Julie Burchill

Woke culture is strangling comedy

The concept of ‘punching up/down’ is no way to decide who can mock what

  • From Spectator Life
[Comedy Central]

Three weeks after that South Park episode and the memes just keep on coming. Despite years of highly articulate fulminating against the preposterous pair by essayists like myself, there’s a feeling that the satirical cartoon was the conclusive blow to the Sussexes’ reputation – no well-turned phrase will ever better the glorious awfulness of ‘The Worldwide Privacy Tour’.

One of the things that the woke hate most about our lot is the fact that we’re far more amusing. Their natural mode of address is to scold – and scolding and wit are polar opposites. I daresay some clown somewhere has stated that punchlines are probably imperialist. In his book The Rise of the New Puritans, Noah Rothman cites the urge to police people’s fun as a feature of every puritanical movement. In many progressive circles the height of socially-approved comedy is Nanette by the Australian alleged comedienne Hannah Gadsby, whose routine features explorations of her autism, ADHD and gender – sounds a riot. But then, getting giggles from an audience isn’t (fortunately for them, if not for us) the aim of many current comedians, especially of the kind the BBC endlessly promotes but who are comics only in the way that the undead can be called ‘alive’ – Nish Kumar, Shappi Khorsandi, Josie Long. Then there’s the ghastly Frankie Boyle, who jokes about rape in a way that would usually get him banned from the BBC, but as he has the ‘correct’ views on Palestine, that’s OK – if you rack up enough woke points, you can trade them in for bloke points. ‘Don’t pick on anyone who might hit you’ appears to be the first rule of ‘progressive’ modern comedy, though we have heretics such as Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle, too big to cancel and spurred on to riffs of ever-more defiant glee by every cry of ‘You can’t say that!’.

Just as Sam Smith says he ‘hates reading’ but wants to ‘change the language’, leaving humour to the woke is akin to allowing an abattoir worker to stand in for a heart surgeon

The concept of ‘punching up/down’ is the woke way to decide who can mock what; as Rothman notes, ‘Perhaps nothing is as important to the promotion of a virtuous society as what you’re allowed to laugh at’. In theory, ‘punching up’ means having a go at people with more power, so you’d think that making fun of politicians was an easy one – but when it’s done to Diane Abbott, there’s always fainting fits from Labourites. And we’re always told that making jokes about Islam is ‘punching down’ – but tell a migrant worker-slave in Qatar or a gay man in Dubai or a spirited woman in Iran that the world’s wealthiest and fastest growing religion is powerless. The ultimate punching down joke was Frankie Boyle’s in 2010 about Katie Price’s disabled eight-year-old son which Channel 4 defended as ‘absurdist satire’. 

Which brings us back to South Park. It’s conceivable that Meghan and Harry could be seen through a mad modern prism as being the victims in this situation; their ‘struggles’ with mental health are well documented. The Duchess is a biracial woman, whereas Matt Stone and Trey Parker – South Park’s creators – are white men. But no one dared bring up the victim narrative this time – not even the Groom of the Stool to the Sussexes, Omid Scobie. The right of comedy to punch up, down or sideways (Joe Lycett mocking David Beckham for something it transpired he had done himself by taking the gay-unfriendly petro-dollar) is being reasserted simply because people love to laugh and the Adrian Moles and Veruca Salts of the Junior Stasi have nothing to put it in its place. Social justice warriors are clueless when it comes to creativity as they lack the questioning waywardness needed for the shaping of a lively culture. 

In the 17th-century Cromwell exhorted the faithful to enjoy something called ‘sober mirth’ – in recent years comedy has veered dangerously close to this diktat, being served up lukewarm for a generation being intellectually groomed to eat only the intellectual equivalent of liquid food for ailing seniors. This is not just Complaint Culture, this is Complan Culture, with the blue fringes taking over from the blue rinses as self-appointed censors. Just as Sam Smith says he ‘hates reading’ but wants to ‘change the language’, leaving humour to the woke is akin to allowing an abattoir worker to stand in for a heart surgeon. 

Great humour starts with taking a scalpel to oneself, as every great progressive modern comic going back to Lenny Bruce understood. But the modern left is incapable of doing this because as a wise man said, the right thinks the left is wrong but the left thinks the right is evil. Such unhinged black-and-white thinking is not a spur to creativity. As my favourite Stoic Epictetus said ‘If you wish to be good, first believe that you are bad’, and ‘If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer “He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone”’. In putting their fingers in their ears and la-la-ing loudly over anyone they disagree with, the snowflakes are doing themselves out of a whole lot of fun at their own expense – often the best kind, I find. 

If the mental health of the young generation was improving on a diet of trigger warnings and cancellations, one might be inclined to give a thought to the censorship of comedy. But it’s getting ever worse as comedy becomes more timid and prim, so what’s the point? He who learns to laugh at himself will have an excellent companion for life. There are lots of reasons I’m so pleased that I was young when I was, mostly to do with different kinds of freedom; the freedom to have fun – to be witty and amusing and amused and outraged – was one of the very best.  

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