy calumny on the officer class of that conflict. We must always remember that there is no hatred in this country so vicious and so deeply felt as the hatred that the upper middle class feels for the actual upper class, that the minor public schoolboy feels for the major public schoolboy. It is a boiling envy for inherited wealth dressed up as social concern for the lower orders and in the modern world, where power resides in a completely different place, this is plainly ludicrous.
When Led By Donkeys revealed their identities to the world in 2019, they looked absolutely exactly as you’d expect. That is: four dejected hipster guys in their late 30s with interesting facial hair and bottom-feeding public-sector jobs called James, Ben, Will and Ollie, who felt they really had to do something about bloody Brexit.
Now that those dreadful Tories have finally been deprived of the power they so devastatingly wielded — enforcing extreme right-wing policies such as admitting millions of immigrants and committing economic suicide — LBD have been left in a bit of a satirical quandary. The other week, they performed an excruciatingly weak stunt — using somebody else’s ancient joke — on, of all people, Liz Truss. Why stop there? Let’s really sock it to Bonar Law, guys. And there’s no doubt plenty of comedic mileage in the repeal of the Corn Laws.
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