You Can't Say That You Cunt!

Yesterday's post has caused some controversy it seems. I was literally bombarded with tut tuts and sucking of breath through teeth by those who saw it.

Apparently, child abuse IS still a taboo subject for comedy. Who'd have thought it?

Obviously, part of the comedy value of such things (if any at all) is that it is controversial and it feels a little naughty laughing at it. But people can be very hypocritical with their misplaced sense of what is acceptable 'fair game' and what is not.

A great example for me was something that happened at an unusual pub quiz I was at in Brixton last Sunday. There was a creative round where the teams had to each create a 'bad taste' Christmas Card.

One team sent one which said "Happy Christmas Mummy, I miss you! Love Madeleine ".

Another team made one that had a pop-up fist that came at you when you opened the card, reading "Have a Smashing Christmas Baby P, from Mum & Dad".

(Ours merely had Santa wanking on it, as an aside).

No-one in the pub was really offended - they were a young & liberal hip crowd, after all. The compere however deemed the Madeleine one worthy of finishing in the Top 3, but deemed the Baby P one as 'too bad taste' as it was still fresh. What a pile of old cock, frankly.

Both instances are terrible tragedies and it may be worth judging an audience before making a joke about either, but does the different passing of time between the two events make them less tragic? Does this mean we can free up more hoots about the holocaust than we can the Srebrenica massacre?

No, of course not.

A fair point is that victims of child abuse are never likely to be rolling in the aisles when they hear a joke about paedophilia. But neither would a joke on any subject be appealing to someone who has harrowing associations with it. You will struggle to find an Auschwitz survivor who enjoyed Freddie Starr's Nazi routine. Mind you, you would also struggle to find anyone who enjoyed it.

But does this mean everyone should tip-toe around all subjects for fear of upsetting someone? Perhaps to some degree. It certainly wouldn't be good form to suggest a game of Hide and Seek at the McCann Christmas party.

So judging your audience is important to some degree. Yet as long as you don't go out of your way to find a Woman's shelter to tell jokes about beating your wife up, I think comedy should be free to touch on any area, as long as it's done for the right reasons.

As such there is something to be said for awakening of the mainstream to why some things are taboo and not acceptable. 30 years ago, you couldn't really say a rude word on TV but you could have racist sit-coms like "My Neighbour is a Darkie" or whatever it was called. Nowadays, fire away with your fucks and cunts but racism is acceptable only as a cringing parody of how ridiculous racists really are. Which is as it should be.

But it seems the propensity of current society to be offended and wound-up over anything and everything is never-ending. The way media hypes up the paedophilia epidemic (so wonderfully parodied by Brass Eye) you would think that Gary Glitter, glam-cock in hand, was hanging around outside every school gate.

This is why jokes about paedophilia offend so many - not because they have necessarily been affected by it, but because many perceive it is everywhere and we shouldn't joke about something so pervasive.

But it's not everywhere. So people who think it is are GAY!