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******Update – extensive replies about the intention of the modern comic canon above and here
Let's ban the escape clause of the right to be ‘politically incorrect' and have nothing to do with racist comedians and their free speech symapthisers
"I asked him [Peter Kay] if it wasn't a bit racist and he said ‘we can get away with it,
they're Chinese' - fat cunt"
Paraphrasing of Daniel Kitson, from his stand-up act last year
From CNN asking the new Black Muslim Congressman if he's down with Osama, to Nick Griffin getting away with recorded race hate and John Reid having a go at Asian kids before they're out of first school, in realworld the politically (in)correct debate has never been more live and there has never been so much at stake, which gives mediators even greater responsibility to make sure they're being accountable.
Mainstream British comedians, some schooled in alternative comedy circles, others always populist and proud of it (regenerating ignorance in the mass commercial market the only vindicator, like a comic Oasis), are increasingly turning to cheap and nasty racist innuendo as part of their act. Some will attempt to justify their prejudice; others just try to get away with it.
It's not just your Kays. There's Sacha Baron-Cohen kicking Kazakhs and Americans in the teeth (and thinking he's making a point), Gervais & Merchant routinely taking the piss out of anyone who isn't white and able-bodied and Jimmy Carr reinforcing the national psyche by doing cheap gags about gypsies.
There's so many reasons why this is wrong in the current climate, and no explanation will suffice about why comedians of a certain level think they can get away with taking the piss out of the lesser races or beings. With Borat there's insufficient daylight between Baron-Cohen's intent and the comedy. Try telling the Kazakhs that the joke is on the Americans. Subtlety is sophistry. You often hear about this sort of crap that audiences are far too sophisticated to fall for the anti-semitism. So they're complicit then.
Gervais, too, is particularly keen to build layers upon layers in order to get away with a surprisingly cheap gag. There's that episode in Extras, where another of his personas, Andy Millman, unwittingly has a go/laughs at a Down Syndrome kid, with the ensuing usual hilarious complications. Was it alright for them to do such a thing because Gervais is now establishment and successful, and that a man of his comedic craft will wrap up it in sufficient layers to avoid criticism?
Well no, it was offensive, ‘politically incorrect' and, in the absence of serving to make a point about disadvantaged children, I can only assume was there because Merchant & Gervais feel they can get away with anything. Merchant in particular has been a sop for some particularly offensive material. Recognition blunts 'values', if they ever had them.
Eventually, I mentioned all this to K-punk, who had raised the point about Borat getting away with his act because he is middle class. "Extras is exactly the comparison I would have reached for... This meta-racism thing needs to be definitively nailed... Gervais obviously has a thing about disability as well, as you say... and of course the pretext for anti-disability and racist jokes is 'characters' whom we are (supposedly) invited to hold in disdain... but of course the presence of these pasteboard ciphers legitimates all manner of stupidity and prejudice."
It's a matter of judgement if their characters are convincing or not but it's not debateable whether some people will get their supposed good intentions wrong. With so much implication in media's ambiguous mySpace maybe it's time to be politically correct.
As for Carr, well I can't make my point any better than Nicholas Lezard did in his Sindy radio column a few weeks ago: "Racist, unfunny corporate entertainer Jimmy Carr was on Front Row last Wednesday. He told the joke about Gypsies being smelly - the one the BBC had to apologise for when he told it on Loose Ends - again. Presumably Mark Damazer, controller of Radio 4, sanctioned the repetition. Mark Lawson invited him to repeat the joke, which is amazing. My disgust at Damazer and particularly Lawson has left me, for the moment, wordless with rage. Carr is nothing." Carr, the former Shell executive, also ‘qualified' as a comedian through an early version of the growing number of courses that are available in ‘comedy' which is a bit like teaching socialising.
We wanted to conclude here on the culling of the jokers but found ourselves drawn back to the pug-nosed gimp and the dumb Boltonian, among others. The comedy of complaint, which is what pissflaps like Gervais, Marchant and PKDumb trade in, thrives on establishing conspiratorial links with the members of your audience who belong to or want to belong to your ‘group'. Peter Kay is particularly guilty here and his use of the Bolton brogue has been copied by far less funny characters like namesake Vernon, for whom just saying ‘Cambodia' in a Bolton accent is worthy of a laugh, surely!
The pathetic podcasts by the 11 o'clock Show's worst act, with that terminally unfunny fuckwit Karl Pilkington (who would be considered as annoying as he actually is if he had a Croydon accent), are further abuses of technology and self. And the Guardian laps it up - an indication of the desperate nature of media whores and the state of left-wing journalism.
Parochial whingers all love Peter Kay because they can see enough small mindedness in the jokes/jibes (especially in the shameful adverts for plastic bitter) and you are certainly not required to think. The message (and there always is at least one) is to not take anything seriously, especially the things vaguely hinted at by these Manning-lites.
Armando Iannucci's recent Guardian article helps explain why even politically conscious comedy is flawed and is serving to inadvertently debase readers/viewers/listeners and the political process especially. And we didn't even mention Little Britain - the drip, drip approach to justifying reactionary comedy.
If you must expose your racism, make sure your creation is not like you and is clearly artifice, or be prepared to take the flak. Adolph McGroot exposed prejudice and the largely innocent stakeholders of that abuse within prejudiced society, and he ended up gagged, an indictment of his fascist outlook. At the moment all we're seeing is racist ‘characters' or the acts themselves getting away with it. Gervais' naturalist settings mean he is never more than an ill-judged phrase away from lapsing away from character, or into it - the distinctions of intention and which voice has said it irrelevant. With Kay too, it's more pertinent to say all the characters inhibit Peter Kay rather than the accepted notion that he has successfully portrayed unreal figures in some magical alchemy of character development.
And if that distance can't be achieved, make the criticism explicit in some other way. Somehow, it seems as though Baron-Cohen is enjoying the boorish Borat a little too much, that ultimately we're celebrating the assumed Kazakh backwardness and American ignorance.
If you really believe you're not racist and you are actually part of the great Western multicultural project then it takes a lot more than buying ‘their' food and music - something like genuine commitment to end the still prevalent bad smell of the colonial and fascist years. As alluded to in an old episode of Peepshow, it's actually not about the ‘jews and the racists living side by side', it's about us all living together and putting our chauvinism aside. Can you cope with that? If not, fuck off to Surrey.
In the end, whether you're a comic or not, if you feel you have to let off steam with a cheap racist jibe or even just a derogatory one-word term, that doesn't make you risqué or mean that you're brave enough to tackle sensitive issues, it means you've soaked up what the mass media tells you about stereotypes (that includes the fair and balanced BBC) and it makes you a racist. And more shame on the liberal apologists for allowing you to get away with it.
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