Culling Comedy
"Either it's all okay, or none of it is."
This reference to the sanctity of comedic irreverence was uttered by an animated 10-year-old boy; Kyle in South Park. Despite the source, the sentiment is true and is a cornerstone of the ethic that drives South Park's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The opening quote in question comes at the climax of a trilogy where a moral panic erupts when Family Guy airs a two-part episode that shows an image of the Prophet Muhammad, twice. Hilarity ensues; resulting in people across America literally burying their heads in the sand! Cartman, enraged that people liken his humour to that of Family Guy, feigns offence in the hope that Family Guy gets taken off air. An epic bitch slap fight between Kyle and Cartman, Cartman employing Bart Simpson as his lackey later, common sense prevails and the manatee writers of Family Guy are permitted to air their episode.
However, it is often also said that art imitates life; and when the Prophet Muhammad does appear in a parody of one of Family Guy's trademark cutaway gags, Comedy Central makes the decision to obscure the Prophet's likeness - in this episode at least, even though Comedy Central had no qualms about airing his visage before.
When someone sits before a caricaturist, they are mad if they think the artist would create a sympathetic depiction of their face. Yet recent disdain for humour to do the same thing - with society as the subject - has resulted in some concerning draconian measures that dictators would relish!
As is well known by now, the Scottish legal system convicted Markus Meechan, better known by his YouTube moniker "Count Dankula," was convicted of being grossly offensive after a video he made went viral. Meechan's pet pug dog named Buddha became the subject of a prank where Meechan, to annoy his girlfriend that adored the dog's cuteness, wanted to warp Buddha's cuteness into the worst thing he could think of; Nazism. Launching into a dedicated regimen of Pavlovian Conditioning, Dankula made Buddha the Pug perform a Nazi salute whenever he heard the phrase: "Seig Heil!" Buddha would also jump to attention whenever Markus uttered the phrase: "gas the jews," and what was supposed to be an in joke for Dankula and his mates went viral with over 3 million hits.
Two years after the fact with hearings postponed so often that the trial lasted longer than Nuremberg, Meechan finally got found guilty (not by a jury of his peers either). The Scotsman is due for sentencing on April 23rd, which is St George's Day, the Patron Saint of England; a day when English Common Law, rooted in the principal of Magna Carta, becomes a travesty as Markus Meechan faces a maximum of six months imprisonment... over a joke that made a jibe at Nazis. In The Producers by Mel Brooks (a Jew, by the way), depicted the scamming producers fooling investors into funding "Springtime for Hitler," a glitzy musical of Nazi glorification. The result is a delicious piece of satire that no doubt would be possible to release as a movie, something Brooks admitted about Blazing Saddles recently.
One writer of TV series, Little Britain - Matt Lucas - recently confessed that the sketches in the show could never get made today - an extremely sad state of affairs. Let's not forget that pearl clutching over comedy is not a new phenomena, the furore over Monty Python's Life of Brian means that the film remains banned in a handful of British cinemas to this day! Ricky Gervais in a 2001 interview was asked: "what advice would you give to people who want to become famous?" To which Gervais replied: "I would tell them to kill a prostitute." He later went on to explain that the joke meant that taken in context, Gervais was making a slight on fame with this gag; implying that if someone merely cared for fame then it is just as expedient to commit a heinous act (or be in a sex tape... ahem, Kim Kardashian!)
Context is irrelevant, according to the judge that condemned Markus Meechan; whereas this might be a reference to so-called legal objectivity, it becomes a frightening portent. Although law is suppsed to be impartial, it does have to be discerning and such aspects of discernment needs to include nuance and context. Take a look at the mainstream comedy available today; it is extremely sanitised to the point of being the antithesis of comedy, emblematic of how numerous Millennials now seem like conformist sheep. The problem is that sheep are vulnerable to wolves and the wolves are the elite Deep State with their mainstream media fangs. Comedy used to be the house that the wolf tried to blow in and instead it has become the Boy Who Cried Wolf; let's ensure that Markus Meechan's conviction isn't the actual alarm cry we ignore.
#minds, #news, #deletefacebook, #politics, #trump, #bitcoin, #freedankula.