Leftist fact-checkers aim to suppress satire and comedy by claiming it is 'misinformation' | The Post Millennial - "Throughout the left-wing media verse, publications that are used to seeing only liberal humor aimed at conservatives are frustrated by jokes that show the hypocrisy, humor, and absurdity of leftist positions. Liberals control culture, the US government, and the institutions across America. Yet want praise for their efforts, not comic critique, and they have the media tools to suppress those who speak truth to their power. An article from global fact-checkers AFP declared that misinformation spreads online by posing as satire. In their exploration of the problem of satire, AFP unintentionally has created satire itself, of itself, and of fact-checkers everywhere. AFP cites The Onion and The Beaverton as publications that most people know are satirical, and are not fooled by, but they claim that The Babylon Bee, a more recent addition to the landscape of satirical and humour websites, has veered too close to the truth for readers to always be able to make that differentiation... In Emma Green's interview with The Babylon Bee's editor-in-chief Kyle Mann, she forced him to explain a joke that was fact-checked. The joke was that after General Soleimani died, Democrats called for flags to be flown at half-mast... "Do you want me to explain the joke to you?" Mann asks. "Because the joke is that General Soleimani died and Democrats were sad. If you don't know why that's funny, then you're not the audience for the joke. The funniest part is that it got fact-checked because it was so believable that Democrats would do that. That's a real honor."... NPR ran an article about the latest comedy special from Dave Chappelle on Netflix. They claimed that his special, "The Closer," which was hilarious by the way, was bigoted. The show "uses comedy to veil bigotry," they wrote, going on to say that "Chappelle is using white privilege to excuse his own homophobia and transphobia." How long before NPR and The Atlantic join with AFP in saying that comedy is simply too dangerous to go unchecked? Once comedy and satire are wrangled and put through the unfunny machine, made to only reflect leftwing political and cultural views and not critique them, what will come under attack next? Hyperbole? Will it become misinformative to exaggerate? To speak in metaphor?"
"White" is how the left insult and dismiss anyone they disagree with and don't like
Why Dictators Don’t Like Jokes – Foreign Policy - "There is a reason why humor is infusing the arsenal of the 21st-century protestor: It works. For one, humor breaks fear and builds confidence. It also adds a necessary cool factor, which helps movements attract new members. Finally, humor can incite clumsy reactions from a movement’s opponents. The best acts of laughtivism force their targets into lose-lose scenarios, undermining the credibility of a regime no matter how they respond. These acts move beyond mere pranks; they help corrode the very mortar that keeps most dictators in place: Fear... By using humor, activists confront autocrats with a dilemma: the government can either crack down on those who ridicule it (making itself look even more ridiculous in the process) or ignore the acts of satire aimed against it (and risk opening the flood gates of dissent). Indeed, when faced with an act of brazen mockery, oppressive regimes have no good choices. Whatever they do, they lose"
Why the left doesn't like satire
Laughing at Power: Satire and Democracy - "Satire is the revenge of the intelligent on the privileged – it is there to prick pomposity and to check power. As the late Molly Ivins once said: “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.” It is, in this sense, a true expression of democracy – a way for the people to have their say... Helen Lewis agrees about the sensitivity of those in power. “Authoritarians hate satire because it makes them look ridiculous – and the whole aesthetic of most tyrants is dangerously close to laughable in the first place... In 1941, the Nazis got all worked up about a dog that used to raise its paw in the air, which tells you a lot about their lack of a sense of humor... Ian Hislop, editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, for the Geddes Memorial Lecture at Oxford University. During that exchange, Hislop said: “You should be able to laugh at anything… at anything grim. It’s a both a release and a way of defying it.”"
Ironically having a Nazi salute dog became a "hate crime" more recently
Titania McGrath on Twitter - "If you find yourself laughing at stand-up comedy, it probably isn’t sufficiently progressive."
yamini on Twitter - "my bf (white trans man) and i (brown cis woman) were trying to decide which one of us can tweet a joke we came up with and realized that if he tweets it, it’s racist and if i tweet it it’s transphobic... back to the drawing board"
Abolish comedy!
Dave Smith on Twitter - "People who have been through some fucked up shit are more likely to laugh at some fucked up jokes. People who have had privileged lives are less likely to understand this. For example, make a fucked up joke in a trailer park and then a university and see who gets offended first."
"Humor and laughter make all the fucked-up shit bearable. My Mom would crush with some cancer jokes as she was dying from it."
moon ☾ luca edit on Twitter - ""dark humor" is joking about your OWN trauma. not trauma that you havent experienced."
