Funny business no joke at all
COMEDIANS Kevin “Bloody” Wilson, Rodney Rude and Billy Birmingham are apparently worried that political correctness has killed comedy. Well, their careers at least.
It seems what was possible, and passable, as comedy in the 1980s is no longer welcome in Australia – killed by the heavy-handed sledgehammer of PC, the enduring bete noire of old-fashioned comedians and right-wing politicians.
But it’s nonsense, isn’t it? Perhaps Australia has evolved over the past 20 years. Jokes featuring derogatory terms for indigenous Australians are no longer considered funny by most.
Another change is that many who were once the silent butt of these jokes – indigenous people, gays, transgender people, ethnic minorities – now have a much greater voice and a greater ability to hit back at this kind of humour.
It’s not even true to say, as Birmingham said, that comedians need to “grow some balls’’, implying the present crop aren’t funny because they are just too timid. Some of the best comedians in the world operate right at the edge, and often topple over it entirely. American comedians such as Dave Chappelle, Amy Schumer and Chris Rock, England’s Jimmy Carr, and Scotland’s Frankie Boyle have made careers out of shocking audiences. They are brutal, but also funny.
Someone like Billy Connolly has remained relevant and funny from the 1970s until today. Connolly has never been described as PC.
In many ways there has never been more freedom of speech than we have today. We live in an age where no opinion goes unexpressed for long.
Do people sometimes take offence too quickly? Yes. Do we all need to learn to tolerate conflicting views with a little more civility? Obviously. Could we do with a little less kneejerk labelling of people as either racists, fascists or socialists? Probably.
One of the problems is, the extremes of both sides of politics want to dictate what freedom of speech means. The Right has a particularly odd view of freedom of speech. Their current obsession is to label views they don’t agree with as either “PC gone mad’’ or “virtue signalling’’ – taking a stance to prove how morally pure you are. Virtue signalling is an odd phrase as anyone who uses it is essentially guilty of the same crime, they are just signalling their purity to a different audience.
Such phrases are also used to try to delegitimise opposing views without actually arguing against them on their merits.
Then we have the famous glass jaw of many on the Right. We have seen rightwing columnists sue comedians. Pauline Hanson told Australians “to toughen up a bit’’ when it comes to insulting and offensive speech. It must have been a dif- ferent Hanson who once sued a comedian who took the piss out of her via the medium of song.
Another free-speech warrior, Cory Bernardi, posts things like “Freedom of thought, freedom of expression and freedom of speech are all under threat by the politically correct social justice warriors’’ on his website, while trying to get the ABC to sack a comedian for a rude joke. Was the joke on Tom Ballard’s Tonightly funny? Probably not. Was it offensive? Yes. But you can’t advocate some freedom of speech and not others. That’s not how it works. You can’t just choose the offence you like.
It happened again when US comedian Michelle Wolf roasted everyone in sight at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It was a blistering performance, but some were upset when Wolf joked that Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, burned “facts’’ to make her eye make-up.
Trump was upset, the right-wing media were apoplectic, there was a rush to defend Sanders and denigrate Wolf. Presumably, they thought Wolf should have been a little more PC, expressed a little less freedom of speech, or that she shouldn’t have had quite as much, as Birmingham puts it, “balls”. Michael McGuire is an author and columnist for News Corp Australia