The Death of Democracy: Why Comedy & Journalism Need Less Free Speech

It’s become a fashion to politicise comedy recently. The Left would have you believe the history of British comedy is a smorgasbord of fascists making Paki Jokes in beerhalls that without emergency treatment, would become a Putsch of sorts.

While there was an element of racism, sexism & homophobia in British Comedy’s history, the idea that this was all it had to offer between 1900 & 2010 is news to me, as I have very romantic childhood memories of watching Jo Brand, Shappi Korsandi, Lenny Henry, Andy Ohso, Paul Sinha, Paul Chowdhry & the proudly genderfluid Eddie Izzard.

The right however argue as the Telegraph did that ‘Our culture of victimhood, political correctness and infinite narcissism is destroying comedy.’ Further evidence of this is provided by right wing actors often incessant fury at the success of both Nish Kumar & Hannah Gadsby.

The Right are also incorrect. While ‘victim-hood, political correctness, and infinite narcissism’ can make comedy more difficult to navigate (Certain audience members may heckle things they don’t agree with, or worse, as in this correspondents experience: tell you that it is racist to joke about your dad owning a corner shop, even though your dad does own a corner shop). However, the idea that it is ‘destroying comedy’ is hyperbole & sensationalism of the highest order. I would go so far as to argue that it is an outright lie designed only to get the authors name further recognition. This however, happens on the left as much as it does the right.

There are two things destroying comedy. One is the politicisation of it by journalists, podcasters, and people who have never done a paid 20-minute set at a proper club. ‘Narcissism, political correctness & victimhood’ are not solely traits of the left. I have watched Amber Rudd respond to a UN report accusing her of genocide, by claiming the report used ‘wholly inappropriate language.’ I’ve watched Matt Hancock tell an A & E Doctor who was working nightshift to ‘watch her tone’ in response to being criticised about the lack of PPE, and finally I’ve seen right wing individuals argue that the left being whiny & self-indulgent equates to ‘the destruction of comedy’.

Comedy has grown exponentially over the past century but what it has always been throughout is both diverse & political. From the days of Redd Fox & Charlie Chaplin to the days of Bill Hicks & Bernard Manning to the British Alternative Comedy Explosion of the late 80s, to the cartoon characters of Family Guy, South Park & the Simpsons to the years of the straight white Russel’s in the late 2000s all the way to the Netflix/Instagram era of Paul Smith & Mo Gilligan, no two breakout acts/cartoons of their genre have been the same, and all have been political. Bernard Manning complaining about immigrants is political, as is Mo Gilligan doing an impression of his white working-class neighbour. Hell, even Peter Kay’s ‘Garlic Bread’ routine is a political statement on Northern Men of a certain generations’ fear of change. Because after all, what is politics but one of the most important components of what we call: ‘Culture’. And what is comedy but a way of describing & analysing what we call ‘Culture’.

Comedy though having changed infinitely over time has in essence stayed the same. As has the reaction to it. Chaplin’s Great Dictator was banned in Nazi Germany, several Latin American Countries and was originally scheduled to be banned in the UK. This changed after the UKs policy of appeasement to Nazi Germany changed to all out war. The African American adaption of Steptoe & Son starring Red Foxx as the lead was controversial both to white Americans & black American at the time. It was offensive to certain white Americans as it was the first sitcom in which a black man played the lead. It was offensive to certain black Americans because the representation was considered unfair…. Ah what was the first line of this paragraph again? Bernard & Bill have had their fair share of complaints and finally just last week the comedian Nabil Abdul Rashid garnered nearly 1000 complaints for a largely inoffensive routine on Britain’s Got Talent.

What has changed more than comedy itself, is how it can be consumed. Nabil for example was a well-known name on the comedy circuit in the UK: often a headliner in the Asian, black & London circuit, before he ever heard that Golden Buzzer. Mo Gilligan was a known name amongst comics before his Instagram live blew up, & Paul Smith was a resident MC at Hot Water Comedy Club @ the Holiday Inn, long before he sold out the 13000 Seat Echo Arena. However all three shot to stardom outside of their live work. It was Simon Cowell’s Britain’s Got Talent that shot Nabil to fame, the 60 second Instagram Livestreams for Mo, & Facebook videos uploaded by Hot Water Comedy Club that turned Paul from resident MC to bonafide celebrity.