This is another manifestation of liberal narcissism. Ironic given so many come from literature, and literature is supposed to promote empathy
Why so serious? A laboratory and field investigation of the link between morality and humor. - "Previous research has identified many positive outcomes resulting from a deeply held moral identity, while overlooking potential negative social consequences for the moral individual. Drawing from Benign Violation Theory, we explore the tension between moral identity and humor, and the downstream workplace consequence of such tension. Consistent with our hypotheses, compared with participants in the control condition, participants whose moral identities were situationally activated (Study 1a) or chronically accessible (Study 1b) were less likely to appreciate humor and generate jokes others found funny (Study 2), especially humor that involved benign moral violations. We also found that participants with a strong moral identity do not generally compensate for their lack of humor by telling more jokes that do not involve moral violations (Study 3). Additional field studies demonstrated that employees (Study 4) and leaders (Study 5) with strong moral identities and who display ethical leadership are perceived as less humorous by their coworkers and subordinates, and to the extent that this is the case are less liked in the workplace. Study 5 further demonstrated two competing mediating pathways—leaders with strong moral identities are perceived as less humorous but also as more trustworthy, with differentiated effects on interpersonal liking. Although having moral employees and leaders can come with many benefits, our research shows that there can be offsetting costs associated with an internalized moral identity: reduced humor and subsequent likability in the workplace."
The morally righteous aren't funny
Why so many BLM ultras are white - "The female comic Katherine Ryan has attacked the gender tokenism on BBC panel show Mock the Week. I can explain why the programme has always been dominated by men, despite efforts in recent years to introduce more gender balance. It’s because the format of the programme is competitive, and men are more competitive than women.It’s also because on average men are funnier than women. As Camille Paglia famously argued, men are given to extremes: there are more men of genius for the same reason most serial killers and lunatics are male.Comedy is fundamentally about cruelty or the distortion of reality: it appeals to the dark side of humanity found mostly in the male of the species."
Ricky Gervais: ‘The Office’ Would Be Ruined By ‘Outrage Mobs Who Take Things Out Of Context - "Given today’s culture of cancelation and roving woke mobs, comedian Ricky Gervais believes that his original BBC version of “The Office” would be impossible if it were made in 2020... Ricky Gervais delivered a seismic opening monologue at the Golden Globes in which he roasted liberal Hollywood for posturing woke while allegedly being total degenerates in their private lives, from friendships with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to shady business deals with communist China... “Apple roared into the TV game with ‘The Morning Show,’ a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing — made by a company that runs sweatshops in China,” Gervais said. “Well, you say you’re woke but the companies you work for in China — unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?”... Gervais added that he did not necessarily believe everything he said in his speech, and only said it to make the best joke possible.“I’ll often take a complete opposite stance to what I actually believe if it makes the joke better. I’ll pretend to be right-wing, left-wing, or no-wing! It depends on the joke”"
Can comedy survive our puritan age? - "TV regulator Ofcom, in a report on the BBC, has classed comedy as an ‘at risk’ genre. In the past decade, the amount of original comedy on the BBC has dropped by more than 40 per cent... Joking around is now a somewhat precarious affair, lest offence is taken, and, like mad dogs playing Chinese Whispers, your ‘joke’ could be the end of you. Cancel culture is very real, contrary to what some ‘commentators’ might tell you. I, myself, have been a victim of it, blatantly and publicly.A friend on Twitter, commenting recently on the decline of comedy, said this was both because humour has become tribalised and because ‘any joke brings with it the risk of cancellation… Why take the risk of trying to be funny?’ An astute observation. With ‘offence warnings’ becoming all the rage this season (for Blackadder, Gimme Gimme Gimme, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Royle Family etc), TV production companies are looking increasingly like deer in excessively bright headlights. One pile-on from the Twittermob and it’s panic stations.But those who claim to be offended by something, in case it offends others, rarely speak for those ‘others’. Time and time again, I’ve seen this in action. ‘This is offensive to gays!’, they say. ‘Oh, I’m gay and it doesn’t offend me… why does it offend you?’, I reply. ‘Well, I’m not gay, but some of my friends are, and I’m sure they’d find this deeply homophobic!’ etc etc, ad infinitum. And therein lies the issue. The pitchfork mob, the mass resurrection of Mary Whitehouse and her moral outrage and purity. We’re all back in Salem... as we have all seen, ‘woke’ comedy isn’t comedy at all. It’s moral lecturing in disguise. And it’s pretty poor even at that."
Woke comedy is like joyless sex - "research done by an anti-woke pressure group called Campaign for Common Sense found that 75 per cent of comedians appearing on BBC shows are left-leaning Remainers with progressive views... Something very strange also happens when somebody is described as ‘right-wing’ these days. The leap to ‘far right’ or ‘alt-right’ is often assumed by default, which is just as absurd as somebody who is left-wing being aligned with the murderous totalitarian regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Chavez.What’s more, not everyone on the left is woke, but the left does have a problem in that woke ideology is rooted in the left. This has made my rational left-wing friends politically homeless, because no one wants to admit that the left has been poisoned by crazy identitarian, divisive bollocks. The left literally has an identity crisis. So, how does this affect comedy, I hear you cry? Well, the greatest comedians have all been free-thinkers, liberals in the truest sense of the word. Joan Rivers would have no truck with the tyranny of woke ideology if she were here today. Nor would Dave Allen, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor, George Carlin and certainly not Sam Kinison, who would have belly-flopped like a bandana-wearing sweaty beast on top of the audience screaming ‘fuuuuuuuuuckkkkkk youuuuuuu’... [A] comedian commented: ‘If you want jokes to be about politicians on the left then VOTE THEM IN. When they’re the headlines, the decision makers and the actual players they will be the focus on satire.’Either these comedians are deliberately using a strawman argument or they don’t understand the seismic cultural shift to the left, and that the woke left is fast becoming the establishment. The comedy industry being a case in point."
