Regular readers will know that I have a very short fuse when it comes to “comedians”. Many of them, particularly in the UK, are a waste of space as far as I’m concerned. I thought it might be useful if I explained why.
We hear a lot these days about the need to stop the bullying of LGBT teens. This story from Canada last week is merely the latest in a long string of preventable teen suicides. But think back, for a moment, to your own schooldays. Many of you, I am sure, will have been bullied to some extent, and you’ll know that it’s not a simple phenomenon.
The sort of bullying that is easy to combat is the sort that arises from the class thugs. If one kid beats up another the teachers can deal with it, because it is obviously wrong. And thugs, generally, are not too smart. The type of bully that is really dangerous is the class comedian. He’s the one who eggs everyone else on by making snide remarks about you, the one who encourages the dumb kids to acts of violence, and then sits back and laughs as you take a beating and they get into trouble. If his actions are ever challenged, all he has to do is say that what he said was “just a joke”. If he’s smart, and he generally is, he’ll get away with it. If he’s good enough he’ll get some of the teachers joining in with the mockery.
Now roll that forward to the adult world. We can have reasonable hope that the thugs who brutally murdered Stuart Walker at the weekend will be brought to justice. But events like that don’t happen in a vacuum. If, as is strongly suspected, this was a homophobic hate crime, the people who did it will have been influenced by things they have read and heard. Some of that, of course, will have come from the pages of the Daily Malice and other such publications, which are pretty much immune to challenge because media regulation in the UK is such a joke. But they will probably also have been influenced by comedians.
As with school bullies, adult comedians know that one of the easiest ways to get a laugh is to pick on someone who is different in some way. There are, of course, right wing comedians who do this all the time, but a disturbing number of left wing comedians are not immune to temptation where they think they can get away with it, and where the target is a group they don’t care about.
So last week we had the undignified spectacle of Ricky Gervais encouraging his Twitter followers to make fun of Downs Syndrome people. The most common target, however, is trans people. Stephen Fry and Charlton Brooker have been spotted having a go, and I’m pretty sure there are others. When called on it, these people generally ignore the criticism or, making full use of their natural talent, laugh it off. After all, they have impeccable left wing credentials, how can they possibly be in the wrong?
When the right wing comedians and shock jocks have a go at trans people, they are heard by the thugs, but when left wing comedians do so they also are heard by very different people — the sort of people who might end up running complaints departments at TV stations and newspapers.
There are, of course, fine people like GLAAD and TransMediaWatch who spend a lot of time trying to educate the media about trans issues. If they see trans people being mocked they will put in a complaint. The defense that comes back is that the item being complained about was simply “reflecting society”. That’s a code term for, “look, if these popular left-wing comedians think that you are laughable then the painful truth is that you are laughable, get over it.”
And so the bullying goes on.
We see this all over the place, of course. The young man who can’t possibly be sexist because he’s a righteous anarchist; the woman who can’t be racist because she’s a righteous feminist; and so on. There’s a terrible temptation to assume that your own cause trumps everyone else’s. The reason I like a lot of what happens in feminism these days is that it reaches far beyond gender issues. All for one, and one for all, as I have been reminded to say by the arrival of what looks to be a very bizarre movie.
We need comedians to be on board with this, because they are a touchstone of what is deemed socially acceptable, and what can be legitimately despised. A minority that it is OK to make jokes about is a minority that it is OK to hate, fear and discriminate against.
I was reminded of this by a minor Twitter storm last night in which Tim Minchin was called on his attitude to trans people (as I recall by top-rated trans pink-lister, Sarah Brown). Initially Tim got very defensive, going through the usual “look at my credentials” routine. He got yelled at a bit, including by me.
Thankfully, when I woke up this morning, I found that Tim was listening a lot and that people far more shouty than I am were praising him for it. As one of my friends noted, it was an internet argument that ended up with everyone happy. So many thanks to Tim for being prepared to listen, and my apologies for getting shouty.
If only more people could be like that.
Great posting, Cheryl.
You reminded me of a dissertation on humour I read years ago. It’s conclusion was that most jokes have a victim and that it takes a clever comic to come up with victimless jokes.
The type of humour/bullying you described is indicative of laziness, going for the cheap shot, and definitely not comedy worthy of reward.
I should point out — and I don’t feel that this is contradicting you, only amplifying — that there is a danger in a bipolar analysis, even of bullying. To take your school situation: I had experience of the ‘thug’-style bullying — on the receiving end. But partly because of my means of coping with this, I would say that I ended up, in my late teens and through my twenties, effectively becoming a ‘comedian bully’. You may even remember some examples of this yourself.
One point is that, like the comedians you rightly lambast, if I had been challenged about it at the time I probably would not have had the self-awareness to recognise that it was true. And the main reason for this is, not that I was ‘right-on’ in some other cause, but that I regarded myself as a victim. But of course, victimhood does not automatically make you incapable of inflicting harm on others.
I’m sure I have been guilty of using comedy as a weapon too, and when it is deployed as a means of attacking the rich and powerful I have few qualms about it. The point of the above post was to say that when comedy is used to persecute minorities it not only kicks those who are already down, but also normalizes attacks by everyone else.
Of course I’m sure many of us, including me, have been guilty of using comedy improperly as well. When you are smart and feeble the temptation is considerable.
There can also be a hierarchy of oppression involved here. I think you touch on this with mention of the various attitudes of gay/bi and feminist activists towards trans.
I remember hearing about a conference here in Japan, where a burakumin (that’s the ‘invisible’ descendents of the Eta Hinin) activist confessed that when he was a kid, they threw stones at the Koreans. A Korean then stood up and admitted that they threw stones at the Ainu. An Ainu stood up… and so on.
One of the classic ways of avoiding getting bullied is to distract attention onto someone even more of an outsider than you are. Sad, but true.