Safe Targets

I've never thought Steve Bell's cartoons remotely funny. I remember once seeing him on the TV explaining to his rapt audience how he invented the idea of John Major with his underpants on outisde his trousers, as if that had been one of the major cultural touchstones of our time, a conceit in which the scribbler seemed to have implicit faith. Tim Blair and his readership rubbish that rot-gut here.

A relative of mine who is - I tread carefully here, for fear that the slightest inaccuracy, the puniest lexicographical inaccuracy, will bring the mosque of familial rage down on top of me - of the Left has always maintained that racism is not about race so much as about power. Hence cartoons showing GWB sodomising a camel, or murdering Iraqi babies in their cribs, or belching out toxic chemicals over the pre-lapsarian paradise of Central Africa, are fair game, but explosive turbans atop stern-looking chaps with beards are strictly verboten. This handy redefinition of prejudice serves the useful leftist purpose of heaping all the blame for human beings' intolerance of one another on one particular group. "Honky", "Infidel", "Zionist Running-Dog" are thus legitimate howls of pain from the downtrodden, where the unutterable opposites are simply saliva from the chops of the guy with his boot on your throat.

The problem for folk like my misguided relly is that the various groups of the downtrodden are annoyingly unaware of their shared status, and insufficiently thankful of their shared benefactors, like the egregious Steve of the Guardian. If the Gay Times were to run a satirical strand of cartoons about a certain sexual predeliction common to a certain politically sensistive region of the world which may or may not be the Middle East, and WHSmith were forced to withdraw copies of the Gay Times for fear of reprisals, and editors, cartoonists and journalists were fatwa'd into submission, on whose side would Mr Bell fall down? Or if the Neasden Feminist Collective stopped wearing burkas in de-sexualised sympathy with their British Muslim sisters oppressed by 1st-World capitalism into staring at all those poisonous Western billboards advertisiing bras and hairspray, and instead mounted a mass demonstration outside the Pakistani High Commission in protest against the latest "honour killing" statistic, what kind of coverage would they get from our courageous and decent satirical cartoonists? I'll give you long odds on a deafening silence.

Jokes about strong and safe targets might make fans of The News Quiz nod their heads in Pavlovian recognition, but they just aren't FUNNY. The British Left, who have cornered the market in state-funded satire, have declared some topics not funny, and others obligatorially funny. Being told that you cannot laugh at x but are obliged to laugh at y is an experience common to those living under a totalitarian dictatorship. Which is why the Left can never tell a joke where the response is not pre-programmed, such as:

"bloke walks into a greengrocers and says I'd like a pound of apples and the greengrocer says how about these and the bloke says are they South African and the greengorcer says yes they are and the bloke says I don't buy South African products on principle and the greengrocer says I know what you mean mate all them black ' ands all over 'em"

Well I know it's not that funny, but written on electronic media typeface it's not clear whether or why it's funny or not, because you're not told whether the object of satire is a narrow-minded bigot who runs a greengrocers shop, or a narrow-minded Anti-Apartheid activist who insists on crowbaring his political opinions into the most humdrum of social situations. And that's why the News Quiz, and its dreadful panel of nodding-dog satirists, just isn't funny.

But the chief irony of all this is, as Mark Steyn has repeatedly argued - here, for intstance -, is that one particular weak minority is getting less and less weak - and less and less of a minority - by the minute. So that by the time Islamic theocratic tyranny becomes sufficiently "strong" to constitute a legitimate target for satire by the likes of Steve Bell, it'll be too late, because satirising Islamic theocratic tyranny will have been made punishable by death.

Satirize that!

... and as a postscipt to jokes with uncertain targets, may I reacquaint readers with the comedy of Bernard Manning, - for the uninitiated, a foul-mouthed working-class Mancunian of considerable girth, and the waddling incarnation of the phrase "Politically Incorrect", so much so that he didn't appear on TV at all post-1975, - who in the mid-eighties was said to have stood up at his comedy club one night and said to the audience: "Any of you lads fought in the Falklands?"; whereupon a raucous and partisan cheer of acknowledgement would rise up from the back of the hall, which Bernard then acknowledged with a patriotic: "Well fuck off, you Argie bastards!"

Poor countries still poor; rich still to blame

Advert in the Sunday Times 15/01/2006:

"want the big guys to drop the debt? drop us your name visit oxfam.org.uk and add your support.

"Debt is crippling the poorest countries. And the vast amount of money used to repay loans could so easily be used for food, water, inoculations and education instead. Although 2005 did [sic] an amazing job in erasing some of this debt, there's still a lot to be done. So we want you to visit oxfam.org.uk and leave your name and email address. We'll then contact you with ways you can help. It may seem like a small contribution, but it shows you want to do something about ending poverty and suffering once and for all. So let's get this done. Are you in?"

Oxfam used to be a charity dedicated to famine relief; nowadays not even the elimination of global poverty is the high-water mark of their vocation, they want to eliminate suffering. You know whom to call the next time you're off work with a bad back.

And while we're on the subject of our sufferings....

Footnote in Hello! 19/01/06:

"Bono, the campaigning rock star and singer of U2, has admitted that he feared his continuing commitment to ending global poverty would force him out of the band. While admitting that the 'first job of a rock'n'roll band is not to be dull', Bono, one of the leaders of the Make Poverty History campaign and avid supporter of last year's Live 8 concert, said he feared his on-stage statements about global poverty during U2's concerts last summer could have alienated fans. 'People openly jeered... When I do my rant on making poverty history, I have Larry behind me looking at his watch, timing me...' "

Who pays £40 to stand up and have a millionaire rock star lecture them about poverty? There's a herd of goats and two hours VSO ditch-digging in Mali gone begging. Multiplied by the capacity of the stadium they're playing in. I'm sure he's putting all that cash to good use, though. He knows best.

Marriage is a Great Institution, but I'm not ready...

Mark Steyn's hilarious 2001 article in the Speccie about trans-species sexual coupling, to which one of Tim Blair's avid readers refers, suggests a flaw in the argument for the legalization of gay marriage which I had not seen before. I hasten to add that I'm not opposed in principal to gay marriage, or to the marriage of man and beast, or of man and iPod, at least insofar as it affects the concelebrants' civil status before the res publica. (Religious weddings are matters for the faithful of whatever religions are concerned, which is the way it should stay; but just as Iran and Syria are to President Bush, so are religious weddings to the gay-civil-wedding lobbyists - they'll get round to them, all in good time.)

Readers with more journalistic or academic rigour than I can command might well care to trawl the archives of the Daily Telegraph's published letters to the editor. I remember one such which illustrated this point marvellously. I thus paraphrase:

"My flatmate Dave and I have lived together for five years. Our feelings for each other have never and never will go beyond the platonic. We can't be arsed living on our own, and due to our shared antipathy to housework and to the rules of basic domestic hygiene appear as unlikely as each other to find long-term girlfriends, let alone get any of them to marry us. Dave has suggested that we register as each other's partner, for tax purposes. My concern is: would we have to perform certain acts to or with each other, and if so, how often?"

Attaboys.