Satire Doesn’t Need a Political Litmus Test - "a coalition of leftist Columbia University student groups had a party to welcome incoming freshmen. The party was held in Potluck House, a special-interest housing community dedicated to food and conviviality, and the decorations were appropriately sans culottes.One student attending the party, however, thought the mockup of a bloody guillotine went a bit too far, and submitted a complaint to the Office of Residential Life. The party’s violent imagery and anti-liberal language, the student said, “threatened [their] identity by creating an unsafe space for capitalists.” Potluck House was officially sanctioned.This is ridiculous. There are few “safer spaces” for capitalism than an Ivy League university located in a global financial hub... Is satire the mere act of making fun? Should it provide catharsis, or a Zen acceptance of the world’s absurdity? Should it studiously avoid being condescending? What kind of social critique should it offer?On much of the left, the consensus has been clear: “Punch up, don’t punch down.” According to this “punch theory,” true satire takes on the powerful. Mocking the downtrodden, on the other hand, isn’t true satire; it’s hate speech. “An armed attack on a newspaper is shocking,” went one popular response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but “cartoonists (especially political cartoonists) generally reinforce the status quo, and they tend to be white men.” The ombudsman of NPR went further, claiming the cartoons were “hate speech unprotected by the Constitution.” Looking at satire this way has the potential to do real damage. For one, it obscures the culturally specific contexts that make satire effective in the first place. The very question, “What is satire?” is contingent upon personal, very heavily disputed judgments about identity. Was Charlie Hebdo satirizing an oppressed group (French Muslims) or a powerful institution (organized religion)? Does Jon Stewart punch down at the poor rubes of America’s heartland or punch up at the elite politicians who hoodwink them? We all have strongly held notions about identity and power, affected by factors including race, class, gender, religion and sexual orientation. It’s the height of naïveté to assume others, even our political allies, share all of our intuitions about where a certain group lies on the punching scale.In cases like Charlie Hebdo, punch theory helped spread confusion over France’s uniquely extreme style of satire, leading some to mistake the magazine for a fascist rag. But the words of a French leftist, Olivier Tonneau, are instructive: the cartoons were “well within the French tradition of satire — and after all was only intended for a French audience. … I hope this helps you understand that if you belong to the radical left, you have lost precious friends and allies.” Tonneau’s point about the need to read those cartoons in their local context should have been obvious. Instead, it was lost as leftists in the Anglosphere imposed their own sensibilities upon a different tradition.The second problem with punch theory is that it also leads to the silencing of satirists themselves. The most famous example is Bassem Youssef, the Egyptian satirist who has fiercely mocked every Egyptian government since the 2011 revolution. Youssef was arrested in 2013 on the charge of “insulting Islam,” part of Mohammed Morsi’s broader crackdown on political dissent. During his tenure, Morsi was careful to stress tentative support for free speech. But as he famously said during a speech to the United Nations, sacrilege was different, “an organized campaign against Islamic sanctities.” The reasoning is remarkably familiar: In order for satire to deserve protection, it must punch in the right direction, which Youssef failed to do. Youssef’s struggles are not unique. The Arabic-speaking world has a rich tradition of satire that has frequently gotten its practitioners in trouble. Often, the excuses governments use to crack down on satirists resemble Morsi’s, using blasphemy laws as pretexts. Officials have pushed these measures as a response to what they see as Western hegemony and provocation, from Islamophobic films to irreverent cartoons. None of them dispute that freedom of speech is important in theory. They just don’t want it used in the wrong way.Finally, punch theory does real damage to the left itself. So far, the debate over satire has taken place on the left, partly because of the movement’s internal diversity and academic affinities. A number of writers, most notably Michelle Goldberg, have pointed to another factor: The left’s obsession with cultural signaling reflects the absence of a proactive political agenda, and “is only possible at certain moments: when liberalism seems to have failed but the right is not yet in charge.”... one day conservatism will be culturally ascendant again, and the left will find itself attacked by the very tools it once employed... Before Pat Buchanan was a fearsome Republican adviser and presidential candidate, he and his brothers were roving Catholic vigilantes, setting fire to stores that sold pornography and other “obscene” material. Buchanan didn’t think he was thwarting freedom of speech. He was preventing a decadent, secular elite from “punching down” and imposing its beliefs on traditional Americans. Saul Alinsky’s “Rules For Radicals,” an organizing manual for leftists, is now beloved by the Tea Party for its tips on how to demagogue and shout down opposition. It doesn’t matter whether Buchanan and the Tea Party truly believe they are oppressed, or are just playing politics. The notion that true satire never punches down provides reactionaries with a blank check to crack down on political speech they don’t like"
Konstantin Kisin - "The same comedy industry movers and shakers who warned me that I was "damaging my career" by defending free speech are now protecting comedians who are widely reported to be sexual predators. 🤡"
Hold sexual predators accountable... unless they're the right sort of sexual predator
America Is Losing Its Sense of Humor - "Part of the reason for this movement away from joke-telling is perhaps due to what philosopher Jacques Ellul identified as our culture’s shift from word-based to picture-based thinking. In the not-too-distant past, people placed value on humor linked to artfully-constructed narratives and clever turns of phrase. Today, many people in the West do not have the attention spans to track a multi-layered joke, and instead get their laughs from viewing memes, gifs, and absurdities on YouTube. I think the other reason why people shy away from telling jokes, however, is simply that our culture is rapidly losing its sense of humor. And the main cause of this loss may be the rise of a fanaticism associated with the ideology of political correctness. Neil Postman identified this link between fanaticism and the decline of humor in his 1995 book The End of Education:
“To be able to hold comfortably in one’s mind the validity and usefulness of two contradictory truths is the source of tolerance, openness, and, most important, a sense of humor, which is the greatest enemy of fanaticism.”...