As a result of stand-up comedians… or anyone being able to upload clips that have the potential to be viewed by billions of people, anybody can progress to stardom overnight. In the case of the three aforementioned acts, while their transition to star happened overnight, the work they put into their craft was a long laborious process that happened over many years. As a result, all of them can handle the rowdiest of audiences in the rowdiest of rooms. As such, very few punters, if any leave the arena & theatre tours of these acts disappointed.

This isn’t always the case: a colleague told me about a Stand Up TV show who in an attempt to boost ratings hired YouTube ‘comedians’… who having never performed live to anyone else but their camera before, created what can only be described as a televisual & live disaster. The transition to the digital age brings with it digital conundrums: Views do not always equate to laughs.

No comedian can play every audience, but anyone making their bread & butter on the live circuit can play most. They can at the least satisfy the room, if not excite it, but most certainly they will not disappoint it. Such is the nature of playing to 300 people, all of whom have different senses of humour, and then playing the next night to a completely different 300 people all of whom again have different senses of humour, but also a significantly different sense of humour to the crowd you’ve just played to the night before. Many TV & online acts cannot do this as they’ve found their audience without ever having to navigate humans who are not their target audience. Some who can, simply cannot do it as well as the previous generation that relied on live and live alone.

Anyone who says Hannah Gadsby & Nish Kumar are not funny are objectively wrong… just as anybody who says Geoff Norcott & Leo Kearse are not funny are objectively wrong. A unique factor of the art of comedy, is that people can define it: as not comedy. Never would someone who hates hip-hop say: that is not music, just that it is not their type of music. If they do say that ‘it’s not music’, it’s usually cause they’re old, out of touch, and their subconscious can’t deal with the fact they’re going to die soon having not achieved any dreams of their own. While I would concede that Nish & Hannah can’t do it in the average live room as well as say Alexei Sayle or Daniel Kitson may have (Alexei wouldn’t have been put off by a bread roll, he would have ate the roll, and whoever had thrown it’s soul), it can be argued that perhaps Alexei & Daniel don’t connect with their fans deeply held beliefs the way Hannah & Nish have. Perhaps not as important a part of comedy as the laugh, but as anyone who prefers South Park to Jimmy Carr will tell you: laughs per minute is not the only part. Just like Russia manipulating the US election, people still had to some degree find Donald Trump appealing to vote for him. And with comedy, if they have fans and followers, those people still had to find the comedian funny regardless of their politics. Comedy is not being killed. Until covid19, it had never been healthier. What has truly died… is journalism & what killed it was freedom of speech.

Just this week, comedians rallied against Rishi Sunak after he was misquoted by ITV. In 2017, A guardian journalist erroneously claimed Daniel Kitson ‘called her a Paki’. In 2018, near all media outlets in the West reported that a ‘Comedian refused to sign ‘behavioural agreement’ before gig.’ This headline should in fact have been ‘Man who does comedy as hobby refused to sign ‘behavioural agreement’ at open mic’ (open mic: an unpaid gig for those people trying their hand at comic, or experienced acts to try new material).

A basic amount of research would’ve uncovered the truth behind these stories, and would also have found that comedy clubs in fact have loads of contractual obligations, and often comedians are asked to gig with all manner of constraints: Racism for example is not permitted in any club. Then there are many shows that come with more peculiar constraints: some gigs ask you to do material only about sex, others request you don’t swear, your correspondent remembers doing a gig whereby he was not allowed to perform, unless fully naked. I don’t think the School of Oriental and Asian Studies were correct in their approach, but if you agree to do a charity ‘gig’ at the most leftist University in the country, don’t be surprised when the University acts all leftist.

Journalists number one priority should be the truth, but clickbait, algorithms, and the capitalist framework in which the media now exist mean previously respected news publications have abandoned all rigour, integrity, and professionalism to catch up with the sensationalist new media of tabloids and online journalism who just want to get the story out first (Babe.net, Buzzfeed & wherever your Nan read Covid is a Satanic plot cooked up by Bill Gates & Mr Blobby).

