The Gingrich Who Stole Race

I'm done, I'm through, I've had it. Really, I give up. You know that really cute saying by Tom Lehrer about how awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger made satire obsolete? At a certain point, you just reach the end of your rope and you say, it's over. Lehrer continued to write satire, he continued to work in parody, he refused to give up; I, on the other hand, think there is no more point having any sort of conversation about comedy.

Newt Gingrich, a man sculpted by God from leftovers from Rush Limbaugh's right buttock, has demanded apologies for a joke Robert De Niro made at a fundraiser. Gingrich called the joke inexcusable; he wants President Obama to apologise. And you know what? Because the fundraiser was attended by Michelle Obama, and because the joke involved her, Michelle Obama's people . . . agreed, and called the joke 'inappropriate.' They caved in, they agreed with Gingrich, and they threw De Niro out of the back of a bus, so to speak.

That's the country, and that's this presidency, in a squirrel-gnawed nutshell.

The Yankee Fan with the Golden Gun

@stevenpoole asked a really good question:

What exactly is the "news value" of a picture of a dead body that is not already contained in the information that said person is dead?

Do such images add "news value" to descriptions like:

In a cellphone video that went viral on the Internet, the deposed Libyan leader is seen splayed on the hood of a truck and then stumbling amid a frenzied crowd, seemingly begging for mercy. He is next seen on the ground, with fighters grabbing his hair. Blood pours down his head, drenching his golden brown khakis, as the crowd shouts, “God is great!”

When the news first came out about Gaddafi's execution, the photographs and video images did - not despite, but as evidence for, the analyses of Barthes and Sontag - provide a sense of confirmation, but this sense of confirmation may be adding something other than what I would understand by "news value"; its value lies elsewhere.

Outer Mong-don't-go-there

Okay, so my arm was twisted by an alert reader, I'll enter the fray.

Apparently, twitter has been a-flutter after Ricky Gervais tweeted a series of jokes in which he plays with the word "mong." Previously, we dealt with profoundly mean-spirited, nasty, spiteful jokes about disability (Ofcom and About A Boy), but this has a different quality to it.

As I'm sure you all know, "mong" is a term of derision for people with mental retardation, especially people with Down Syndrome. The "stigmata" of Down Syndrome can include macroglossia (a big tongue, hence elegant impersonations that involve putting your tongue under your lower lip and going "nhhhuhhhh"), the rather more imaginatively-named "simian crease" ("get your simian crease off of me, you damned dirty ape"), and, of course, prominent epicanthal folds, which spurred the popularisation of the term "mongoloid", cleverly contracted to "mong". There is nothing affectionate or endearing about the word "mong"; it's a crass and pejorative diminutive of a weirdly racist characterisation of a feature associated with a number of conditions associated with mental retardation. A whole history of dismissive, contemptuous, belittling, and arrogantly misconstrued cruelty is captured in that term.

The Importance of Being Santorum

An alert reader notified me about a segue, or a sequel, to one of the great comic political bitch-slaps of modern times, Dan Savage's take-down of the puckerbutted, sweaty-browed Pennsylvania Bigot, Rick Santorum, previously discussed in the blog; you can find the sequel here. Anybody interested in the political use of language will enjoy this comic twist to a story I still find amusing; I've tried to interest some people in considering this an act of speak, as opposed to unspeak, but they just look at me like a little part of them died when I spoke. It's not an unusual experience for me.

Keep checking in; I promise, over the next few days, a post on impressions and at least one on Hall Pass.

On no he didn't

An alert reader, one of the few who has remained alert after reading this blog, which is particularly impressive as most either click away quickly or end up in a self-soiling torpor, sent me news that Tracy Morgan surfed into New York on the wake of his recent anti-gay scandal and performed what sounds like an excellent gig at Carolines. Unlike bigoted, racist gutter-slurpers like Mel Gibson, Morgan promptly did a lot to make amends since his famous Nashville rant, so the audience at Carolines was no doubt in a forgiving mood.

And so, he ended the evening thus:

Then, just before midnight, Mr. Morgan said he had something going through his mind “that I can’t share with y’all.” Though the audience goaded him to continue, Mr. Morgan said, “I can’t. I just got out of controversy, man. This is diabolical.”After another brief flirtation with a woman in the crowd, Mr. Morgan turned sincere. “I love you all so much,” he said, “did I tell you that tonight? I’ve been in trouble lately, and this was big for me that you all came out.”Whatever he had been accused of, Mr. Morgan said, “I don’t have that in me. I believe gay, straight, anybody, everybody’s supposed to be happy in this world, man.”

Resuming his routine, Mr. Morgan warned his audience, “Don’t ever mess with women who have retarded kids.” As groans and cries of “Uh-oh” were heard, he continued, “Them young retarded males is strong. They’re strong like chimps.” Finally, he concluded with a bit about his alleged teenage romance with a girl he described as “a cripple” with a prosthetic arm, a mechanical larynx and a portable dialysis machine. See you at the next apology?

I don't know about you, but I was reminded of an extensive discussion of a strikingly similar joke on these very pages some months ago when this blog was just a baby-blog, wobbling to its feet, flinging its pudgy arms in all directions to stay balanced. It was a Frankie Boyle joke, first discussed here and then, in more detail, here. I quoted it as follows:

Katie Price – aka Jordan - has complained to Ofcom about Frankie Boyle, after the comedian made a joke about her disabled son, Harvey, who suffers from septo-optic dysplasia and autism.

Boyle said on his Tramadol Nights show: "I have a theory about the reason Jordan married a cage-fighter. She needed a man strong enough to stop Harvey from f***ing her."

There are three notable differences:

1) Morgan was not directing his joke at a specific woman and a specific son.

2) He was suggesting that the retarded sons are, at least, defending their mothers and not raping them.

3) There is something in Morgan's performance that suggests - no, more than suggests, that demands - you consider him somewhat limited himself.

I would expect point 1 not to be controversial. Whilst somebody who thinks he or she knows a lot about jokes and is a sophisticated analyst of comedy might try to insist that every joke, even if directed by narrative details towards specific figures, is already generalising, already sweeping in those who might be formally excluded by the details but are nevertheless otherwise identified with that figure, I can't help but feel that this person would be an idiot. It's worse when it's personal. It's meaner, it's crueler - it might be funnier, too.

I can't imagine anybody really objecting to point 2 as a distinction between the jokes?

Point 3 might be somewhat controversial for a number of reasons:

1) Is it okay to compare Tracy Morgan to a retarded person?

2) Is it okay to compare Tracy Morgan, by way of question number one and Morgan's routine, to a chimp?