When those who subscribe to the ideology of political correctness do make an attempt at humor, I find that it is usually not funny at all, but caustic and mean-spirited. This observation has also been made by Amos Oz—dubbed Israel’s “most famous living author”— in his book How to Cure a Fanatic... The decline of humor in America is unfortunate both for ourselves and our society. The ability to laugh at ourselves is a normal part of humility, and to laugh at others serves as a recognition of our mutual brokenness. As philosopher Roger Scruton has noted, humor served a particularly important role in sustaining the “melting pot” of America"
The Decline of Laughter | The American Spectator - "A society that does not laugh is one without an important safety valve, and a society in which people interpret crude humor not as the first step toward friendly relations, but as a mortal offense, is one in which ordinary life has become fraught with danger. Human beings who live in communities of strangers are greatly in need of laughter, if their differences are not to lead to civil war. This was one of the functions of the ethnic joke. When Poles, Irish, Jews, and Italians competed for territory in the New World to which they had escaped, they provisioned themselves with a store of ethnic jokes with which to laugh off their manifest differences. Ethnic humor has been studied in depth by the British sociologist Christie Davies, and his findings — in The Mirth of Nations — are a salutary reminder of the ease with which spontaneous social solutions can be confiscated by the po-faced censors who seek to govern us. The jokes and teases that Christie assembles are gestures of conciliation, in which difference is made harmless and set laughingly aside. Yet everywhere in the modern world a kind of puritanical vigilance is extinguishing the ethnic joke, condemning it as an offense against our common humanity. What was traditionally regarded as a way to prevent social conflict is now seen as a major cause of it: The ethnic joke is accused of “stereotyping,” and so tainted with the indelible stain of racism... THERE ARE MANY JOKE-FREE ZONES in our religious literature. The Old Testament is full of them — think of that appalling Book of Joshua — and the Koran is as rigidly humorless as any document that has survived the efforts of humanity to laugh it off. But this points to another area in which humor has become dangerous. Christians, Jews, atheists, and Muslims, living side by side in acute consciousness of the divisions between them, are greatly in need of the religious joke. The Jews, through their experience of the Diaspora, living as strangers and sojourners among communities that at any moment might turn against them, have long been aware of this. As a result the rabbinical traditions are full of self-deprecating jokes, which underline the absurd position of God’s chosen people, living on the margins of a world that does not know that that is who they are. Jewish humor is one of the greatest survival mechanisms ever invented — which has aided not only its own survival but the survival of Jewish identity, through an unparalleled history of attempts to rub it out... the ability of the self-appointed censors to discern ideological sins and heresies has been vastly enhanced by their daily exercises in resentment. Such accusers know how to discern racist, sexist, and homophobic thought-crimes in the most innocent-seeming small talk. And they know no forgiveness, since they are cut off, like all humorless people, from the process of self-knowledge. The desire to accuse, which brings with it a reputation for virtue without the cost of acquiring it, takes over from the normal flow of human forgiveness, creating a wooden personality familiar to all who have had to deal with the lobbies that now control public opinion in America."
Racist jokes actually help racial harmony and reduce racism
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Today guest edits: Grayson Perry - "‘Strangely, you never get Tories ever complaining about jokes. But followers of Corbyn, I did find that even if you have written sort of one column in 10, about Corbyn and the rest about Johnson, even that is too much. And there should be no jokes.’...
It's fair to say that during a standard, standard political poll, you probably won't ask people whether they believe that alien life has contacted this planet in the past, but you might argue that would be the decision to make, because if you do believe that alien life has contacted this planet in the past, you're more than twice as likely to vote Leave than you are to vote Remain...
