I ♥ PC

Posted by Verity on February 15, 2022 in Human rights, Humour, Living today, Rants, society | 2 comments

After the uproar about Jimmy Carr’s offensive joke about the Holocaust, I thought it worth re-posting this, to explain why such humour is unacceptable. And if anyone thinks , like Carr, that comedy is dying because of this attitude, they need look no further than Bill Bailey: perhaps the funniest man in the media, but without an ounce of malice.

I had a rigorous and early training in political correctness in the late 70s/early 80s, thanks to Jacaranda Wiley educational publishers in Brisbane. As our textbooks were in use across Australia, we took great pains to show girls and women in non-stereotypical situations, and to have illustrations featuring children of all races and abilities. After all, Australia is not a country where the white majority can feel in any position to claim that ‘migrants come over here and take all our jobs.’

Not a week goes by without at least one story about political correctness making the news. Recently, we’ve had the debate about what we should call the desperate souls at Calais, and protests about Frankie Boyle appearing at an Irish comedy festival. Beneath this there is the continuing trickle of ‘political correctness gone mad’ stories, usually about councils coming up with a succession of supposedly daft rules. On a darker note, the lack of action on child sexual exploitation has been blamed on political correctness, though I would consider it only a contributory factor, alongside sexism, target culture and the sheer pressure of workloads.

But it’s not surprising that people think the whole enterprise has gone too far when, for example, plays seeking to explore such issues are banned in case they offend anyone. Conversely, the Alf Garnett dilemma is also a tricky one: how do you prevent a character intended to lampoon bigots being enthusiastically taken at face value by bigots themselves?

In terms of humour, I think there’s a simple rule of thumb: it’s OK to mock people for the things they can change: politics, religion, hypocrisy, greed. It’s not OK to mock them for the things they can’t change: disability, race, sexuality, age, appearance. And even if individuals don’t personally have any problem with being the butt of jokes (some may indeed be the source of them), there is a wider issue. One has only to look at the caricatures of Jews in Germany in the 1930s to realise that humour can be used to dehumanise, then demonise certain groups, making it easier to exclude and attack them.

I can’t help speculating that the prevalence of bullying those with disabilities, both online and offline, is in some way related to our increasing – and unconscious – internalisation of airbrushed images of perfection as the norm. In addition to his mockery of people with Down’s Syndrome, Boyle’s joke about Rebecca Adlington’s looks confirms this as a possibility.

This joke caused trouble for Boyle because he made it on the BBC. If you want to pay to go and see him and be subjected to his vicious brand of humour, go – just don’t adopt his approach to your fellow humans. But why should people with disabilities, old people, or any other disparaged minority who pay their licence fee get mocked on the medium they’re paying for? And this isn’t an argument for doing away with the licence fee, it’s an argument for a channel that caters for all, regardless of race, creed, etc., and doesn’t join in the jeering.

One final point: I’ve been mulling over this post for many months, during which the Charlie Hebdo murders have taken place and the debates that followed played out. By my own rule of thumb, it was fine for Charlie Hebdo to mock Islam, but since then reading a description of the experience of being born into a devout Muslim family and being subjected to an intensive religious education at an early age made me realise how inconceivable it would be to you that your faith was a matter of choice.

So where to draw the line? Well, I’m afraid I feel it’s worth the odd ill-advised incidence of overzealous censorship that itself engenders debate if it means we can continue to nurture and protect a society in which difference is respected, not disparaged.