Freedom of speech is not under threat. We live in era where absolute fundamental freedom of speech has never been more prevalent, and more encouraged through algorithms that trick us into thinking that what we’re saying matters more than what everyone else is. And what this has lead to is everybody talking, and nobody listening… Because at it’s heart that is what fundamental freedom of speech for all is. Your correspondent would in fact argue that it is in fact too much free speech that is in fact killing comedy as well as journalism.

Freedom of speech has always had its constraints beyond comedy club rules & regulations. Lenny Bruce was routinely arrested at gigs for offensive material and is rightly lauded as a legend of the craft today & if long before Lenny, if you as a court jester insulted the King, however justifiably, you were liable to lose your tongue. Something many ‘right wing comedians’ forget is that if you want to be Jesus, you have to go through being nailed to a cross.

Furthermore, freedom of speech is not the only tenet in a democracy. The tree is democracy. Freedom of speech is but a branch on that tree, and if respect for minorities is not also a branch on this tree, then as far as your correspondent is concerned, the debate is over: I’M BURNING DOWN YA FUCKING TREE BITCH.

What is important to note is that comedy clubs do in fact inhibit freedom of speech sometimes fully… for the audience at least. Can you imagine a comedy club that was set up with absolute free speech without any regulations at all? Where audience members were encouraged both to talk amongst themselves, and to stand up and heckle comedians not even with an insult but with a joke of their own, or a statement questioning the intent of the speaker? That sounds horrific… It also sounds exactly like social media.

I remember where it all started: KONY 2012. KONY 2012 was a 30-minute online video produced by American Christian group: Invisible Children with the purpose of mobilising people to lobby their governments to devote more money and effort to capture a war criminal by the name of Joseph Kony. The movie was deeply emotive with footage of a former child soldier decrying his lack of will to live due to prior experiences under the command of Kony, while director: Jason Russell asked people to mobilise to ‘Cover the Night’ on April 5 2012.

The video succeeded in it’s aims, receiving over 102 million views on YouTube, not to mention other online video platforms & social media. TIME called it the most viral video ever. The mobilisation worked too. Young people around the World flocked to purchase their KONY 2012 merchandise, and the US Senate passed a resolution to send troops to the African Union to look for Joseph Kony.

But as with many viral sensations, the rise was followed by a very quick and dramatic fall. Within weeks, Ugandans hit back at the video claiming it was dated, an unrealistic reflection of Uganda, and that Jason was guilty of ‘White Saviourism’. The unprecedented attention the campaign received led to the website crashing and caused Russell to break down leading to him being arrested on 15th March 2012 outside his home for masturbating naked in the middle of the road as cars passed. The ‘Cover the Night’ march in April thus was a flop. I mean no one wants to join a campaign lead by a man who wanks at cars…. Not even the loneliest pervert asked for Transformers porn.

Only a year prior, tech heads in the West helped start the Arab spring, which much like Kony 2012, started with the best intentions, but ended in disaster, mainly because a bunch of people who’ve never lived, visited or engaged with the Middle East were egotistic enough to think they could save it.

Both events mobilised masses online in a way previously not possible, and both events have shaped the landscape of the last ten years: from politics to journalism to comedy. From Brexit to Trump to BLM, all of these campaigns took KONY2012’s methods and put them to use, whether that be the age-old approach of tugging on the heart strings or the novel approach of data collection. Clickbait media institutions that care more for growth than truth such as the Canary, Babe.net & Breitbart dominate our journalistic landscape, and comedians can land themselves a career by crying racism, sexism or leftist censorship far quicker than they ever can spending the years learning their craft at clubs around the country, playing to different audiences every night. Sensationalism sells better than truth.

This is far bigger than politics, journalism, or comedy: It is about the very fabric of democracy & civil society. Everything we have built rests on a knife edge. Tabloid journalists realised long ago that fear, hate and anger sell more than anything else. They realised that conflict sells more than co-operation. Lord of the Rings would have been a far less popular movie had Sauron and the race of men just sat down and talked things through.

Silicon Valley also realised that, they’ve realised like Online Betting Companies did before them, how to manufacture their website to make it feel exciting, but to get addicted to gambling you still have to fall in love with the thrill of gambling. Through algorithms, social media know what you want better than yourself, and they make sure you see it every single day… and what we want it would seem… is conflict.