‘Conversations are really difficult when they're about moral things or identity things. That's why the trans issue is so difficult to have a conversation about. Because it's about an identity issue. So those issues take extra care in discussing them’
‘Mmm. Extra care or perhaps just don't. I mean, we have too many conversations online and not enough face to face.’
‘Yeah, maybe but you can't run from it your whole life, right? So wouldn't it be better to be empowered to have them than to, to, be afraid to speak openly and freely. And isn't part of the problem, because so many of us feel like we're walking on eggshells that we can't say what we, what we feel what we want to say? The problem with that is if you live your life like that you'll never develop genuine relationships with people, because not only will you not know what they mean, and they will not know what you mean, but you won't even know what you mean.’...
‘What beliefs the left have, is this system that will fix the world. And maybe it won't, and maybe we need to compromise and, and it won't be as perfect as you hoped’
‘You said the left is oddly more rigid than the right often.’
‘Yeah, I think there's more antipathy from the left in the in the current climate, you know, they seem more puritanical. They have a list of 20 things and if you only agree with 19 of them, then you're a fascist... Being a member of the establishment is quite an interesting place to be and a lot of, I mean, now the left is the establishment, you know, like the champagne socialists of North London are like the last little bit of kind of unlogged forest aren’t they of the socialist left?’"
The infallible left, which cannot take jokes
Shane Gillis' 'SNL' Firing: Comics Mixed Reactions Exposes Growing Rift in Stand-Up World - "the Gillis controversy — which began hours after his hiring, when podcasts surfaced of the 30-year-old Philadelphia comic calling presidential candidate Andrew Yang a "Jew chink" and spewing other racist and homophobic jokes — has become a flashpoint revealing a deep and widening rift in the comedy world. Like every other aspect of American life in the Trump era, stand-up is turning polarized, pitting comic against comic in an escalating civil war over what's acceptable humor and what's unfunny hate speech. "You millennials, you're a bunch of rats, all of you," Gillis defender Bill Burr snarled on David Spade's Comedy Central show. "None of them cares. All they want to do is get people in trouble.""
Why Woke Comedy's 'Punching Down' Rule Is a Joke - "Progressive comics love punching down ... if the targets are Trump voters... Trump fans aren’t rich. They often hail from cobalt blue collar backgrounds and have little political clout. In short, they’re low on the cultural ladder and, therefore, shouldn’t be targets of ridicule. Yet they are, both in this sketch and across the comedy landscape... They’re repeatedly beaten up, mocked on national TV and some higher profile supporters are chased out of restaurants.Meanwhile, today’s woke comedy police cite “punching down” as the biggest thought crime on the books."
Why the woke can't make jokes - "A few weeks ago, the head of ITV’s comedy department, Saskia Schuster, announced at Diverse Festival that the channel will no longer commission programmes written by all-male writers’ rooms.I know what you’re thinking. Yes, it’s incredible but true: ITV really does have a comedy department. A quick check under the comedy category on the network’s streaming service reveals that the only new British comedy programme available at the time of writing is Keith Lemon’s Celebrity Juice, so quite what this department is filling its working hours with when it isn’t attending diversity festivals remains a mystery... Telling jokes carries an appallingly high risk of social embarrassment – not for nothing do stand-up comedians refer to a bad performance as ‘dying’ – and a correspondingly small glimmer of reward. It is competitive – and about pushing at boundaries of taste. Putting writing of any kind on the line to be judged is never a pleasant experience. As a script editor on a soap, I once had to pass on adding one of the greatest writers of his generation to the team because I knew he would be torn apart by it.But I can’t think of anything less likely to produce good ideas, or indeed laughs, than to don the straitjacket of sensitivity and the safe space, of watching what you say, which tends in my experience to create a working atmosphere with all the easy, relaxed affability of Act Four of The Crucible. Schuster’s comments are also telling for what they reveal about how women are viewed by this culture. Anyone who has worked in television for more than a week, and particularly around television writers, will be amused by the notion that it’s a group populated by thrusting macho men and demure little ladies.There are two implicit suppositions behind Schuster’s statement. The first is that women will civilise the rough and tumble chaps, a view of the sexes plucked straight from an Edwardian drawing room. The second is that different levels of employment of the sexes in any workplace are entirely because of male privilege and power. I think there are more male writers for the same reason there are more male criminals – because men are on average more likely to do stupid, irrational things that have a high chance of ruin.Schuster has founded a campaign called Comedy 50:50, whose aim is to reach perfect equity between the sexes in writing comedy... What a limiting view of people and of her fellow writers. Men do man jokes, women do woman jokes, homosexuals do homosexual jokes, black people do black jokes. Nobody has imagination or empathy or fellow feeling. We are apparently parrots loaded with one set of phrases, defined entirely by an arbitrary characteristic.There is certainly a problem with the same kind of people telling the same kind of jokes, as anybody who’s watched or listened to any of the multiple shows “taking a sideways look at the week’s news” such as Mock the Week will know – the people employed are overwhelmingly middle class and Left-wing. But nobody seems in a hurry to understand or address this most glaring lack of diversity... This reflects a modern cultural quirk in the arts: an obsession with process rather than outcome... All art, even the desperately silly and trivial, is now regarded as political and with a mystic power to remodel society. The language of HR courses and inclusivity awareness workshops has cemented around the very daftest things. Somebody should write a comedy about that."
