It's Just A Joke

How a person handles great power and influence is the greatest test of their character.

Humour in a profoundly stratified world is seldom politically neutral. 

Humour which relies on taking the piss out of any given demographic, is never politically neutral.

Humour can be a powerful weapon in defence of the powerless; it can also be used to strengthen power – directly and indirectly.

Rickey Gervais’ trademark is pushing the boundaries of acceptability – taking “edginess” to the extreme.

He uses his humour as a weapon, and he uses his working class background to justify a style of humour that is essentially just a laddish, “taking the piss”. 

He mocks religion but he’s also capable of being mawkishly sentimental. 

Although he's mildly self-deprecating, he never takes the piss out of himself to the same degree as he does others, ie he hurls his barbs at pretty much everyone other than himself. 

I suspect he has always used his sharp wit as a defence. People back off because there’s nowhere he won’t go – nothing he won’t say, no weakness he won’t exploit. 

His humour is an extension of the adolescent style of humour which gave rise to:  “Mummy, mummy, why do I keep going around in circles? Shut up or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor.”  

Or the legion of Biafran jokes back in the day which made me cringe long before PCness made people stop and question the role that sort of “humour“ can and does play in diminishing social problems, and/or reducing others’ humanity.

We ALL have things we can’t find funny and which we may actually find profoundly hurtful or offensive – jokes about burying a baby being a case in point.  

In a world that remains homophobic and in which we know the far right is making big strides, how defensible is the “risk” Gervais took with the crass and unfunny AIDs joke? 

Or the way he mocked gender identity which totally relied on laddish “cock” jokes. 

This is not a sophisticated defence of women’s sex-based rights, it’s a piss take of men who identify as women. 

I also ask - why now? 

Why did Gervais back off when the TRAs challenged him a couple of years ago, but suddenly he’s emboldened? 

Why is Netflix suddenly enabling it?

Why is Bill Maher suddenly on the anti-genderist bandwagon? Ditto Chappelle?

A black man finds a cache of deeply offensive material in an all-male and white, uniformed workplace where he’s covering a vacancy. He reports it.  It includes such things as a picture of a starving black child with the caption “Greedy little wog bastard.” A picture of an elderly black victim of a gang rape captioned, “Be gentle with me, boys”. A pamphlet from a rest home captioned, “Piss-ridden old hag” and “Your cunt smells like rancid shit”. And loads more.

How far are some of Gervais’ “jokes” from those men’s ideas of what was funny?

I get dark humour; I understand it can be a way of coping with hard, dangerous, and shitty lives, and it can also serve to forge bonds. 

But when you are also living a hard, dangerous, and shitty life, maybe one that’s objectively worse because you are black, a woman, old, gay, or disabled, and you are the target of that sort of humour, or when the bonds being forged are ones which exclude you, even harm you, it’s not funny. 

To then be told to lighten up or be told it’s his right to be offensive – can we blame people for being angry?

I find Gervais’ humour often to be so laddish, as a woman, I don’t relate to it. I don’t feel Gervais is setting out to be an ally to women; if he was he’d have done what Graham Linehan did and put his career on the line at the off.

Did the group of men who wrote that vile shit referred to above, and who all thought it was funny, have the right to do so?

How about the senior officers who minimised it by saying they’d “seen worse on the walls of rugby club locker rooms”? Did they have a right to their opinion? 

Not one of those men were bothered by how that black officer felt, or were concerned by the fact that the workplace happened to be a stone’s throw from where a black lad was beaten to death by racist thugs whose crime was covered up by a racist police force, or that those men were supposed to be public servants, protecting the very people they were busy taking the piss out of.

Humour can be a scalpel - in the right hands it can delicately peel away layers of hypocrisy and bland acceptance to reveal essential truths; at the other extreme it can be a cudgel used to coerce or to bludgeon selected others into silence and submission.