Requiescat

Monday, 4 November 2002

After reading this article* by "meika von samorzewski" in On-Line Opinion over the weekend, I got into a bit of a reflective mood and started thinking very seriously about the nature of comedy and issues such as why it is automatically funny to characterise Phillip Adams as a corpulent gastropod or decry descriptions of Adams as a pig as an "insult to pigs", while on the other hand calling Piers Akerman "the star intellectual sumo of the Daily Telegraph" is met with reproving glares and admonitions to stop traumatising the children with ghastly mental images.

While I believe that old-growth humour is a vital part of our precious national heritage, satire is in a pretty parlous state if the best that's on offer is lampoons on airhead middle-aged dole-bludgers with mickey-mouse degrees, recycled Johnsonisms and yesterday's leftover marrons d'ecolier. The fault, of course, is in the censorious political correctness of the eighties and nineties, which stripped us of our most powerful and immediately recognisable comedic and satiric language. Jokes about "the two african americans who slipped into the big house for a quick spot of penetrative sexual intercourse while the capitalist oppressor was away from home" lose all the comic punch that was there in the original language and we are left with pale, inadequate imitations of some of our greatest comic stereotypes.

Personally, I can't say that I miss them.

* - Link via Ken Parish.