Ricky Gervais Takes On Verbal Terrorism: ‘Don’t Apologize’ - "Ricky Gervais calls himself “a lefty liberal champagne socialist,” but when he says, “I don’t agree that feelings are more important than facts,” he echoes Ben Shapiro. The point of intersection: Both men support speaking freely. This quality makes them somewhat courageous, though it shouldn’t... “it’s not enough to apologize anymore and move on. People want blood, people want you ruined, because it’s a point-scoring competition now.” Even if you’re finely attuned to evolving standards, as Gervais says he is, “You can make your jokes bulletproof at the time, but now you have to make them bulletproof for ten years.” That seems like a lowball estimate. As time passes, people don’t just let their irony detectors rust and fall into disrepair; they seem actively to sabotage them. Willfully ignoring comic intent is a growth industry. In his comedy, Gervais says a lot of things he doesn’t actually mean in order to get a laugh, but that may become an increasingly untenable practice in an age when satire is subjected to stern and humorless fact-checks. “If you water the irony down so much, it’s not irony anymore,” he tells Harris. “I might as well go out and say ‘racism’s wrong, isn’t it,’ and get a round of applause. That’s lovely, but it’s not funny.” He could have added that no comedian would stay in business for very long by being boringly earnest. (That task falls to politicians.) When he’s doing his standup and “ten thousand people are laughing, you don’t care about one heckler. Sometimes I explain the joke to people, and the people who got it are angry. . . . And I have to say, when a comedian apologizes, I go oh, ‘F***ing don’t apologize!’ You can’t please everyone, and you shouldn’t. You can’t legislate against stupidity, and you shouldn’t.”The environment around us seems to be one in which actual racists and actual Nazis feel increasingly comfortable. Why might that be? “Everyone knows that you can make a joke about race without being racist,” Gervais says. Yet everyone who says anything that gets labeled offensive gets thrown into the same box. Disagree with progressive dogma on anything? You must be a white supremacist. Gervais smartly explains this willful failure to distinguish actual malevolence... A favorite tactic of Gervais’s detractors on Twitter is to point out that someone on the right agreed with something he said. Does that bother him? No, actually, he likes finding common ground with people on the other side. Yet “it’s not about the argument anymore. It’s not about the joke. It’s about who’s saying it because there’s a point-scoring system going on now. It’s like everyone’s trying to get into heaven by having more points scored for them and more points scored against the opposition.”Unless you stick to the softest possible level of comedy, every joke is going to have a target, yet “everyone wants to be exempt. . . . They don’t want their beliefs being made fun of so they try and give beliefs human rights. . . . That’s what blasphemy is, giving their beliefs human rights. It’s like saying, ‘you hurt my god, you hurt me.’” Gervais is an atheist, but even he takes note of how efforts to enforce dogma now come primarily from the woke and secular Left. “If you say the wrong pronoun it’s a blasphemy. . . . They stick ‘phobia’ on the end of a word and then you’re racist if you don’t agree with an idea. It’s like me getting offended by someone making fun of maths. Doesn’t change it. Science doesn’t care about your feelings.” He sounds a more optimistic note than I would about where all this is heading when he avers that we’re coming out of the Dark Ages of wokeness: “There are blips, but I think truth is too strong in the end.”... Do not mistake Gervais for a supporter of Donald Trump, whom he calls “this crazy narcissistic baby, this overprivileged dog-whistling moron,” but he sees the connection between the BBC’s attitude and the attraction of Trumpism. “You have conspiracy theories start, like his whole base is racist, which clearly can’t be true,” Gervais says. “Some people just voted Republican. Some people hated Hillary. . . . The swing vote was a certain percentage of people who’ve been tired for the last ten years of being told what they can say and do.”Everyone knows this, and yet what does the Left do? It turns up the volume. “Won’t you listen to the children?” the Left always pleads. My response is: Won’t they listen to the comedians?"