I'm not sure it's okay, but let's face it; Morgan's allure is as a modern fool. He's not whip-smart Chris Rock, he's not haunted Dave Chappelle, he's not even angry. He's a man who can barely muster the concentration to tweet, which is the non-sexual social human activity that requires the least amount of concentration ever, and when he does, it's about his penis. It's quite a good tweet actually. But anyway, the point is, there's more than a sliver of a difference between Frankie Boyle's condescension and Morgan's goonish expostulations, and their performances, in this case, draw upon two very different histories, the history of the comedian as the court's most formidable and scorching propagandist and the history of the comedian in exile.

Of course, the rubber-kneed, tin-eared, sugar-titted masses are clamouring for another apology, but the real problem with Morgan's joke is much more obvious: it's basically an old joke. It was done. Comedians aren't really supposed to be stealing others' routines. I know that Morgan doesn't have the foggiest notion who Frankie Boyle is, so it is looking increasingly obvious that he must have stolen it by reading my blog? In any case, while Johan Hari faces the wrath of God, or really the wrath of right-wingers, which is, I suppose, the wrath of God, for allegedly doing something that isn't so great, Tracy Morgan is free to roam the streets.

Pity the Fool

France is undoubtedly a great nation, although we all know it peaked as a place, as a concept, as une histoire almost two thousand years ago, when a small band of indomitable Gauls held off the Roman Empire. Since then, there have been highs (Diderot, Serge Gainsbourg, Zidane) and lows (Vichy France, the sacking of Africa, Henry); the recent arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the extension of his New York visit at Riker's Island is unlikely to be recorded as one of the high points in French history.

This blog is not devoted to z-list celebrities, much less to the Nixonian gnome, Ben Stein, but we did recently dwell upon the question of his comedy and sexism, Parte Une and Parte Deux; although I thought I firmly closed the door on him, he's slipped back into our consciousness by writing a wretched little piece for The American Spectator in which he rushes to defend the honour and reputation and presumed innocence of Dominique Strauss-Kahn by slandering hotel maids, crying class warfare while evoking the image of the guillotine, and saying that, Come on, a short fat guy can't sexually assault a woman.

Much more interesting is the case made by Bernard-Henri Lévy, who, like me, is a philosopher, and, also like me, tends to go by his initials: BHL. In fact, BHL and I are like two peas in a pod, and might even be mistaken for twins were it not for his far better hair and his inimitable capacity to arch a single eyebrow.

In The Daily Beast, his piece is prefaced by a little blurb:

No one knows if the IMF director is guilty of sexual assault—and by dragging him through the mud, politicians and the press are committing gross acts of injustice, says French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Yes, no one knows what really happened, except, of course, for the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and a widowed refugee mother. But other than them, nobody knows. I would encourage readers to find BHL's piece to dwell on his epistemological scrutiny of what it is we know. And do not know.

If readers do not wish to dwell, I will start the dwelling off for them.

BHL's piece begins with a fact, an irrefutable fact.

"Monday morning."

Yes. Monday morning. Not Tuesday, not Wednesday, definitely not Thursday. I laugh at the thought it might be Friday or Saturday, and cast a melancholic glance at those who think it might be Sunday. And nor is noon, much less afternoon; do not deceive yourselves: it is not evening or night. "Monday morning."

That established, he goes on: "I do not know--no one knows, because there have been no leaks regarding the declarations of the man in question--if Dominique Strauss-Kahn was guilty of the acts he is accused of committing there. . ." We have come to our first epistemological insight from the philosopher. In the world before, the world that precedes ours, in the past, we might have asked whether it is possible that the alleged perpetrator or the alleged victim knows, but this is the world of Julian Assange, and all we can know must come through leaks. A foolish reader of BHL, a real idiot, might say that the implication is that there is "no one" and there is Strauss-Kahn, there is the "no one" who knows, and there is Strauss-Kahn who knows, and that this formulation submerges the alleged victim into "no one." But such a statement would betray a real lack of philosophical insight.

Those who are not philosophers should stop reading now, because it's about to get complicated. Having established not only the epistemological limits of who can know, but also the rhetorical patter of the epistemological question itself, he goes on: "I do not know--but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, and without delay--how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York's grand hotels of sending a "cleaning brigade" of two people, in the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet." The opening of this sentence could have come straight out of Derrida: the sly introduction of "on the other hand" without presenting the first hand, the double-barrelling of the question with both epistemological and ontological urgency, all couched in a homely but spry spirit of inquiry from a position of ignorance. The next part of the sentence could also have come straight out of Derrida, or Foucault, or Deleuze and Guattari, or anybody else who has ever spent a night in a New York hotel, especially a grand one: it is simply a fact that chambermaids never walk alone into rooms. To doubt this is something that even Descartes would have considered outre. Chambermaids, like presence and absence or power and truth or being and time, are never without their double.

Having demonstrated that nobody can know what happened, except that nobody can explain the sheer impossibility of a single chambermaid entering a hotel room, we are invited to share what BHL does know: that dime-store psychology is not helpful, that "nothing in the world can justify a man being thrown thus to the dogs", that no suspicion should allow the entire world to revel in this man's disgrace, that no earthly law should allow another woman to be exposed to this slime. Passing through the unknowable into the known, BHL drives towards one truth that stands above all others, an insight that justifies the hyperbole, the aroused rhetoric, his impassioned and devastating study of the inflamed epistemologies of the contemporary soul: the New York tabloid press is a disgrace to the profession.

Oh he is so right! They so are.

BHL goes on to talk about other things he knows about the exploitation of this scandal and the politicking, with a sensuously righteous sneer at those who righteously sneer. What we see in Ben Stein's hack-handed attempt to weasel his way back into the limelight and BHL's priapic defence of his friend is the failure of boorish politics and quasi-philosophical musings to address the sheer nastiness of this situation, however close they stumble to real, fundamental problems about publicity, presumptions of guilt and innocence, to questions of class, race, friendship, politics, and legal process that affect how and what we know; why this nastiness is exploited and enjoyed is a question both men veer away from investigating and answering seriously.

This, on the other hand, begins to say some interesting things:

IMF Chief tried to fuck New York chambermaid after mistaking her for a small financially crippled country.

It's crude, perhaps Onion-quality? But it's infinitely more damning than either Stein's or BHL's analyses as a reflection of those real, fundamental problems about publicity, presumptions of guilt and innocence, those questions of class, race, friendship, politics, and legal process that affect how and what we know, and how nasty this publicity, these presumptions, and these questions are.

The good Dr Peter Thraft

An alert reader emerged from the white-capped rapids of twitter, thrusting a hand out of the roiling flood of tweets to attract my attention to this twitter account, before being hauled back under and carried away, quite possibly to a pool of ecstatic aphorisms, although that might be more hopeful than realistic: I caught sight of his face and he had # for eyes.

In any case, I hope you go to that account, wherein Dr Peter Thraft, a relationship expert and sex therapist, offers invaluable advice about sex and relationships for men and women in the sensitive but clinically-unembarrassed manner befitting a true professional. I would highly recommend that you spend some time at the site. You can work your way forwards or backwards through time, because it's not the narrative that counts as much as the truths dispensed by the good doctor.

