This outrage is just a meta-joke? You're kidding, right?

 

This time I am writing about a storm in a teacup. Jimmy Carr, a famous comedian, made a joke that has been shared more widely and has caused considerable outrage. The offending line which has been taken out of his show was about the deaths of some lesser-known victims of the holocaust being one of its upsides.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-60261876

Funnily enough, I listened to a thoughtful interview of Frankie Boyle by Louis Theroux yesterday, also on the BBC, which would have explained to this journalist what the other side of this one-sided report should be.

Lots of people struggle to pin down what makes something funny, and it’s clear that it varies between people. One key element is the punchline (/payoff) being unexpected. There must be a surprise: the double meaning of a pun, for example.

In Mr Carr’s routine, he probably spent some time building up a persona; taking the opposite point of view from usual as he mentioned various subjects, startling the audience as they failed to anticipate the approach a less reasonable person would have to each subject… and, happily, making them feel better about themselves for not being that bad!

This conceit is based on the idea of ‘pretending’, and the ludicrosity is of the opinions is partly what makes them funny: they are so wacky as to be funny. Many comedians have used comic extremes to make people laugh; Monty Python, for example, had many sketches which were just plain silly without any wordplay. The phrase ‘comic extremes’ exists for a reason: this is not a novel type of humour.

Similarly, pretending to be something you are not is a well-known concept. We have whole jobs, such as ‘actor’, ‘actress’ and ‘prime minister’ in which this is a primary skill.

So Carr has hardly done something utterly unknown by making extreme statements about important issues. We have a prime minister who says things as wacky every single day. Recently he claimed not to know whether he had been at his own birthday party.

The key to the joke is that the statement has to be ludicrous. Wackiness is not wacky if it’s just unpleasant. For example, if I were to say that we shouldn’t let darkies into the country to an audience that didn’t know me, it wouldn’t be funny: this is, shockingly enough, an opinion that is widespread in the country. In 40 years it will be a joke: a punchline a comedian uses while pretending to be a bigot. In some social circles it could be a joke right now, except that so many people lose their sense of humour, turning into solemn, earnest American-style killjoys.

A core part of British culture has been the willingness to indulge in humour in any context; that a good joke is always worthwhile. This has been documented many times, such as by Kate Fox in Watching the English. It is fundamentally un-British to suffer a sense of humour failure: this is a personal failing. The British had, until recently, the ability to enjoy jokes independently of the seriousness of the subject. Some, such as Jimmy Carr’s audience, are still a little British. Others, such as the online trouble-makers who posted short extracts of his performance online, have clearly lost touch with my culture.

A wacky joke is often, in fact, a little dig at people with similar, if lesser, beliefs. Jimmy Carr does not need to learn about the fate of Roma people, as advocated by the Auschwitz Memorial, one of many stupid commentators that should be sent to a concentration camp for their criminally obtuse statements about this comedy performance. If he didn’t know about their fate, he couldn’t have mentioned it in his joke!

There is a method of making a point sometimes called the ‘argumentum ad absurdum’, which involves taking a principle and applying it a different context to produce an absurd result. This thereby demonstrates that the principle is flawed. A great many people utterly fail to understand this line of argument; often I find that people both assume that you agree with their principle and that your position involves the wacky outcome, when in fact the whole point is to demonstrate that their position is the wacky one.

Comedians who make extreme statements are often subtly, or not-so-subtly, indulging in this form of argument. A sort of ‘preaching to the choir’ that makes the audience happy with themselves for not being that silly, just as politicians will [mis]characterise their opponents in speeches to the party faithful, showing how the enemy believes silly things. When Carr makes a statement such as ‘the holocaust had an upside because it got rid of gypsies’, it is a sharp dig at people who are anti-gypsy, which is still a well-known attitude (as the various campaign groups whose quotations make up most of the BBC ‘journalism’ are well aware). He is implicitly noting that disliking a group of people has gone to crazy places in the past. If we tolerate that, what next?

This is why comedians such as Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle often mention subjects such as paedophilia, racism and, as here, the holocaust. These are established evils: it should be where they are on safest ground, as supporting such things is genuinely ludicrous in today’s society, although of course there will always be crazies in any free-thinking society.

Should these subjects be off-limits for jokes? Are they so sensitive that mentioning them, even as implicitly wacky, or an argumentum ad absurdum, is unacceptable? For some people, perhaps, they don’t feel wacky. But someone operating from the approach that this opinion is ludicrous should surely be welcome support for campaigners trying to counter such opinions? If we return to Carr’s audience, they clearly accepted his humour. So he must have warmed up, or judged, his crowd correctly, as you would expect from a skilled performer. Focussing on him might make it easy to indulge in outrage, but he is merely the comedian making the audience laugh. It is the audience of hundreds, or more, against whom more of the outrage should be focussed. But when you realise that that many people from the general population found it reasonable, in context, it’s hard to maintain that self-righteous glow of misunderstanding. Taking an aspect of a performance out of context is guaranteed to give you odd conclusions.

For example, one of the best songs of all time has the phrase ‘I just killed a man’, and yet people of taste the world over take great pleasure in Bohemian Rhapsody. Is it right of them to delight in murder? Charlie Chaplin, in the film ‘The Great Dictator’ dressed up as Adolf Hitler. One picture must indicate that he was a fascist idolising his hero. And yet the message his film sends is firmly anti-fascist: it is a send-up.

Next, since I do not know Jimmy Carr, I might be wrong in all these arguments. It might be that he is not a clever comedian (despite his evident success in that profession). Maybe he is, in fact, a vile bigot. It doesn’t matter that I cannot prove that he is whiter than white. His current detractors cannot prove that he wants the population to be whiter than white. I think that my arguments are stronger; everything points firmly towards him being a comedian and not a bigot. But public condemnation and lynch-mobbery should operate not on the possibility, but the overwhelming probability that he is an awful person. Or perhaps with even more certainty than that. We should give people enough rope to hang themselves: give them the benefit of the doubt. Too often, all across society, we condemn people for one word or phrase and yet forgive others for ruining lives and prosperity.

There is a bit of Bayesian probability involved here. Where you have lots of evidence that someone is a bigot, an apparently bigoted statement reinforces that conclusion. Where you do not, such an outlandish conclusion needs equally strong evidence. The assumption nowadays seems to be that if someone is capable of twisting your statements into a nasty conclusion then it is your fault and the nastiness in their imagination must have you as its source. I confidently suggest that its source is much closer to its home.

Finally, how many truly bigoted statements would truly be a worthy rival for the write off to fraud of £5bn of public money because of the government’s incompetence? Is a story like this worth so much twitter and news time?

 In summary then:

1.       Extreme jokes rely on the knowledge that the opinions are absurd to be funny. They cannot be both jokes and genuine beliefs.

2.       Extreme jokes and statements frequently emphasise the absurdity of an opinion, rather than genuinely advocating it.

3.       People for whom these things are not absurd are welcome to avoid these comedy nights, or develop enough social awareness to know when everyone else thinks they are absurd.

4.       Someone malicious can usually find a way of taking a piece of anything out of context and making it seem bad. We should be more interested in the trouble-stirrers who created this news story.

5.       Such fury cannot be merited by one small statement. The chance of the hearer having misunderstood is always too great. A little more humility is appropriate.

6.       There are far more important things to worry about. Anyone with a need to indulge in some self-righteous fury need not go unsatisfied.

 

I I leave you with the thought that crossing the road just to get to the other side is an outrage. There is a real risk of danger to traffic; at the very least a possibility that travellers will be delayed because of the chicken's pointless whim. This creature has risked its own life for no good purpose and we should not celebrate such an action. It is not funny.