Our culture of victimhood, political correctness and infinite narcissism is destroying comedy - "Olaf Falafel, the winner of Dave’s ‘Funniest Joke of the Fringe’ prize, was accused of insensitivity. His winning gag: "I keep randomly shouting out ‘Broccoli’ and ‘Cauliflower’ – I think I might have florets" prompted criticism from the charity Tourettes Action, which described it as "disappointing" and claimed the joke "brought shame on Dave". The charity even demanded an apology from the Swedish comedian.Last week, my friend Ryan Dalton, one of the least offensive comedians alive, was performing ‘When Nature Calls’, a show about his love of animals. On this occasion, he made a joke which insinuated that pugs are not the best-looking dogs. Two people in the front row stood up and walked out. When asked why they were leaving, their explanation was "We’ve got a pug". Another friend and former winner of the Joke of the Fringe Award, Masai Graham, also fell foul of a snowflake in the audience. The West Brom native was performing ‘101 Naughty Jokes in 30 minutes’ when a woman in the crowd took offence to one of his gags but rather than walking out, berated the rest of the audience for laughing and attempted to frogmarch them out of the venue. When they refused, the woman left, only to return minutes later to collect her forgotten brolly. Awkward. My own show, ‘Orwell That Ends Well’, which deals with controversial subjects like racism, offence, freedom of expression and political correctness, has also not gone without incident. A few days ago a man took exception to something I said and proceeded to shout a series of unprintable expletives, and even called me "racist" – rather odd, given that I was talking about racism directed at me. I'm not usually a fan of identity politics, but I couldn't help but notice that the heckler was a middle-class white man who seemed entirely undeterred by the fact that he was surrounded by ethnic minorities who were all laughing their heads off.So are we living in a culture of offence where more of us are unable to take a joke? There is some truth to that: performing in comedy clubs in London, Brighton and other right-on metropolitan areas does often feel like walking a tightrope, even for fairly inoffensive comedians like me.But the bigger shift has been towards a culture of narcissism. Where in the past being offended by a comedian might have simply meant choosing not to see him or her again, somehow we have convinced ourselves that our opinions matter. Audience members will routinely demand that a comedy club stops booking certain comedians – not because they failed to make the audience laugh but because someone felt like being offended. If 299 people enjoyed the show and one person did not, that individual feels entitled to complain, disrupt the performance or even shame others into walking out with them.Why? Because the currency of modern society is victimhood... the story of someone being offended is irresistible to the media because it provides the ever-elusive clicks, likes and shares we all so desperately desire.The only way to reverse this culture of entitled, aggressive hypersensitivity is to stop rewarding victimhood. We must remind ourselves that the purpose of life is to overcome challenges, not wallow in them. And we have given 'offence' a social cachet it simply doesn't deserve – being offended is, after all, a choice."
To think liberals used to campaign against censorship by saying that if you were offended by a book or movie, you should just not read or watch it
"Rape Jokes by Survivors: A Night of Comedy and Catharsis" Review - "in the case of one comedy show being held in New York City this weekend, rape survivors are the ones asserting their right to joke about sexual assault."Rape Jokes by Survivors: A Night of Comedy and Catharsis" is the brainchild of Kelly Bachman, a New York-based director and comedy fan who’s also creating a documentary about the project. Bachman has enlisted more than a dozen survivors for a night of "storytelling, catharsis and laughter" over a subject that, despite the success of #MeToo movement, is still seen as taboo. Rape jokes still make many recoil — especially, it seems, when those jokes come from women. For Bachman and other survivors, though, a well-constructed rape joke is not only funny, but therapeutic. For some, it’s a necessary step toward catharsis... audiences seem appalled at Brave for daring to talk about it.“If someone came up to me after a show and said, ‘That joke was fucked up,’” Brave says, “I’d say, ‘Well, what’s fucked up is that this did happen to me and my boyfriend did punch me in the face. The joke is not what’s fucked up.’”... To dismiss a rape joke without hearing it out is always a mistake, comedian Adrienne Truscott argues — even if it’s told by a man who’s seemingly never been assaulted.“I think that people are capable of making interesting observations or jokes about things that they don’t necessarily have firsthand experience with,” she says. “I think that I should never tell anyone what kind of joke they should or shouldn’t write. I’m not into censoring anybody.”"
