So quite a lot of people seem comfortable with the idea that jokes in bad taste are a matter for the police these days.
Thus does freedom die - not with a bang, but with a whimper.
I really am starting to think we need a First Amendment-type thing in this country.
Let's not shy away from the fact that it was actually quite funny, too.
I mean, if they'd done it apropros of nothing, that would be kinda weird. But in the context of it being done for Bonfire Night, I was rather impressed by the imagination and detail that went into it.
Originally Posted by Burney
Last edited by Monty92; 11-07-2018 at 10:08 AM.
It isn't funny, really, is it?
Who goes to all that trouble of making the thing for 'a joke'? Then records it and posts it on social media?
Pondlife imo
“Other clubs never came into my thoughts once I knew Arsenal wanted to sign me.”
Why isn't it funny? Because people died? So what? I've heard jokes about any number of disasters and tragedies over the years - from the Challenger disaster, the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, Hillsborough and 9/11. There is always scope for a joke.
No, the thing that makes people tiptoe around this joke more than others is simply that they fear there's a hint of racism to it and want to distance themselves from that rather than the joke itself.
What isn't funny about it, for me, is the effort that they went to make the 'joke'.
A quick quip, about any tragedy, might be humourous. I can agree on that. The joke is in the humourous element not the context of the tragedy.
To go out of your way to make a piss poor Blue Peter version of a tower block then throw it on a fire, then film it while applying 'commentary', then posting it on social media AND then not expecting a backlash?
If I went to all that effort to make a joke about Grenfell and that video was the outcome . . . I doubt I'd win any comedy awards.
“Other clubs never came into my thoughts once I knew Arsenal wanted to sign me.”
I spent hours and hours in my 20s with friends in pubs playing Celebrity Death Pool Betting, fastidiously making lists of which celebrities we think are gonna die over the next year
They thought it would amuse their mates - and it did. A joke is only good or bad based on the audience for which it is intended.
Yes but the victims here were brown people so it's off limits.
Hundreds of people work for months on the various effigies burnt at Lewes every year. They can't all be pondlife.*
* Maybe they are, how would I know?
Yes, but those people are middle-class and their targets are usually those it would be considered acceptable to lampoon on a Radio 4 panel show. This makes them exempt from such criticism.
These perpetrators were working class, white, had estuary accents, probably left school at 16 and - worst of all - were mocking brown people whom the media has effectively canonised.
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