Now, of course, the question has been raised: is Dr Peter Thraft real? Is Dr Peter Thraft for real? Is it, as the alert reader suspects, the great Peter Serafinowicz? The tone would be just right for Serafinowicz, exquisitely attuned to just the right whiffs of innocence, ingratiation, and indignation while revelling in the corporeal and indulgent.

But what if, what if Dr Peter Thraft is real? The tweets are funny because Dr Peter Thraft is so fully alive and so realistic he almost could be real, and yet if he were real, he would only become funny, if at all, in very different way? (And if it were discovered that he is real, then much of the amusement one derives from those people getting rebuffed and blocked by the kind, offended doctor for tweettacking (tweet-attacking?) his misogyny and his advice would double-back: instead of being the gulls, they would be the ones who were perceptive; instead of being rigid moralists who can't get a joke, they'd have been true to a moral universe we thought we inhabited.)

More later, I hope, on the question of reality in comedy. But in the meantime, spend some time with Dr Peter Thraft and you might pick up a tip or two.

Conviction

Of course, that wasn't my last post ever. Although nobody was rude enough to say it out loud, my entire readership was very upset and annoyed with me for threatening to leave this blog behind, and I know that had I left it any longer, the e-mails and tweets would have started coming in, begging me to start it back up again. Thus, this post is about conviction, as in "having conviction", believing in what you do and say.

Here's an opening line from a recent editorial:

Since the shooting rampage in Tucson on Jan. 8 that killed six and wounded 13 (including Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford), there has been intensified rhetoric urging Americans to arm themselves and to carry guns for protection

I should not have been astounded that in the United States a sentence beginning with a list of casualties from gun violence would end with an evocation of "intensified rhetoric" urging people to buy more guns. Now, mind you, the writer is not endorsing the NRA's point of view and he goes on to make points I myself would make if I were half as articulate and had a bully pulpit (and, I assure you, I will never turn private matters and public things into a bully pulpit; objectivity rules the day on this site).

No, it's the voluminous, heavy-swinging cajones of various groups on the American right that have me dismayed; their power over the national discourse, the way their words - "to arm themselves" - and their logic - "to carry guns for protection" - can infiltrate even their opponents' language, is something to behold. It's not a matter of integrity or intellectualism, it's sheer conviction. They believe it so hard, it becomes true.

It got me to thinking about editorial cartooning.

Editorial cartooning somehow survived the mockery of Brass Eye; the long tradition of using caricature - elephantine ears, stalactite noses, pebbly eyes - and a few words inscribed into a drawing to make a convincing case for an argument about current political affairs lives on today. All over the place. You can't spit at a newspaper without hitting an editorial cartoon. Of course, an editorial cartoon can make a powerful point with all the majestic impact of Zidane's bulldozer head, or it can simplify a complex situation into a crude lie; an editorial cartoon can be Hogarthian art about human folly, or it can be frank propaganda spewed out by the machine.

Here are a selection of editorial cartoons about a recent topic in the news. The first is by Steve Bell in The Guardian. The last is by Brian Fairrington.

Now, I'm particularly interested in the percentage one by Fairrington. Ostensibly, the argument is being made that George W. Bush deserves the credit for the very brief capture of Osama bin Laden: for his years of painstaking work behind the scenes, for his leadership and his vision, for bearing the brunt of the public's ire even as he steeled himself with resolve to do what he had to do, opinion polls be damned; Obama is just a late-comer, profiting from his predecessor's hard work and sacrifice.

An editorial cartoon is a model of efficiency, condensing a roomful of fog into a few pure drops of insight. But what is being left out by such an argument, if indeed Fairrington is making that argument? What has been excluded as the cartoonist sought to condense the history of the American search for bin Laden over the past decades into a single drop? Oh, I don't know: the war in Iraq; letting bin Laden escape Tora Bora; closing the bin Laden C.I.A. unit; Bush not worrying so much about where bin Laden is; the utterly confusing and misleading """information""" procured from torture, which may well have contributed to bin Laden's safety. Not to mention Obama's own contributions, the decisions he made, and so forth. And, if this is the argument being made, how can we not imagine a very similar cartoon with a picture of the U.S. Economy in place of bin Laden's - everything else would be the same. But Fairrington, who's done a lot of cartoons about the U.S. Economy, such as here and here, might not agree?

After all, what we're talking about is a cartoonist's assessment of responsibility; and what if this is about responsibility as culpability? Isn't it possible that this same bullet-through-Osama's-head cartoon could be appended to an editorial about American acceptance of extra-legal, illegal, extra-moral, immoral devices, techniques, practices and policies, to show how Obama is continuing what Bush started? (After all, surely if this were only about responsibility for nabbing the old goat-fucked terrorist, Bill Clinton would earn a few percentage points?)

Similarly, laying out bin Laden's corpse as the "i" in Justice, with its own poetic reverberations of an "eye for an eye", an "i" for an "i", a life for a life, speaking also to the impossibility of measuring the extinction of Osama's subjectivity against the extinction of thousands of his victims' subjectivities, could be read quite differently: a murder has intruded upon justice, or has been claimed by "justice".

What about Steve Bell's Tessiobama? Are we supposed to see it as an image of old-school White House gangsterism? But even if we do see it that way, as something outside the law and murderous, how hard is it not to feel implicitly sympathetic? After all, I may not approve of the Corleones, but I admire them more than I admire anybody else who has ever lived. Hell, I wouldn't mind setting Clemenza on a few peoples' asses; I wouldn't be averse to sending Luca Brasi to deal with Mugabe, or getting Willi Cicci to sort out a few genocidaires:

And so I've been perturbed by the confluence of ambiguity and conviction in editorial cartooning. However convinced we may be by a joke's conviction, a joke is never enough to indict. Think of that the next time you read some pained piece by offended parties centring their victimhood on a joke at their expense.

But I'm still trying to figure another cartoon out. It's by Fairrington again. Fairrington has had a cartoon about how left wing MSNBC is; he produces one of those annual regular-as-clockwork-it's-winter-so-it's-time-to-do-a-global-warming cartoon; he does standard issue NRA, and pro-torture, and Clinton cartoons:

All in all, your everyday right wing bullshitter. Or is he?

Would someone explain this to me?

(Update, prior to posting: see below cartoon for my thoughts)

So, linger with that cartoon for a minute.

What does it mean?

Okay, so when I first saw this cartoon, I thought it was to be understood as follows: we all know that one reason why the "gays in the military" debate is such a charade is because there are already gays in the military; and one of the most poignant arguments against the charade is that gays in the military have died in the military, just like straight soldiers. I thought this cartoon was a tribute to these men and women, specifically showing a proud, fallen gay soldier calling out to his gay brethren to thank them for repealing what had kept him silent in life.