Nipple cripple proves Australia has lost war on political correctness - "Comedians are of course notoriously melancholy creatures but there have been several recent developments that make me more sure than ever that my mate is on the money.One was a report this month that the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions had ordered his Newcastle office to complete a sexual harassment course after a lawyer “tweaked” a colleague’s nipple.Sounds fair enough, you might think, until you read on. You see, it wasn’t a lecherous old man groping a young vulnerable clerk. It was a female solicitor mucking around with a male colleague when she gave him a little nipple-cripple over his shirt. Call the prosecutors!And it gets better. It wasn’t even the bloke who had his nipple tweaked who made the complaint. He wasn’t fussed at all. Instead it was someone in the office who witnessed it and reported it as “inappropriate”.As a source rather plaintively told The Daily Telegraph: “It was just a joke.” But as my comedian mate now knows, there are no jokes anymore. There’s just appropriate and inappropriate behaviour.And so, as a result of a playful exchange between two friendly colleagues who were completely untroubled, dozens of legal experts have to sit through an interminable sexual harassment lecture delivered perhaps by some po-faced bureaucrat or perhaps by a disembodied online portal. It’s hard to know which would be a bigger waste of the taxpayer’s time or money... two people, one white and one black, were talking about how absurd it was that a certain derogatory racial term was still allowed to be used in some contexts. Another person in the office overheard the conversation and reported them.And so it was back to the re-education camps for that happy little workplace. Yes, even a black person discussing a racist word can now be sanctioned for racism.Again, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is as dumb as society could possibly get but, again, you’d be wrong.Because just last week an educator infamously suggested that parents should ask their babies for consent babies before changing a nappy. Needless to say, in any such exchange it would not just be the nappy that was completely full of it... Of course people have the right to be offended by whatever they want to be offended by — indeed, who could stop them? The only question is whether the ultimate power in society should be held by whoever is offended the most.And the fear of causing offence has now reached the point where people who are upset by a conversation they overhear are rewarded for reporting its participants to authorities.Worse still, even the intent or context of any action or conversation doesn’t matter... Seriously, was this new breed of educators trained in East Germany?... Frankly, I don’t want to live in a world run by robots. I want a world where people can say stupid stuff and say sorry in the morning, where people can swear at each other and then shake hands, where a drunken shag isn’t sexual assault and where sexual assault isn’t likened to caring for your newborn child.I want to live in a world that is warm and wild and funny and free. And I want my children to live in that world.And if that world disappears, well — as my old mate said — I’m going to miss it"
Rod Liddle was joking, you idiots - "how come Rod Liddle’s joke about disenfranchising Muslims in the forthcoming election caused more outrage than the revelation earlier this week that many young people actually want to disenfranchise older voters? We all know the answer to this question. It’s because in the world of the woke, in the ruthless and quite racist hierarchy of identities these people have constructed, the Muslim community must be protected from everything, even humour, while old people, especially those nasty white working-class ones who voted for Brexit, are fair game for whatever shit you want to throw at them... Jonathan Swift didn’t really think Irish people should let rich gentlemen eat their babies, and Rod Liddle doesn’t really think Muslims should be denied the vote. It’s remarkable this needs saying... Satire isn’t allowed anymore, it seems. Everyone who’s anyone has condemned Liddle and his jokecrimes. This is ‘not acceptable’, decreed Sajid Javid. Thanks, Saj, but we do not need or want and will never, ever tolerate politicians dictating what jokes people are allowed to tell or publish. Like a mini McCarthyite, the Labour MP Liam Byrne wrote to the BBC’s director-general to insist that the Beeb give no more airtime to Liddle or the Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson... You know what wasn’t a joke, though? A survey earlier this week which found that 47 per cent of Brits aged between 18 and 34 think older people should not be allowed to vote in big-issue elections – for example on Brexit or Scottish independence... We shouldn’t be surprised. Many of these people want to disenfranchise numerous sections of society. They literally want to crush the votes of 17.4million people, which includes eight million women, millions of working-class people, and a third of ethnic-minority voters. Well, they’re all dumb, racist scum, right? Shove their vote for Brexit down the memory hole."
So much for humour and satire as ways of speaking truth (to power)
Even woke comics aren’t safe - "Russell Howard claims the BBC asked him to tweak a routine in case it offended ISIS. Seriously... he wrote a bit for his then BBC show, Russell Howard’s Good News, lambasting the ISIS killers as ‘warmongering pricks’ and insisting that they aren’t Muslims, but terrorists. This apparently set off alarm bells with the executives, who made him change it to say that the jihadists aren’t ‘devout Muslims’... if anything this was an odd kind of departure for the corporation. The BBC’s clunky house style has it so that the words Islamic State only ever appear in quote marks or prefaced by ‘so-called’. In Howard’s case, the execs seemed to be conceding that ISIS is, at least a bit, Islamic... Take another example – that of Nimesh Patel. Last year, the New York stand-up and Saturday Night Live writer was pulled off stage at a student event. The organisers took issue with a joke he told about how getting to know gay, black men proved to him that homosexuality isn’t a choice. ‘No one looks in the mirror and thinks, “This black thing is too easy; let me just add another thing to it”’, he quipped.It’s a good line, and no one in the audience could possibly have disagreed with the message of it. But the fact that Patel even ‘went there’ was apparently enough to render his set ‘problematic’. So often we talk about PC as the silencing of opinions certain people find disagreeable. But what we’re looking at here is something more irrational – a knee-jerk fear of even taking on certain issues."
Konstantin Kisin cancels university show over 'behaviour contract' - "A comedian has pulled out of a student charity event after being asked to sign a contract banning him from being offensive about almost anything.Konstantin Kisin was sent a 'behavioural agreement form' which stopped him telling jokes which were not 'respectful and kind'.The form stated: 'By signing this contract, you are agreeing to our no-tolerance policy with regards to racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia or anti-religion or anti-atheism.' Student leaders said the ban was necessary to preserve the event as a 'safe space' and a place for 'joy, love, and acceptance'... Mr Kisin, who has lived in Britain for 20 years, said yesterday: 'I couldn't believe it. The only people who should be controlling what comedians say are comedians. This is a threat to freedom of speech and I have declined the invitation on a point of principle. 'I grew up under the Soviet Union. When I saw this letter, basically telling me what I could and couldn't say, I thought this was precisely the kind of letter a comic would have been sent there.'"