If you give a child £10, they’ll be thankful, excited but forget about it in a year. If you take that same child, and punch him in his face, he’ll remember that forever. He’ll go over it in his mind, and it will dictate how that child then goes about the rest of their life. Analogously if you scroll on Facebook, and see something you’ll love, you’ll give it a quick like, maybe a quick comment: ‘HEY LOVED THAT MAN’, and a share, but if you see something you hate… you stop to comment and tell that person why they are wrong. What social media has also done is tricked us into thinking that being proven wrong is the end of our lives, as opposed to a very normal & human part of growth and existence. So thus, the original poster will also comment to prove that they are not wrong, and in fact it is you who is wrong, and this goes on and on until eventually both parties end up blocking everyone you disagree with.

And why should social media companies care, if their share prices keep rising as exponentially as they have, why would they care about impact on our mental health, the endless suicides, and the violence that spills from the comment sections to the streets? They should care because those billions Facebook shareholders made may be worthless if they end up Kings of the ashes.

The irony is quite poetic: that Russian & Chinese actors have destroyed the West using something we pride ourselves on, something that they have never had: freedom of expression. Bravo Putin. That is like killing a shark by swimming into the sea & biting it to death.

When you’re having these debates and consuming this information on a feed where there is literally no end in sight, with such an overload of information, and where what’s real or not is always up for question, it’s easier to break things into binary categories. Ironically, the platform that pushed individual voices has completely rid us of any individuality. We are no longer nuanced human beings with a multitude of conflicting beliefs, we are all either Nazis or ANTIFA Communists now. The last time we were split into such binary groups of us & them, friend & enemy, the whole World went to war.

It is most certainly alarmist to say individual comedians or journalists not being as honest as they could be will cause a world war, but if you think it’s alarmist to say the culture tech has ingrained us in could lead to war, you’re not paying attention.

Firstly, it has. Remember the Arab Spring? Well Libya, Yemen & Syria aren’t exactly doing so well out of that are they.

The one thing I can at least say about the military industrial complex is that they kept it out of house, but Silicon Valley has brought this to our very doorstep. Extreme left & right sympathies have risen to record highs in every single European nation as well as America, as has the justification of violent aims to achieve their goals. It’s very easy with everything that’s happened in 2020 to forget that Greek rapper Pavlos Fyssas was stabbed to death by 25 neo Nazis in 2013, that Jo Cox was gunned down for her political beliefs in the run up to the 2016 Brexit referendum, and that just last month BLM protesters & Statue Defenders clashed in Newcastle over a statue of Earl Grey…. The Foreign Secretary that abolished slavery in the UK… who wanted to take it down? Who wanted to keep it up? Or did they all in fact subconsciously just want to be right, even though every person there was categorically wrong. We no longer see the humanity in the other side because we no longer see the other side… until it is too late. Instead as Orwell predicted… of some Big Brother watching us, it’s as Huxley predicted: where we now all watch each other, waiting gleefully for our neighbours to slip up so we can report them to the Gestapo.

Finally America finds itself in a scenario whereby riots, and political violence happen on a weekly basis, with often fatal results, and as we head to November 2nd, the President has at the time of writing refused to say whether he will vacate the White House if his competitor Joe Biden wins. He has also told the openly violent Proud Boys to Stand By (a phrase I’ve only ever heard used by X-Wing Pilots in Star Wars) and asked supporters to go and watch polling stations to ensure the establishment which he runs is not conspiring against him. And if he does win freely and fairly, left leaning Americans most likely will not take that lying down either. We are at a point whereby it seems impossible that the US election result will not avoid violence of some kind. And Britain may not be far off either. A national lockdown combined with a no deal Brexit could legitimately cause food shortages, which in turn could lead to riots. We have never had such an experiment in free thought as social media, and it so far has allowed a millennium of progress in democratic norms and rights that have allowed the longest period of peace in human history to come dangerously under threat in just one decade, but just as Americans had to believe Russian propaganda to vote for it, and just as people have to find a joke funny to laugh at it, social media could not have done this without us. SO PLEASE, I BEG YOU, FOR ALL WE HOLD DEAR, PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP, and try listen to the other side instead of talking over them.

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