Newton found that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Yet even he didn’t grasp the full ramifications of his discovery.
Newton thought his law applied only to the physics of motion. Yet its implications reach further than that, all the way to culture, civilisation, social interactions – life in general.
Thus fascism intensifies anti-fascism, modernism fosters classicism – and woke totalitarianism forces resisters to go to the other extreme.
The more wokers of the world are united in their urge to shove homosexuality or anti-racism down people’s throats, the more likely some people will be to use pejorative terms describing the protected groups.
It’s in this context that one should view the hysterical brouhaha about the comedian Jimmy Carr and one of the jokes he cracked in his concert streamed on Netflix.
Jimmy is arguably one of our best stand-ups and definitely one of the most successful. Part of his appeal derives from the shock value of his humour. He wants his audiences to gasp, look furtively around them and only then laugh.
The shocks he causes slide up the Richter scale in direct proportion to the strength of the original tremors. A joke about cannibalism wouldn’t shock cannibals as much as it would a group of vegans aggressively promoting their diet.
Some of Carr’s jokes are hilarious, some (well, most) are in deliciously bad taste, some aren’t especially funny. But I believe that any artist should be judged on his best work. Thus Mozart is a genius not because he wrote Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, but because he composed, among numerous other masterpieces, the Jupiter Symphony and the Piano Concertos in A Major and D Minor.
Without in any way drawing a parallel between Mozart and Jimmy, when the latter is good, he’s very good. But yes, when he isn’t so good, he makes one wince rather than laugh.
The joke that caused such an outburst of ire went like this: “When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of six million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.”
I find this joke mildly funny, though Penelope doesn’t. Unlike me, she was properly brought up and hence is reluctant to offend people. I, on the other hand, grew up in Russia, which is to say on the wrong side of the tracks. My jokes are often similar to Jimmy’s, if delivered with considerably less panache and sense of timing.
Yet both she and I had our mothers use gypsies as the bogeymen to scare us with: “If you are a bad boy [girl, in Penelope’s case], the gypsies will come and get you.” It’s on that perception that Jimmy’s joke was built.
Gypsies, to be fair, aren’t the only Holocaust victims Jimmy sees as a fit butt of his jokes (“They say there’s safety in numbers. Tell that to the six million Jews.”). Christianity, especially Catholicism, is another one of his frequent targets. (“If we are all children of God, what’s so special about Jesus?” Or, “When I was a boy, my priest told me ‘When you masturbate, God is watching you.’ I asked, ‘Is he a paedophile too, Father?’”)
Do I find such jokes in bad taste? Yes, definitely. Do I feel offended? Not at all. I make allowances for the context, the intent and the genre. Having done that, I may wince but I won’t be compelled to seek legal or legislative recourse.
After all, even Jesus Christ forgave those who mocked him. All they were commanded to do was stay off the subject of the Holy Ghost: “And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”
Yet we are supposed to be undergoing a constant progress in everything, including morality. The morality preached by Christ is oh so yesterday. We have a new, much more exacting morality, according to which anyone is entitled to feel offended and then seek retribution.
Hence Mr Carr is accused of endorsing the Holocaust, though his detractors still don’t charge him with killing those Gypsies personally.
A petition, called The Genocide of Roma is Not a Laughing Matter, has so far collected signatures of 16,000 people who feel duty-bound to feel mortally offended. The government, in its turn, feels duty-bound to censure anyone who offends anyone.
Dame Melanie Dawes, Chief Executive of the media regulator Ofcam, insisted that Netflix remove the offensive clip from the broadcast, though she stopped just short of demanding that Jimmy Carr be publicly eviscerated.
And Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries thundered that sites airing such offensive material should be held to account, with their owners possibly facing prison terms. She is pushing through a restrictive media bill, and culprits like Mark Zuckerberg have been put on notice.
As I’m writing this after a rather liquid lunch, I feel mellow and accommodating. Hence I’m willing to accept that Carr’s joke has caused some real – as opposed to put-on – damage.
Yet his joke was to a large extent a reaction to what I call glossocracy, a tyranny that imposes its despotic rule by controlling what people say as a way of controlling what they think and ultimately do. If you don’t like ‘glossocracy’, how about ‘woke fascism’?
That’s what’s destroying the last vestiges of our ethos, its cultural, social and political aspects. Things have got so bad that even fundamentally ‘liberal’ people like Jimmy Carr feel they must fight back. Their reaction is nowhere as strong as the action that caused it, but at least they are trying.
More power to them, I say. The real, irreparable damage is being done not by off-colour jokes, but by singular nouns followed by plural pronouns, by diktats on unisex lavatories, homomarriage and the delights of transsexuality, by sermons of socialist medicine, by kindergarten courses in advanced condom studies, by champions of ‘music’ that is in fact an anti-musical cult ritual with strong Satanic overtones.
Theirs is the action; ours, merely a reaction. But if we don’t react as vigorously as they act, it’s curtains for our civilisation – not just for Jimmy Carr’s performances. Newton’s third law must not be repealed.
“culprits like Mark Zuckerberg”?? I must have missed something. Mr. Zuckerberg is the prime felon aiding the U.S. government in its assault on free speech. His minions “flag” and report any entry they deem offensive to modern sensibilities (most things rational, conservative, scientific, et cetera). The Biden administration has called on them and thanked them for their support in removing dissenting material. I cannot imagine Mr. Zuckerberg being the target of anyone condemning free speech – he is their most ardent supporter.
Nadine mentioned him by name. He is being held responsible for every word uttered on his platform. This, though, as you correctly say, he is one of them.
It is interesting that he has been targeted. He certainly won’t take a stand for free speech. I’ll be looking for his response.
Joan Rivers did a satirical comedy in 1978 on the world’s first pregnant man. A good thing she was gone before the PC zombies could take her out.
Or before pregnant men became a reality.
Don Rickles used to say things to blacks while on stage which would have landed him in prison today, or got someone else in trouble even back then.
The whole genre of ‘insult comedy’ is dead. When are insulted these days, they call the cops.
Jeff Foxworthy tells good “redneck” [hillbilly] jokes . You can still say jokes about the Appalachian white and probably Polish people too but it seems no one else. And surely not a BIPOC.
Appalachian white and Polish people are fair game for the comedian, but no one else?