JUSTIN DUNN’S ROOM 101 Since when has anything funny been appropriate?
WHAT’S ANNOYING HIM THIS WEEK?
JUST a few years ago, I was stood outside a busy bar called Kitty O’Shea’s in Brussels smoking a cheeky Malboro Gold, washed down with an ice-cold beer.
I was chatting to someone I’d never properly met before but was another fellow alumnus of these here Sport Towers.
We were standing opposite the Berlaymont, the grotesque building that houses the dreaded European Commission – aka the Death Star – wondering how on earth we had ended up there.
And, as you do, we shared tales of our lives working for this newspaper and our sister titles Weekend, and, of course, the legendary Sunday Sport.
We both agreed that it was by far the funniest – if maddest – place we’d ever worked.
A place where no joke was off the table. Nothing was too rude. No affliction or illness or sexuality or even bestial behaviour could prevent a gag being told.
It’s called “having a laugh” – and we most certainly still do.
Humour
Unlike the notoriously bland stick-up-arses in the building opposite, who largely didn’t even know how to smile.
We were both describing how life is so different when you’re outside Sport Towers.
For starters, you learn to speak differently.
That joke you make inside our four walls is not necessarily ready for what others might call polite society.
The dark Jimmy Savile quips and related humour were probably better suited to our former colleagues rather than, say, suits droning on about agriculture and strangely sweet beef stew.
Because as with all comedy, official or otherwise, it pays to know your audience.
I drifted back to that afternoon chat on Sunday after reading the most extraordinary story about what passes for so-called comedy these days.
The brilliant, effervescent, outrageously rude comedian Jerry
Sadowitz had just been cancelled by a venue at the Edinburgh Fringe festival.
He’s 60, been making people howl with laughter for decades, and is comically offensive to just about everyone who exists.
And his audience love it. Just like they always, always have.
Ah – but not any longer.
Infected
The Humour Police have descended, with a venue denouncing the truly very funny man as not being “appropriate”. Why? Well, the Fringe, like pretty much everything else these days, has become infected by the sour, bitter, humourless sting of the passionately parsimonious left.
Twenty or so right-on beards and braces-wearing lefties stomped out of the gig because he flashed his knob as part of a joke and suggested Rishi Sunak might not be up to becoming the next Prime Minister.
You can imagine what happened next.
All of them re-gathering to get over their invented shock in a vegan water juice bar, sharing the £19 fee for a glass of tasteless shit on their organic credit cards while a restless queue formed behind them.
Meanwhile, back at the venue, hundreds and hundreds of people carried on laughing their tits off.
Banished
But those happy, satisfied, paying customers no longer count in a world where these vacuous c**ts who genuinely think they know better than everyone else are actually allowed to get away with it.
We used to point at these pricks and laugh.
But now WE are standing on the sidelines being pointed at, and like Jerry Sadowitz, banished from polite society. Just for enjoying a proper laugh. So thanks for sticking with us, dear reader.
It’s great knowing that out in the real world, the Quentins and Tamaras don’t really matter in the slightest. They just think they do. So don’t let ‘em.