And then I thought, hold on. Holy Shit. That viewpoint would be very inconsistent with Fairrington's oeuvre. Maybe this cartoon means quite the opposite. It could be a depiction of a (presumably) straight soldier who has been killed because they let gays (come out) in the military, who is sarcastically sneering from beyond the grave at the gays who insisted that gays be allowed (to come out) in the military.

So, which do you think it is?

Wham Bam

The list of things that aren't quite as good as they should be is soul-numbingly long. Glee would be near the top of the list right now, but as the anti-Glee bandwagon is getting more crowded than the Glee bandwagon, I can't really find anywhere to jump, so I've skulked away to pretend it doesn't exist. Community deserves a spot on the list, despite also being better than it could have been, and The [US] Office has long tarried there. The novels of Louis de Bernières, recent Scorsese films, Lou Reed's hairstyles, New York pizza, any father who isn't a 'tit singer' ... the list of disappointing things is a very long one, and it extends quickly towards the horizon when you start to add things that were once amazing but now, in retrospect, aren't quite as good as we once thought (Seth Rogan, 1980s sitcoms, Lou Reed's hairstyles)

Of course, what is really prominently positioned at the very pinnacle of the list, standing a lanky, greying head and shoulder above the disappointing throng, is the presidency of Barack Obama. I know, I know. But it's true. One of Jay Leno's writers stated the painfully obvious through the ham-jawed, stage-pacing ventriloquist's dummy: "President Obama said he plans on running for reelection against the Republicans. After the tax-cuts for the rich, the bailouts for Wall Street, and the bombing in Libya, I already thought he was the Republican candidate." Glenn Greenwald over at salon.com (which is my main competition for readers, though I think I've siphoned off about 45% of their traffic) is charting a much more painstakingly detailed course through the oil-polluted waters lapping across the deck of Obama's sinking presidency.

I was curious to find out what sort of jokes are being told about Obama, outside of the slightly-scared laughter emanating from The Daily Show audience, who can see the wounded disenchantment in Jon Stewart's eyes. So, I typed in a search-term of some sort and found a bunch of sites, which I perused. It's always strange to seek out comedy and jokes where even from the (presumed) privacy of your home you don't expect to be part of the audience; it's strange to be alone and to know there are kindred souls out there chuckling at the same time, but not as strange as the weird solitude of listening in on a conversation other people are enjoying from the silence of one's own room and finding in that conversation nothing to share.

This list of jokes is strikingly barren. I cannot say that I even forced the corners of my mouth into a formal smile of recognition, although I accepted that a number of the jokes had various features that would place them in the category of comedy. The comments, despite one lonely plea in the middle to steer clear of racist material, hone in on racist jokes, the hallmark of which is that they say nothing about Obama except by way of how they are racially designating him and then slurring those who share the racial designation. And I would be ashamed to have come up with the poor quality jokes the editors of another, purportedly comprehensive, list include, and this is coming from somebody whose blog is full of such poor quality jokes, his readers don't even notice them. (Hey, what's Sarah's only qualification for running against Barack? She's Palin comparison. What's the difference between Obama and Osama? Osama has plundered plutocrats' wealth to fund his wars.)

One of the most peculiar things about comedy is that an act of comedy - a joke, a pun, an impersonation - may have all the necessary formal qualities but there can be absolute disagreement about its essence, its effect, its core aesthetic virtue: whether or not it is funny. Of course, out on the edges of any aesthetic movement, one may be compelled to ask "Is it art?" but, crucially, that question can be answered, and, even more crucially, the question may even be a productive, instructive way to begin a conversation. "Is it funny?" is far less likely to lead to a conversation about a comic act that renders it funny, and it is possible to ask the question with deadly earnestness as myriad people around you are busting their guts.

One reason for this potent divide is that an entire Weltanschauung can be packaged into a joke of only a few words: the tiny fragments of scaffolding that make up a joke -- a few pieces of rusted pole and an odd-looking twisty device that holds sections of pole together -- can also house nearly endless boxes of information, whole libraries of sentimental and political-philosophical books, lengthy corridors lined with portraits, picture galleries and treasuries of old videos and film clips, and Grandma in her rocking chair by a roaring fire. If you approach a joke without similar furnishings and gimcracks, you're left with a useless, empty, and terribly small frame.

Another reason is a less positivist version of the first (or really, more positivist, because it relies not on Danielewskian architecture, but on visible or reproducible or nameable ploys to evoke the negative): the joke expands into commentary and comedy not just out of what we have but what we pretend or think we don't have. The defensive functions, for example, of denial, so usefully employed by so many of the birthers who insist, sincerely, that they are not racists; their sincerity is not a function of integrity but a product of total submission to denial, and so their jokes are ones they can share with their (imaginary, or otherwise depressed and frustrated) "black friends". If the psychology of defensive functions, of denial and reaction formation and repression, of compromise and displacement. which can construct out of a few snippets of words a system of the world and an appreciation of that world by infiltrating the spaces between the words and in the words with the materials of the unconscious without even necessarily being aware that you are doing this, are not your cups of tea, then the joke still hinges at the unspoken and the unspeakable, the actively-forgotten; and if this isn't your cup of tea either, then take your thirst somewhere else.

I know you're asking: how is any of this different from the response to any art or any "text"? I really wish you wouldn't ask that, you bastards. To come up with an answer would be to come up with a final definition of comedy. I can offer two (non)answers. The first is that there is no quantitative difference, just a qualitative one, to which you are guided by the structure and the paradigms (or, really, the repertoire of paradigms) in comedy: surprise, reference and quotation, incongruity, etc., which designate the aesthetic experience a comedic one. The second is that comedy, unlike other forms, sustains an ambiguity within the resolution, where the dynamics of the ambiguities are not fully explained by the end result and yet remain decisive, whereas with other arts or other "texts" there is a completion which is suspended where the joke is decisive, and finalised where the joke presents only a blank stare.

Which is the same type of stare you're giving the screen right now, right?

Reporting Live

There is in comedy a weird dynamic between the circumscribed and the dagger-like thrust into the centre. We joke about things: the joke encompasses something, encircles it, moves in an orbit around its topic like a sneaky satellite scanning information and shooting small, painful darts down towards the haplessly exposed surface below. Jokes are also about something because something is extracted, like a heart pulled out of a chest and held up for our cheers and roars, gripped now by the joke and not by its familiar contextual cavity.

(Of course, we joke with friends, we tell jokes to our bosses, and so forth, but in relationship to the subject of the joke, we joke about it).

