We’ve sat idly watching tv all through the pandemic, it’s early 2021 and I’ve just watched the Hairy Bikers japing and singing badly while they cook something fatty and no doubt delicious. My ex-wife loved these guys, in fact she loved this type of humour, from Michael Macintyre to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I think it’s infantile, and luckily my partner now (Em) thinks that too. Her sense of humour isn’t quite as dark as mine, but then mine isn’t as dark as some of the members in the WhatsApp groups I’m in, it’s all about degrees of tolerance I suppose.
I got thinking while in a conversation with a co-worker, one that neither of us could have had in public without ridicule or anger, and following a good laugh at some truly rough subject, that there is a lot that we cannot say publicly now. Not because it is obsolete, nor because it has ceased to be relevant or funny, but because there would be somebody somewhere that might choose to be emotionally effected by what they may hear. This is Pareto Optimality, which is not actually ever in any way optimal to anyone, but is the lowest and safest situation that is acceptable to a group based on the most timid, and likely to become emotionally hurt, member of that group being able to curb the actions of all others within the group to accommodate their low benchmark. My conclusion to this conundrum is the same as everyone else’s, I mind what I say based on who my audience is, I could be in a room with my mother, my boss, a child, or a particularly mentally ill person. Is that a cop out though, is it a nonsense? Yes, I think it likely is….
The more I thought about it the more I started to realise that anything comedy that is actually funny must have a victim of sorts, that victim will be the Irishman, the dark skinned individual, the toffy nosed rich person, the grossly overweight, the less than intellectual, the blonde woman etc.. I can’t remember the last time I belly laughed at a safe joke told by a sanitised comedian…. Here’s part of a FB conversation I had recently. I’ll only post the things I wrote in response..
Jimmy Carr is not the news. Growing poverty and inequality as a result of years of tory rule is. Jimmy tells jokes you might not find funny, so what? Jimmy has no impact on your heating bill or your shopping basket… Maybe get upset about shit that matters?
At this point I am accused of not knowing enough, and being a right winger….that angered me a bit. so I wrote…
Carr appeals to me because he is edgy and funny, simple as that. I like comedians that don’t play it safe.. like Jim Jeffrey’s, Doug Stanhope, Frankie Boyle, Bill Burr. Since we’re discussing the difference between real harm and offence, and we seem to be also now suggesting that further education is needed (an oft encountered tactic in an argument to suggest that one interlocutor has arrived unarmed, I haven’t) I would recommend John Stuart Mill’s book ‘On Liberty’ as a good read for those that are not well versed in the western tradition of freedom of speech. In it Mill defines not the authority but the right to curtail behaviour in a Liberal Society based on harm, not offense. You could also look to the 1st amendment of the US constitution for guidance on the prevention of prior restraint of words spoken or published being that there can be no authority recognised that can be said to be better at deciding what you can be allowed to hear than your own authority. Or try Rosa Luxembourg who said that freedom of speech is meaningless if it does not guarantee that the most dissenting or disgusting voices be heard. Now, by implication, if you wish to ban a comedian for what he might say, before he might say it, or even after he says it, and having done no harm being that his words are not forced upon anyone that is unwilling to hear or read them, then you are a lot more right wing than I am bud…
We live at a time where only the intellectual comic, somebody like Ricky Gervais, can be close to the bone with his comedy because he has the smarts to defend his position to the Nth degree against all those that would deconstruct it to find the unreasonable and offensive implication, and there do seem to be plenty that will try. Or we have Romesh Ranganthan, a comedian who is lucky enough to be from an ethnic minority, an immigrant family, has a disability, and has mixed race children with his Caucasian wife, this is an absolute golden position, a lottery win for a comedian – this man can go anywhere and do and say anything, and nobody can accuse him of anything offensive since he himself is most often the locus of the comedy he uses. Comedy is not a privileged position as it is often mooted, the white man cannot tell the joke about the black man but the black man can about the honky, the man cannot tell the joke that degrades the woman or presents her as lesser but the woman can lay bare all the ineptitude of the man in sexual circumstances or his general ability to perform any menial task, this is the reality of it. Jim Davidson and Bernard Manning pointed out the humour in cultural differences, they didn’t create those differences or the difficulties that come with them. They’re not to blame for the perception that Jews are tight fisted, Jewish people are to blame for that, and Jewish comedians like Woody Allen have have great mileage from pointing it out in their own jokes.
I’ve worked for over 30 years, in that time I have had tricks played on me, I’ve been the butt of jokes and japes, I’ve been teased and harangued both at work and in my social life. At no point in my life did I ever mind being in that position if the person doing the teasing or playing the trick or telling the joke was not motivated by hatred towards me if I was just the convenient target of an observation that might make others laugh. I imagine that our recent softness to this is because we are moulded by societal rules, ones we see as decency rather than obstruction, we assimilate the feelings of the now without thinking, what hurts us now in words would merely have made us think twenty years ago, and done nothing to us at all ten years before that. It is my attitude that has won out for me, my choice not to search for hurt in the act but to accept that we all have the possibility because of our own flaws to be the reason of laughter if the observer is skilful enough and their intention is merely a laugh without malice. It’s just a joke.
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