Really, I am so sick of the way cancel culture infantilises everyone. No one is allowed to be complex. Everyone is now pure or impure; saint or sinner.
There are people I find both offensive AND funny. I loved seeing Frankie Boyle live. Was he misogynist and ableist? For sure, and also brilliant. Now he is enlightened, his TV shows are beefed-up sociology seminars. One of the last live gigs I went to consisted of many talented comics telling an Islington audience that everyone who voted Leave was an idiotic racist. Satire? No. Clever? No. Funny? No.
The pinnacle of being offended to your core and laughing or leaving is a Jerry Sadowitz gig. Vicious, self-harming, nihilistic – hardly Netflix material. Johnny Vegas came close at times years ago, pleading for love. Watching Larry David offend just about everyone around him is my idea of heaven.
If alternative comedy started as a reproach to the sexist, racist comedy of the Seventies, we are now in a strange place where even things we laughed at a few years ago are now verboten.
Ali G? Sacha Baron Cohen is a genius but he wouldn’t be allowed to do that today. Little Britain is now seen as punching down (hitting black people, disabled people, working-class people), not up. But comedy that punches up, the dull Tory/Brexit bashing of Radio 4’s “comedy”, is like being trapped in some interminable dinner party and achieves what, beyond self-satisfaction?
The TikToks my daughter shows me are mystifying and hysterical in equal measure. Succession has probably made me laugh more than any recent comedy. Bob Mortimer is universally loved for humour that never hurts anyone. Surrealism, silliness and observational comedy will always have a place.
As the underrated comic Simon Munnery says, “Anyone ever noticed anything ever?”. And comedies from Stath Lets Flats to Mandy to Toast show us indeed they have .
Cancellation just does not work with comedy. Thankfully, Dave Chappelle will continue even when transgender employees walk out – he will talk about race. Carr’s audience know what they are getting. Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby called Netflix “an amoral algorithm cult”.
Gadby’s view of the world is not mine. She cannot enjoy Picasso, for instance, because of his treatment of women. Vying for the high moral ground of humour is surely largely class-based. You must not laugh at Mrs Brown’s Boys, but you may laugh at the interminable lefty Radio 4 bores confirming everything their smug audience already thinks.
Those up in arms about the numbers of Roma killed in the Holocaust will solemnly tweet about it and then what? I can’t stand Jimmy Carr – but nor can I stand the demands to cancel him either.
Comedy is not a safe space. There is nothing about which a joke cannot be made. Who makes it, and in which context, matters. And by all means discuss it, but beware: historically, the policing of humour only ever ends one way. And that is beyond the pale.