One reason jokes are so disavowable is that this aboutness means we can always dispute what the joke is about. Is it a racist joke or about racism? However piercingly accurate or brilliantly observed a joke may be - especially when piercingly accurate or brilliantly observed - this aboutness is a distance and an estrangement, a ripping away. But, unlike a lonely satellite circling a stooge planet, and perhaps more like what we see in a celebratory heart-removing ceremony, the aboutness is not happening in a vacuum. There is a coordination of orbits, a ritualized and socialized communal engagement, a crowd of spectators at a hanging whose participation is not accidental curiosity but instrumental to the spectacle.

When something is generally spoken, there are claims of responsibility to the topic (contested, ambiguous ones, to be sure, when those claims are examined); when something is joked about, the claim is qualitatively different, as the circumscription, the encirclement is effected (in part) by the adoption of a voice that is not one's own, by quotation (we are repeating a joke, circulating something funny created somewhere else, we're sharing a perspective about something we don't entirely claim is our own), by impersonation. The various pathologies of comedy deviating from the norms of speech are not pathognomic, they are not so much exceptions as they are symptoms; or, to put it another way, and to quote Derrida, "Let's be serious."

At the same time, at the very same time, as comedy handles its topic from a reserve, a preserve of distance, its virtuosity is its complete grasping of the core of what it speaks about: the way an impersonation gets somebody just right, the way blondes are that stupid, the sensational evocation of the quoted.

I was somewhat grateful that an alert reader sent me a link to The Onion: "somewhat" because if I were to pay too much attention to The Onion, I would be forced to blog eight, nine, ten times a day. I haven't kept up with the newspaper; honestly, I became a little tired of some of the gags after about six years (Area woman can't find birth certificate, worried she's not a citizen; Boehner pronounces "penis" to rhyme with "tennis")

But this video is a work of art.


Autistic Reporter: Train Thankfully Unharmed In Crash That Killed One Man

In previous posts, we discussed a joke about autism, or really, a joke about a boy.

There are a number of things I like about this video. The first is that I can't help but enjoy the character of the autistic news reporter and how excited he gets about trains; the second is that I can't help but be amused by the missed cues. In both cases, it would be untrue to say that these are not jokes "about" autism. But the joke is not only about autism; it's also a lovely parody of the news anchor as a provocateur, trying to rachet up the drama, and a Brookerian review of the format of the news report, skewed by the "autistic reporter" who "misses" the point: the news story is a conventional type of narrative, usually in the """tragic""" mode, with a shallow, but deeply expressed, sympathy for the victim of the "tragedy". In this case, the autistic reporter fails entirely to develop this emotional-dramatic narrative, and instead focuses on the train. As such, it's an act of resistance, and has its own piquant twist: there are other values. There is a perspective where a train is a thing of beauty and majesty and importance. Although the comedy essentially skewers this as a failure to recognise the import of a man's death, I can't help but admire this reporter, and the joke, as a small rebellion against the phony sentimentality of the news with its cheap paradigms of head-shaking sorrow and disgust, its assumptions about homogenous values, its glib normativity posing as objectivity and common sense. And the way in which all of these are tied into entertainment and commercialism.

So is this a sick joke "about" how people with autism lack a theory of mind that would allow them to see the death of someone else as something to mourn, about how people with autism fail to "empathise" with others, or is it about the news?

Time's tide will smother you

A very alert reader buzzed me about this particular column in Time Out New York. The Hot Seat is a standard format, back-page Q&A for celebrities touting their latest book/movie/spouse/bleaching, and in it, there is usually some effort made to address, or at least allude to, some recent scandal involving that celebrity and a biographer/movie/spouse/bleaching. This week, it's Gilbert Gottfried, and the alert reader wondered if this wasn't "a propos".

The first thing this interview does is address something that, terrible dictu, happened before this blog started: Gottfried tweeted jokes about the tsunami in Japan as it was happening. I'm so glad that the alert reader let me know about this TONY column, because it always seemed to me that the real tragedy of the tsunami and Gottfried's jokes was that they happened before this blog got started. It was as if the Gods of Nature and the Gods of Comedy conspired against me. (But what do you think I'll get another chance?)

So, the first question posed to the shrill memoir-shilling comedian:

You tweeted some shocking jokes about Japan. Are there any topics that are off limits for you?
Evidently not. When martians land on this planet, years from now, and dig up our civilization, they’ll see my name and picture and the tsunami and figure, Well, this guy caused the tsunami.

Clever answer. Without exactly saying it, he's tossing the comedian's Get Out Of Jail Free card onto the table and shrugging smugly: he actually didn't cause the tsunami, he just joked about it. He goes on to point out that the media coverage of the tsunami was soon dropped from the front pages and television news for more celebrity outrages, which just goes to show how contrived and phony the "scandal" was; and he's pretty much right.

The next answer is really just your typical celebrity reach-around:

Was there anyone you were particularly proud of offending?
I heard Dr. Laura was very offended. And also Perez Hilton. He takes photos and draws penises on them and accuses everyone of being gay, but he was morally offended. And my favorite was I beat out Charlie Sheen as the most provocative celebrity of the week onShowbiz Tonight. And the expert to give the final comment on why it was wrong was Kelsey Grammer’s ex-wife Camille—to let you know that the universe has officially come to an end.

Celebrities critiquing celebrities critiquing celebrities. It's a bit sad that the phrase "accuses . . . of being gay" is still in circulation, but, anyway, as I said (accusing everybody of being gay), it's just your typical celebrity reach-around.

And then things get interesting:

Is there is a waiting period for joking about tragic events?
There is that old saying, tragedy plus time equals comedy. Although I realize that’s true, I also think that is so hypocritical. Because why should you [wait]? If it is wrong before, why should it be allowed afterwards? Somebody tweeted me recently and said, “I just looked at the calendar. I am going to wait another 17 days till I can laugh at Gilbert’s Japan joke.”

I'm deeply impressed that Gottfried takes the moral highground (perhaps a useful place to be when a tsunami of moral approbation is bearing down on you?) With utter disregard for the convention of apology, he says that people who complain about his jokes as having come at the wrong time or too soon are the hypocrites, the moral wretches. He's spotted something deeply obvious: that the moral issue at stake is (largely) the same, whether or not the comment comes a few minutes, an hour, a week, or a month later: it is laughter as a response to suffering.

Now, hold on, you might say. Grab that floating piece of car, pull yourself onto that roof, let's take stock of the situation. What is not funny at the time can often becomefunny later, when the pain and terror and fear diminishes, when the healing has begun.

We know this from our own lives.

Imagine you're attacked by a pit bull. It jumps up, clamps its jaws down hard on your hand, and with a drooling snap, it bites your middle finger off; it then staggers back while you stare at the bleeding stump; the pit bull looks up at you, swallows your finger dramatically, pauses for effect, and then vomits out your finger, right there, at your feet. You're probably not laughing. But four years later, as you tell the tale in the pub, it's a great story, and everybody laughs. Tragedy plus time equals comedy.

