I’m not proposing this drastic measure as a punishment. On the contrary, stand-up comedy is the only popular entertainment I like.
It’s just that comedians will have to make a living somehow after their profession becomes obsolete, as it surely will soon.
Comedy depends for its survival on two preconditions. First, there must be enough people out there whose sense of humour outmuscles their self-righteousness. Second, comedy can only thrive if reality doesn’t overstep the limit beyond anyone’s ability to poke fun at it.
Since neither of these preconditions is met these days, comedians will have to retrain as diversity consultants, sensitivity advisors, social workers, community organisers or anything else seen as indispensable these days.
Not to starve while the training is under way, they may indeed have to support themselves by working down the mines. If they mutter that life is the pits, no one will laugh at the pun.
As an illustration of the first precondition rapidly disappearing, Mike Kusneraitis, a Tory councillor in the Runnymede Borough, is being investigated for the terrible transgression he has committed.
I’m not sure whether the investigation is merely professional or also criminal, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were both. So what’s Mike’s crime?
He shared on the net a spoof of the advertising campaign for Carlsberg beer. For the outlanders among you, the actual campaign shows some impossibly wonderful event, with the tagline saying “If Carlsberg did [X], it would probably be the best [X] in the world.
The spoof that got Mike into trouble features the tagline “If Carlsberg did illegal immigrants…” under the picture of a boat densely packed with 14 pretty, stark-naked girls.
Now some will find this joke funny and laugh; some may find it tasteless and wince. Both will have to agree, however, that this is just a joke, and a topical one at that.
Runnymede is after all a borough where Magna Carta codified the rights of Englishmen exactly 800 years ago. Surely one of those rights must have been to be able to laugh with impunity at anything this side of the Holy Spirit.
This right was first established by a source predating Magna Carta: “Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.” Obviously, modernity is less forgiving than Christ.
Some jokes may be in poor taste, some may be funny. Some may be both, as will be confirmed by anyone who has heard that the last thing to go through Diana’s mind was the steering wheel. None, however, would be seen as grounds for prosecution in a world that didn’t think that humour is tasteless or criminal by definition.
As to reality outpacing any humour or satire, this point was put beyond any doubt by the Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
The very fact that an institution of higher learning has such a job description on its staff would already place it outside the reach of satire, even if the gentleman in question did absolutely nothing.
But hey, everyone must earn his keep, and the good Vice Chancellor is no exception. Hence he proposed the ‘inclusive practice’ of introducing ‘gender-neutral’ pronouns as a way of “exposing our students to an increasingly diverse and global world.”
Actually a world where no sex distinctions were allowed to survive would be rather the opposite of diverse, but one can’t expect intellectual rigour from a chap in charge of diversity and inclusion.
What one can expect is exactly what one got: the proposal to do away with such offensive words as ‘he’ and ‘she’, along with their derivatives, and replace them with the new ‘gender-neutral’ pronouns ze, hir, zir, xem and xyr.
Donna Braquet, Director of the university’s Pride Centre, whatever that is, agrees wholeheartedly: “It is important to participate in making our campus welcoming and inclusive for all. One way to do that is to use a student’s chosen name and their correct pronouns.”
The wording of her drivel proves that the job is already half-done: in a sane world the antecedent ‘a student’s’ would be followed by the possessive pronoun ‘his’, not the ideologically illiterate ‘their’. But, since we’ve allowed PC fascists to impose that harebrained diktat on the world’s greatest language, we must be prepared for ‘ze’ revolution.
There we have the double whammy: PC fascists mangling English in a way that no satire could possibly fathom, and students being brainwashed to be offended by such ‘gender-specific’ fossils as ‘he’ and ‘she’. Comedians have no place in such a world.
There’s nothing we can do about it, other than refusing to use PC pseudolanguage and mocking those who do. The other day I did just that by refusing to use the PC term ‘African American’, as demanded by my interlocutor of the US neocon persuasion.
“Would you call a dog a canine American?” I asked. No smile crossed his self-righteous face. Life is no longer a laughing matter.