This is my truth - tell me yours

Comedy is subjective. Let me just start with that.

You might feel, quite intensely, that something either is or isn’t funny, and find many, many people think exactly the same as you – doesn’t make it a universal truth. It’s just an opinion.

This is mine.

Racism isn’t funny.

I’ve witnessed a number of new acts (by which I mean newer than me) lately take to the stage with some quite dodgy material to say the least. Yes- they’re all new, so hopefully will either get the message and drop the lamentable bits of their act or fall off the circuit completely. There’s a reason why Jim Davidson gets to work the war zones – we just don’t want these people attracting idiots into our clubs – we have enough!
Watching a new act launch into a routine, which then becomes a racist routine, makes your stomach feel like you have been violently sick – a horrible knot that intensifies as the crowd draws in their breath, a whistling that sings in your ears as some of the targeted people (that the comedian hasn’t even spotted are in the room) start muttering and shifting in their seats, getting ready to move. Everyone is waiting for the punch line, where the comedian could or should say, “Ah – look at me, I’m such an idiot for saying that. And you’re all idiots for laughing. Idiots!” ... and the moment where it should arrive, passes, and then you just have a horrible quietness ready to greet the next act, who has the decency to not be racist.

Then the comedian with racist material comes off stage and none of the other acts say anything. Some of them might even tell him he was good – which he probably was until that moment he started being racist and killed the room.

It’s all very well giving racist idiots a platform to spout their idiocy, because, yeah, they will look like idiots. But what we have to differentiate is that whilst the likes of I and probably you, reading this here blog, are intelligent enough to not be racist and can spot idiocy before it has even sat next to us on the bus… well, just think about it. The print newspaper with the biggest circulation is The Sun. What I am saying is there are an awful lot of idiots in the world, feeling sorry for themselves, who love it when someone comes along and points out that there’s someone other than them more worthy of ridicule, and once that sense of alienation sets in, therein lies the path to scapegoatism.

… and then you get members of my family having to put up with idiots in white vans shouting racist abuse at them in the streets, which is happening a lot these days. And this is twenty-first-century Northampton? Absolutely.

The thing is, I am far too lowly to tell other, more successful comedians that they should abandon their lucrative material. It’s going to sound like sour grapes, but I was discussing Sarah Silverman with another comedian last night. Some of her jokes are highly racist with an egg-wash of irony. And yet loads of blokes think she’s the funniest woman in the world in a world where women aren’t funny*… so does that mean ironic racism is funny now? I do think she’s funny, but I’m not into ironic racism. And frankly, Susan Calman and Zoe Lyons are tons more funny, to give just two examples.

Subjectivity aside, the comedian’s job is to make people laugh, and comedians can approach the task in billions of ways. As far as I can tell, racism isn’t really getting the job done.

I’m just a little voice with a Black Country twang, but I want to make an appeal to burgeoning comics like myself. If you are going to approach the subject of race within comedy, please try not to be a git about it.

Bit ranty, I know, but I’m annoyed for my family getting shouted at in the street.

*Oh –last night, the promoter said I was funny enough to be a boy. That’s going in my quotes, that is!