But wait: that's because it happened to you. Therefore you need the time to get over the pain, to become accustomed to typing without that finger, to go outside without wetting yourself every time you see a dog. So, let's imagine we're all walking back home, late at night, a big group of us, drunk and happy. It's after a long evening of, say, karaoke. Our voices are hoarse, our crotches damp, our feet sore, and if we hear Coldplay one more time, we're going to fucking hit something. And along comes a pitbull. It jumps up clamps its jaws down hard on somebody else's hand, and with a drooling snap, it bites that person's middle finger off; it then staggers back while everybody stares at the bleeding stump; the pit bull looks up, swallows the finger dramatically, pauses for effect, and then vomits out the finger, right there, at our feet. I still think that the laughter would come later. I still think that we would be screaming, calling for help, traumatically dissociating and mumbling the words to The Scientist, and not laughing. So, the rule stands: Tragedy plus time equals comedy.

But, of course, as a rule, it's also rubbish. Countless are the times when, once the moment has passed, once the fire has dimmed, once the tide has turned, that jokeisn't funny anymore. So what about Gottfried's tweet-jokes? How do they stand the test of time? Are they any better or worse now that some so-called "time" has passed? Here are the "worst ten" of the twelve he tweeted. I should defer on judging them, because this is the second time I saw them, but, as I've discovered, because I'm writing this blog, I don't actually have to defer to anybody. So, here's my "judgement": on the day, I thought that one or two were quite funny, though most of them were shudderingly bad. But the one or two I thought were quite funny on the day don't seem so funny now. Hmm. Time's tricks are a mystery.

So, what is the relationship between a joke, tragedy, and time? If there is to be a rule, it would probably involve something like Tragedy plus timing equals comedy: the time of the joke relative to the tragedy, the relationship of the joker and the audience to the time of the joke relative to the tragedy, but also its rhythms, its patter, and, perhaps the real twist, the real problem, how much comic bang you get for the tragic buck. In other words, how we judge the timing depends in part on how good the joke is, while the quality of the joke is affected by the timing.

In any case, this passing scandal involved the usual chest-thumping and shock, horror, outrage, and lots of reader polls about whether or not the jokes were funny. Gottfriend had to share the stage, though, with a somewhat more impressive figure.50 Cent also started cracking jokes about the Tsunami on the day, and so the chest-thumping and shock, horror, outrage was distributed amongst the celebrities. (I honestly think that more journalists troll twitter for something to write about than report on what is happening outside the twitterverse; everyday and in every way, we're getting closer and closer to having our entire lives mediated by celebrities).

So why do we tell sick jokes? This post runs through some of the most famous reasons: coping, hostility, fear, and -- full credit to the author -- dismisses these explanations (or at least problematises them); it's worth reading for the jokes included therein, including ones about Japan. They are far better than Gottfried's tweets. And maybe, today, instead of asking about why "we" tell these jokes, perhaps we should end this meditation on why Gottfried tells jokes like this. He has an answer, and he cites his source.

Ima wanna summa that

As I mentioned yesterday, we would come back to sex slavery. It's a big topic now.

I've known it's wrong, ever since I first became aware of it.

And now we have Demi and Ashton, compellingly called "DNA" (as in "Demi'N'Ashton"!) leading the global campaign to end child sex slavery. Given the fact that just about everybody in the world has at some point wondered if it would be all bad to be Ashton Kutcher's sex slave, I can't think of a better celebrity pair to take on this task.

In addition to giving speeches and appearing at official functions around the world lending their support to the abolition of child sex slavery, all of which is chronicled on their web-page, they've created a series of video ads starring friends: "Real Men Don't Buy Girls."

Here's one with Justin Timberlake. Frankly, I think it's a bit disappointing. Justin Timberlake is one of the funniest young comic actors out there, but he can't quite pull it off. In fact, most of them are a bit disappointing. I wanted to enjoy Sean Penn's. But I didn't. Ashton Kutcher proves that he really is quite a poor actor. I suppose that this one, featuring Jason Mraz, is quite interesting?

In any case, I've been amused to discover that there's something of a backlash, which I don't want to whip up into a cultural whiplash: it's a small backlash, limited mostly to comments on YouTube about how these ads aren't quite appropriate. Michaela Haas, who is one of those weird media celebrity-cum- academic-cum-advocate figures, has written a delightfully lurid piece of agonised concern over DNA's Real Men blitz. But I get the sinking feeling that this is really all about celebrity. The word "celebrity" is in the piece five times, and "star" four times, which is more than "slavery", "HIV" and "Clooney" combined. And she's quite careful with her criticism; she is very pleasant about how

Demi and Ashton, with their combined star power, can attract considerable publicity and capital for a cause that truly deserves more attention and clearly needs more exposure.

But she's not so sure about the comedy bit.

Yet the reality is dirty, painful and cruel -- the videos are so silly they miss the mark because they seem to make fun of the reality.

Yeah, um, do they do that? Or is this some other, Matrix-like use of "the reality"? Anyway, this allows her to segue into some sentences that might suggest "expertise" by listing a bunch of unsurprising facts. What she's really worried about is that if celebrities act silly, then media celebrities-cum-academics-cum-advocates may lose their gravitas when they put on their Armani glasses and act serious. Without anything approaching a serious analysis, she points to some other celebrities who have apparently done it right:

The most successful celebrity philanthropy endeavors all prove that success comes with continuous involvement. Sean Penn does truly amazing work outside the limelight [Ed. note: that's Limelight the club in Port-au-Prince; he's regularly covered by photographers and the press] in rebuilding Haiti. George Clooney has spent an enormous amount of time and undergone tremendous personal risk (including contracting Malaria [Ed note: Malaria was actually the name of the driver Clooney contracted to drive him around in Southern Sudan]) to keep the world alert to the atrocities in much forgotten Sudan. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have devoted not only millions from their personal fortunes, but also time and real effort into causes such as rebuilding New Orleans [Ed note: which they did! It's huge!] and the plight of refugees around the world [Ed note: they're still working on that]. Using their celebrity status and wealth, Bill and Melinda Gates have been able to gather billions of additional support dollars for global health causes [Ed note: they also channelled about ten thousand dollars to a guy name Stichko to stab Slavoj Zizek]

Yeah, come on. It costs more to fly any one of these jokers to their destination and then back to their holiday villa (stopping off for a junket in Monte Carlo or Tokyo) than on those Real Men videos, but . . .

I hope Demi and Ashton got their friends to produce the videos for free. It would pain me to see donor money wasted on neatly polished, silly ads when I know that as little as $100 can keep a girl in school for a year in Asia -- and thus likely out of the reach of traffickers. As little as $25 pays for a month of trauma counseling when a trafficking victim in Cambodia needs support to start a new life.

Hey, I know how they can earn that money!

