Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? by Mick Hume

Author:Mick Hume
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

The rise of the reverse-Voltaires has damaged comedy. On one hand it has created a stifling atmosphere of conformism and intolerance in which any humour that crosses the line must be not just ignored but ‘shut down’. That in turn has given rise to a feeble backlash of comedians trying to be offensive for the sake of it.

Top American comedian Chris Rock, not noted for avoiding controversial issues, revealed in December 2014 that he no longer plays college venues, because the student audiences are ‘too conservative’. ‘Not in their political views – not like they’re voting Republican – but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody,’ Rock told New York magazine. ‘You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.’23

A similar atmosphere now appears to prevail even among some paying audience members in comedy clubs. The traditional art of heckling a performer you don’t find funny is apparently outdated – now you hear tell of punters trying to shout down a comedian or flouncing out in outrage because they object to him or her breaking a taboo – say, by joking about gay marriage or police racism. Whether what they said was funny seems to miss the point for those who think a comedy set should be as orthodox as a sermon.

Inevitably, there has been an attempted backlash against these stultifying trends. We have witnessed the rise of comedians or just deliberate provocateurs whose aim is to appear as offensive as possible. This is the flipside of the attempt to sanitise humour. It leads unerringly to further attempts at ethical cleansing of the comedy cesspit. In spring 2015, when the South African comedian Trevor Noah was appointed to succeed John Stewart as host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, online critics protested that Noah was an unsuitable choice due to his past record of tweeting ‘controversial’ jokes about women and Jewish people. One tweeter put this row in some welcome perspective: ‘Trevor Noah doesn’t offend me as a woman,’ posted @helienne, ‘he offends me because he’s just not funny.’24

That is the question that appears to have been forgotten in all this: Is it funny? The attempt to impose codes of conduct on comedy reflects the idea that you can somehow apply a political and moral judgement to humour. That you can, in short, stop yourself laughing at something offensive or controversial. Good luck with that, and with preventing yourself sneezing at the same time.

The history of comedy surely shows that, as with old-time British comedians such as Bernard Manning, it is perfectly possible to talk like a bigot and yet be funny. That’s life. Comedy is a messy business, and people can laugh at the most outrageous things. To attempt to impose order on it, by removing what is not to the taste of the moment, is to risk killing it. In the early 1990s, I recall,

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