Tom Slater Tom Slater

Spare us Frankie Boyle’s lecture on offensive comedy

Frankie Boyle is complaining about offensive comedy. In a year of firsts and unprecedented moments, I’m not sure anyone could have seen this one coming.

The Glaswegian comic had a pop at Ricky Gervais in a podcast interview with Louis Theroux recently. Boyle said Gervais’s recent routines about transgenderism were ‘lazy’, and claimed he wasn’t even a real stand-up.

‘I would like him to have the same respect for trans people as he seems to have for animals’, Boyle intoned, nodding to Gervais’s passion for animal rights. ‘I don’t think that’s a lot to ask.’ In his 2018 stand-up special, Humanity, Gervais ripped into the idea of gender self-identification, with an extended riff on him ‘identifying’ as a chimp and the bigotry of those who dare question it.

Comedians should be able to joke about whatever they like, so long as they can find a way to make it funny

At the Golden Globes in 2016, Gervais also ruffled feathers when he joked about Caitlyn Jenner, lauding the trans icon for ‘destroying stereotypes’ but letting the side down when it came to women drivers. (In 2015, Jenner was involved in a fatal car crash.)

That Gervais’s unwoke material has caused outrage is hardly surprising. These days it doesn’t take much. That Frankie Boyle – a man who made his name off of sixth-formerish sick jokes – has also decided to pile in is another story entirely. For whatever you might allege about Gervais, it can doubly be said of Boyle.

In making jokes about Jenner and trans issues, woke scolds claim, Gervais was ‘punching down’ – attacking a marginalised group in society. But who could be more marginalised than, say, disabled children, which were a once-favoured target of Boyle.

In 2010, in an episode of his Channel 4 series, Boyle joked

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