Being funny is difficult but laughing is easy. Or at least, it used to be. These days, you better beware what jokes you find funny.
A Scottish politician this week used Twitter to call for the audience to be prosecuted for applauding a joke at a comedy show. The offending comedian was Jimmy Carr, who got in trouble for a bit about gypsies and the Holocaust in his new Netflix special. Of course, joking about one of the worst crimes in human history is edgy, but the perennially offended woke brigades wasted no time in calling for his show to be removed from Netflix and even for a police investigation under Britain’s dystopian hate speech laws. And Scottish Councillor Julie McKenzie thought that investigation should extend to everyone who found Carr funny.
It was all so predictable. Carr must have anticipated the backlash, so should be applauded for persevering with the joke anyway. It is an all too rare commitment to what should be comedy’s ONLY mission: to be funny. Comedians aren’t in the business of social commentary and there are no areas where comedy can’t tread. The quality of comedic material can be judged by the simple standard of whether it makes people laugh. Because context matters – in fact, when judging what people say, context is everything. Carr’s offensive joke was made at a comedy show in front of an audience who had paid to hear jokes. It would evidently be very different if the words were uttered at a neo fascist political rally, but given the setting, it is obvious to everyone that Carr did not actually mean what he said. It was a joke. Context matters.
The woke left act as if the very concept of context is alien to them, but of course, we know it isn’t. That is evident from how they treat a word which landed another comedian, Joe Rogan, in hot water this week: the word “nigger.” Long regarded as anathema for a white man to utter, the N-word is, in fact, perfectly acceptable if spoken by a black man. But hear a white skinned person say it and we are supposed to recoil in terror, as if we are too fragile to handle it. Setting aside the infantilisation of the audience that is implicit in treating a word as if it’s a weapon, this is what context means: the word said by one person is treated as different than if said by another. But why, then, is when and how the word is said suddenly not of relevance when assessing whether there is malice intended or not?
This was where Rogan got in trouble, because he has, on several occasions, used the N-word on his Spotify podcast – mind you, always as part of his conversations and never as a slur against anyone. Regardless, the mob came for him and he was forced to half-apologise (though he made clear in his statement that context should have been taken into account). Spotify allegedly paid $100 million for Rogan’s podcast and can’t afford to fire him (not unlike Netflix’s predicament with Dave Chapelle), but they predictably distanced themselves from him as much as they could and promised to be more woke.
There is more context here than just how and when Rogan used the N-word: the establishment left is on a mission to get him totally discredited and his show cancelled because he has given a huge platform to prominent voices that counter the official Covid narrative, especially with regards to vaccines. We’re just assumed to be too stupid to connect the dots. It’s cancel culture at its most potent, a relentless campaign to target not only what people say but their very right to a platform to say anything at all. That is how they control speech: misstep once and you are done for. Why risk your entire career for a joke? Better play it safe and not offend anyone.
So, comedy is dying. All the great comedians know that; Carr said as much this week in the aftermath of his controversy. The greats of comedy took chances and risked offence. Monty Python incurred the wrath of the church in 1979 over The Life of Brian but stood their ground and the film is now considered a masterpiece of comedic movie making. Back then, it was the reactionary parts of society who took offence of comedians daring to joke about everything. Today, the role of killjoys is played by the progressives. The woke want to applaud what comedians say, not laugh at their jokes.