Day 21. 60 pages, 27,338 words.
So what’s happened lately? Well, Boris Johnson compared women in burqas to bank robbers and letterboxes. And Rowan Atkinson, just to jump on the bandwagon of cherished British comedians and personalities I’m mildly let down by[1], said it was a perfectly fine joke.
[1] Joining his fellow Blackadder veteran Stephen Fry, who did his very best to play Devil’s Advocate on the subject of political correctness and just wound up coming across extremely stodgy, out of touch, and borderline traitorous to the cause of minorities everywhere. Ugh.
I mean, it wasn’t a joke. It was mean-spirited and pointless antagonism like any bully telling his victim they look like something unpleasant or unflattering. It was a joke in the same way that “he looks like a monkey / she looks like a hippo” is a joke, and if you think those are jokes and you’re not six years old, then there’s something wrong with you. And I don’t want to live in a world where that kind of behaviour is enabled.
The lads on Last Leg said it better than I could. Here is the link, and I apologise that I couldn’t find it properly on YouTube but had to rely on the Facebook video link. It should still work. That show is well worth checking out in any case, there’s a lot of great commentary there.
Follow-up: Found it!
Check it out. If you don’t do it, it’s probably because you look like Boris Johnson.
– Posted from my Huawei mobile phone while sitting in the carpark before work.
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Agreed. Something isn’t a joke just because you say it is, just like something isn’t a ham sandwich just because you say it is. It has to have the INTENT of being a joke (or of being a ham sandwich, accordingly).
No honest person would say such an insult had that intent. It might have been intended to AMUSE, but many things that are not jokes are amusing.
See, the way I see it (really quick lazy tired example), if a burqa-wearing Muslim woman tells an anecdote about how she got the silent treatment from a friend for ten minutes before realising she was glaring at a letter box, that would be a joke. I’d give it a pass even if it was a bit uncomfortable, if she was clearly telling it to be amusing.
Boris can make all the jokes he likes about how he got his hair out of the trash after Trump dropped one of his toupees in there. That’s a joke. And I don’t care if Boris gets upset by it because Boris, specifically, is a stupid cunt.
Wait but are YOU telling jokes here? Because if not I’m offended.
I don’t tell jokes. I hold up a mirror to the world and force it to laugh by pure charisma and also I’m not wearing pants.
Now THAT I can get behind.
Take that as you will.
“It works on so many levels!”