About a Boy

A few days ago, we discussed a Frankie Boyle joke and, under closer scrutiny, a BBC news report about this joke. I want to thank those who commented on the post for pushing a few points, and I want to return to the joke and what was said in the BBC news report. Underlying this return is the same question that I asked in the post: how do we . . . make sense of offensive jokes?

If you don't have the patience to scroll way past the enormous photograph and down a few posts, I'll provide a brief synopsis. Katie Price, also known as Jordan, has a son with septo-optic dysplasia and autism. In a routine on his television show, Frankie Boyle said:

I have a theory about the reason Jordan married a cagefighter. She needed a man strong enough to stop Harvey from fucking her.

Let's leave aside the joke for a moment and recall the responses, as reported in the BBC article.

Ofcom. In the article's opening paragraph, we learn that Ofcom censured Channel 4 for the joke because it was "offensive"; the article concludes by noting that Ofcom refused to censure another television show for jokes deemed offensive because "to restrict humour only to material which does not cause offence would be an unnecessary restriction of freedom of expression." We could spend hours on the wild inconsistency between the moral obligation of the body to censure what is offensive and the social obligation to prevent restriction of freedom of expression; we could spend hours on the concept of "unnecessary" in their statement; we could spend hours on whether any comedic material would be left if humour were restricted to jokes that could never cause offence; we could spend minutes on whether their statement should have used "that" instead of "which".

What Ofcom fails to realise is that Sick jokes are, fundamentally, jokes at the expense of (moral, aesthetic) judgement. That is what they do. That is how they work their magic. They root their way into the nooks and crannies of offence and expose the act of judgement at its hinge: either you laugh, rejecting the disapproving judgement of silence, or you remain silent, rejecting the approving judgement of laughter. But, crucially, that is not all. There remains ambiguity: in laughing, are you rejecting the disapproval of silence or are you rejecting the disapproval of the joke; that is, are you rejecting judgement or suspending judgement? We can rephrase it for silence: are you not laughing because you disapprove or are you not laughing because you think it is not funny? I would argue that these are not all wholly the same thing, although another layer of ambiguity spreads an opacity over the proceedings: if you disapprove of the joke, you are unlikely to find it funny; if you find it funny, you are unlikely to disapprove of the joke--at least at first. We could go on like this, so let me make this point about Ofcom's contradictory stance: if you are only going to address an offensive/sick joke as a moral matter of censure or a social matter of freedom of expression, you are going to get caught in the wild inconsistency we see on display; if you fail to see how one essential function in offensive jokes is to create an ambiguity out of the twin contradictory certainties, you will end up looking like fools. That is what happened to Ofcom. They literally don't know what they are talking about.

Channel 4. I am reminded of Senator Inhofe: when speaking about "Iraqi prisoner abuse"/torture, he was famously more outraged by the outrage. I find myself more outraged by Channel 4's official response than by the joke. As I pointed out in the previous post, Channel 4's bullshit slides by because neither the journalist nor Ofcom (nor, I would assume, the reader) is making any sense of the joke. Channel 4 says the joke is "wholly justified in the context", and they get away with it because nobody is interrogating what they mean by "context" (much less how any context can wholly justify anything). They say it was "not intended as a slur on any particular community" and that "everyone is fair game in Frankie's eyes", and they get away with it, even though they're having their cake and eating it too: a revocation of intent to slur and a justification of slurring anybody Frankie chooses to slur on the basis of some phony egalitarianism. To make sense of offensive jokes, we need to think about their multiple contexts, particularly the overarching "comic context" and how offensive jokes are secure in the heart of the "comic context" but also always testing the boundaries of that context; to make sense of offensive jokes, we need to reckon with how they target vulnerability, not leak platitudes about valuing "communities" or egalitarianism.

But then Channel 4 really begins to insult our intelligence. They call it "simply absurdist satire" and then say that the joke was a socially-complex, targeted, and significant critique of celebrity, maternity, and attachment: i.e., making fun of Price's "exploitation of her children for publicity purposes...her behavior as a mother and her cavalier attitude towards relationships." I was initially pissed off that they would think we are so stupid about comedy that they could throw this rotted contradiction out and we'd lap it up like it was fresh cream. But then, thanks to the comments made to the original post, I thought about it some more and became outraged. After a comedian cracks a joke about a woman's son, Channel 4 comes out and insults this woman in horrible ways, humourlessly and viciously maligning her as a mother and as a person. Now, I'm as tempted as the next person to despise and deride trashy celebrities, but to let myself get caught up in Channel 4's assumptions about this woman on account of her "celebrity" has really made me quite ashamed. I know vanishingly little about Katie Price, but if some anonymous spokesperson tells me that a celebrity is a slut and a shitty mother, I basically believe them? That's feeble on my part, and insidious on theirs. Katie Price knows this: she asks if Ofcom would have come to the same decision not to demand an apology from Channel 4 "if Harvey was the child of a well-known politician?" And, as pointed out in the comments section to the original post, saying that the joke is about her and not about the boy is as disingenuous, as consciously misleading, as a pickpocket saying "look up there" and pointing to the sky with one hand while his other hand is in your pocket, stealing your integrity.

Channel 4 takes us for fools; they talk gibberish about comedy and we nod and rub our chins.

Katie Price. You live by the media, you die by the media. Because I know nothing about Katie Price, I can't really make much sense of Ofcom's warbling Solomonic justice in giving censure but not demanding an apology, a decision possibly arrived at in part because Katie Price and her ex-husbands "consciously exposed their and their children's lives to the media" and (now citing the BBC article) "must expect to be the targets of humour and criticism." Though, typically, Ofcom goes on to say that there is not "unlimited licence to broadcast comedy that targets humour at such a child's expense" and, weirdly, that the child "had not himself chosen to be in the public eye": so there is licence but it's not unlimited; and, children in the public eye should be expected to be targets of humour and criticism but not if they haven't chosen to be in the public eye? Why can't they make up their minds? (Answer: because they haven't thought about what they're doing; they're using cut-and-paste ethical fragments and putting them together in the hopes that we won't notice). But back to Katie Price. Wait. This actually isn't about Katie Price. It's about a boy.

