Daily Mail

Gove should have told the humourless, po-faced Lefties wailing about his joke to take a running jump

- by Dominic Sandbrook DOMINIC LAWSON IS AWAY

MOST of us agree that if there is one thing that binds the peoples of our islands together, it is our shared sense of humour.

From Shakespear­e’s plays and Dickens’s villains to the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, the surrealism of Monty Python and the gentle comedy of Dad’s Army, we like to think of ourselves as a uniquely funny people, brought together by our ability to laugh even in the blackest situation.

To foreigners, of course, our blend of sarcasm, irony and outright farce often seems mystifying. But they never deny that there is something exceptiona­l about it. ‘If you want to succeed here,’ advised George Mikes, a Hungarian exile who became one of the best-loved comic writers of the Fifties and Sixties, ‘you must be able to handle the English sense of humour.’

But are we ourselves still capable of handling it? Apparently not, if the fallout from Michael Gove’s joke about the disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein is anything to go by.

Condemn

In case you missed it, Mr Gove was a guest on a special edition of Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday morning. The presenter, John Humphrys, asked if politician­s feared that interviewe­rs would make them look silly.

What Mr Gove said next apparently sent shock waves throughout the nation, or at least that part of it that reads the Guardian.

‘ Sometimes I think that coming into the studio with you, John, is a bit like going into Harvey Weinstein’s bedroom,’ he said, to appreciati­ve chuckles from the audience. ‘You just pray that you emerge with your dignity intact.’

At that, his fellow guest, the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, chipped in. ‘ John goes way past groping,’ he said, ‘way past groping.’

This was the cue for all sorts of weeping and gnashing of teeth — by Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, Labour MPs Jess Phillips and Stella Creasy and the Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson, all of whom were quick to condemn Mr Gove — but not, revealingl­y, Lord Kinnock — and to demand an apology.

Within minutes Mr Gove had tweeted an apology, presumably having calculated that it was better to beat a swift retreat than let it drag on.

But should he have apologised? Well, at the risk of provoking a chorus of execration, I think Mr Gove should have told his critics to take a running jump.

With the sanctimoni­ous selfimport­ance that has become her trademark, Ms Sturgeon declared that ‘women being abused and raped is not a laughing matter’.

For the avoidance of doubt, I should stress that I don’t find women being abused at all funny. But it’s none of my business to tell other people what they should laugh at, any more than it’s Ms Sturgeon’s business to tell other people what jokes they can make and which ones they can laugh at.

And yes, of course Mr Gove’s quip was a bit tasteless. But wasn’t that the point? Isn’t humour often intended to be tasteless? Isn’t that what makes it funny?

In this latest case, there is, of course, a very obvious political subtext. It is no coincidenc­e that almost all the criticism has come from the Left, which seems determined to drive humour out of our national life for good.

Remember New Labour’s Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which Tony Blair tried to push through 11 years ago? This would have made it a crime to say anything that might provoke ‘ religious hatred’ — even if you were a stand-up comedian making a weak joke about a Christian, a Muslim and a Sikh walking into a bar. After loud protests from comedians and writers, the Bill was defeated. Unfortunat­ely, the forces behind it have never gone away.

Indeed, as the furore surroundin­g Mr Gove shows, they are more intolerant than ever.

Read any column in that newsletter of the metropolit­an chattering classes, the Guardian, and what is striking is the absence of levity.

Everything is deadly serious. Humour must be suppressed, lest it undercut the Guardianis­tas’ horror at the supposedly dreadful state of what is actually one of the richest, safest and most contented societies in human history.

But they are merely the heirs to a long tradition of highbrow humourless­ness. For despite our reputation as an exceptiona­lly funny people, Britain is also the land of the Puritans, whose legacy survives.

In the 1650s, having lopped off the head of Charles I, these miserable, buttoned-up busybodies tried to ban dancing, gambling, make-up, football, swearing, theatres and, most famously, Christmas.

You don’t have to look far to spot their modern- day descendant­s, from snowflake students who want to ban Halloween costumes to pofaced Labour MPs who would like to see Mr Gove thrown into the stocks.

Suppress

What drives people such as the strident Labour MP Laura Pidcock, who famously boasted that she would never befriend a Tory MP because they are the ‘enemy’, is an implacable sense of their own seriousnes­s. Suffused with moral self-righteousn­ess, they exist in a permanent state of near-hysteria, infuriated by ordinary people’s failure to live up to their lofty ideals.

George Orwell, the supreme scourge of the high-minded Left, maintained that humour was inherently political. ‘Every joke is a tiny revolution,’ he wrote in 1945. ‘If you had to define humour in a single phrase, you might define it as dignity sitting on a tin-tack. Whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny.’

This, of course, is why totalitari­an regimes always try to suppress humour. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, ordinary citizens who joked about the gulf between the regime’s Communist propaganda and its drab, depressing reality were liable to be dragged off to the labour camps.

Seething

For totalitari­an regimes depend on a sense of their own dignity. Once you debunk that, once you point a mocking finger at their defects, then the whole edifice begins to collapse.

The high-minded think of themselves as a moral and intellectu­al elite, chosen to lead the rest of us towards the kingdom of heaven, or rather the kingdom of Corbyn.

If Mr Gove offended their sensibilit­ies, so much the better. Nobody likes being offended, but it is good for us. It reminds us of our weaknesses; it punctures our selfimport­ance. If we lose our sense of humour, we lose what comes with it: a sense of humility and perspectiv­e.

But the high-minded Left want a nation of latter- day Puritans, constantly seething with righteous indignatio­n, too busy building the New Jerusalem to bother with anything so trivial as a mere joke.

What a dreary place their ideal country would be! No colour, no laughter, everything subordinat­ed to the pursuit of ‘social justice’, to use their own sanctimoni­ous jargon. It wouldn’t be much fun.

More importantl­y, it wouldn’t be Britain.

So Mr Gove has nothing to apologise for. Indeed, I think he should tell even more jokes, no matter how tasteless.

After all, there’s one thing the Left hate more than anything else. Like so many humourless prigs through the ages, they just can’t stand seeing other people laughing.

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