About a Boy. The boy has septo-optic dysplasia and autism. I argued, in the comments, that Boyle's joke plays on notions of physical strength and sexual incontinence in the mentally retarded - cf Of Mice and Men (I won't repeat my John Terry joke here). I should have made clear then, and will make clear now, neither septo-optic dysplasia nor autism are synonymous with mental retardation: however specific and detailed Frankie Boyle's joke is - the new step-dad's profession ("a cage-fighter"), the boy's name, his mother's celebrity - my interpretation of the joke is just that: an interpretation. An interpretation means an assumption of shared meaning (I will defend this statement to the death). I think I'm getting the joke because I think I know what Boyle is referring to, what the joke means. A joke is always interpreted (now that's a controversial statement, but I will stick to it even though I happen to believe it is controversial because, as I hew to my party-line, I insist that comedy is always ambiguous, even cognitively: is it interpreted, an active process, or do we get it, a passive one? Both.) Why is any of this relevant? First of all, if the joke must be interpreted, then there must be a declaration of shared meaning. Channel 4 lied about the shared meaning ("it's about the boy's mum"); Ofcom deferred (that's the whole point! In cutting-and-pasting ethical boilerplate, they're deferring interpretation, and that is why they are contradicting themselves); Katie Price says it's about her son. In the comments, another interpretation is given: apparently Harvey is large. I don't think that is sufficient to explain the joke: there is, I think, some broader implication about disability and physical strength, sexual rapacity, and lack of cognitive and psychological orientation in the joke. But the comment is spot on to point out that it only makes it that much more obvious the joke is about the boy.

What is the relationship of the boy to septo-optic dysplasia and autism? What is the relationship of the boy to his mother? What is the relationship of people with neurodevelopmental disorders to aggression, sexual expression? The sick joke relays between "communities" and individuals, between deep assumptions about people in general and specific characters, between assumed characteristics and stereotypes; the act of interpretation, of assuming (the mantle of) a shared meaning, is incriminating (if you laugh, you've agreed in some way with the material) or judging (if you do not laugh, you stand outside in judgement). If you want to make sense of a sick joke, you need to linger with it, to state your assumptions, to expose yourself to judgement; the boy (the one being accused of blindly raping his mother) is innocent, but he is used to incriminate us all - Ofcom, Channel 4, me, even his own mother.

Frankie Boyle. How cruel is his joke? How mean-spirited? You don't need me to answer that for you. But Frankie Boyle stood up there and made the joke; in my eyes, however cruel and however mean-spirited the joke was, Boyle takes responsibility for it, which is more than I can say for either Ofcom or Channel 4.

*****

As a coda, I want to mention Nick Hornby. I assume at some point during this post you got the "About a Boy" reference? Nick Hornby has a son with autism. About a decade ago, he edited a book of short stories called Speaking with the Angel, whose contributors included a round-up of the usual suspects (Smith, Welsh, Eggers, Doyle, Fielding, Marber) and a ringer or two (Colin Fi-Fi-Fi-Firth); the proceeds of which went to TreeHouse, a school for autistic children. Now, I have very little patience for short stories that aren't written by masters of the craft; bad theatre, bad films, bad paintings and bad sculpture are usually at least interesting and/or amusing; bad novels can be put down; but bad short stories steal something from me. I don't remember if any of the stories were really good or really bad or how much of my soul was taken from me by Patrick Marber or Zadie Smith; maybe not much? But I do remember the introduction: it's one of the best written pieces about raising a child with autism I've ever read. It's really Hornby at his best.

So if you feel a bit dirty about this whole sordid sick joke Frankie Boyle affair, get a copy of Speaking with the Angel.

Plus, face it, you now really want to read a sh-short story wr-wr-written by C-C-C-Colin I-uh-I-uh-I-uh . . . HAVE! . . . a-a-a-A. . . Osc-Osc-Osc-OSCAR!!! Fi-Fi-Fi-FUCK!-Firth.

(And yes, dear readers, unlike Colin Firth, I actually am a stutterer, I don't just play one in the muh-muh-muh-movies).

Ofcom

I was alerted by a kind reader to this BBC report about comedian Frankie Boyle getting his wrist slapped with a limp piece of soggy toast (one resembling Frankie Boyle's face). Apparently Boyle told a joke that involved Katie Price's son. The kind reader, ever alert, pointed out that the BBC article did not contain the actual joke that provoked this crazy outburst of ass-censuring.

Before I impress you with my skills as a web-researcher (I think I found the joke!), I wanted to discuss - briefly - the article. In part, it is completely crap journalistic writing, a mish-mash of provocative quotes of the He-said, She-said variety. In part, it is completely crap journalistic writing because nobody has really bothered to think through the topic at hand: How do we describe and make sense of offensive jokes?

Channel 4 said it was "wholly justified in the context". Price said it was "a further insult" that Ofcom had not forced the station to apologise.

Right, there's some nice examples: "in context." In what context? How does the context justify this particular joke? Which context are we talking about? And when does a context wholly justify something?

The model was among those who complained about the comments in Boyle's comedy series Tramadol Nights, saying they were "discriminatory, offensive, demeaning and humiliating".

In response Channel 4 said Boyle's comedy was not "intended as a slur on any particular community", but that "everyone is fair game in Frankie's eyes".

Having your cake and eating it too: we don't intend to insult anybody, we just insult everybody. Phony egalitarianism, the cowardice of comedians who pretend they're honest-to-god, "equal opportunity" truth-tellers and not vampires sucking the lifejuices out of the vulnerable. (Just to be clear, I mean "vampires sucking the lifejuices out of the vulernable" as a compliment)

One of the jokes that attracted complaints was not about Harvey's disability or about rape or incest, it said, but was "simply absurdist satire".

Okay, really? Really? Leaving aside the "simply", do we really suspect the joke is going to be "absurdist satire"? We can judge at the end whether it is "absurdist satire", but I'd have been willing to bet it was going to approximate "absurdist satire" about as much as Chinese Democracy approximates Glenn Gould. Discuss.

The broadcaster also said Boyle's remarks were meant to make fun of Price's alleged "exploitation of her children for publicity purposes... her behaviour as a mother and her cavalier attitude towards relationships".

So wait, is it "absurdist satire" or is it "meant to make fun of . . ." According to this article, Channel 4, which apparently can speak, speaks completely contradictory, righteous, arse-covering nonsense.

The ruling also said: "Ofcom was of the view that the material in question appeared to directly target and mock the mental and physical disabilities of a known eight year-old child who had not himself chosen to be in the public eye.

"As such, Ofcom found that the comments had considerable potential to be highly offensive to the audience."

Yes, and how do you bet this article is going to end?

Meanwhile, Ofcom also cleared BBC Two's Top Gear after the hosts made fun of Mexican people for being "lazy". The regulator said viewers would have been familiar with the show's "mocking, playground-style humour". "To restrict humour only to material which does not cause offence would be an unnecessary restriction of freedom of expression," it added.

I'd sigh if I weren't choking on a piece of toast.

So what was the joke?

I have a theory about the reason Jordan married a cage-fighter. She needed a man strong enough to stop Harvey from f***ing her.

Or, as it is fully reported:

Katie Price – aka Jordan - has complained to Ofcom about Frankie Boyle, after the comedian made a joke about her disabled son, Harvey, who suffers from septo-optic dysplasia and autism.

Boyle said on his Tramadol Nights show: "I have a theory about the reason Jordan married a cage-fighter. She needed a man strong enough to stop Harvey from f***ing her."

So what do you think of the joke?