I think disability is a step to far(
)when it comes to jokes.
Is making a thousand people laugh acceptable if 20 are really offended.....not for me it isn't.
But commercially it is....
I disagree. Taking advantage of an innocent party for cheap laughs (especially when it's not funny) isn't on, but tackling difficult subjects with comedy is important, if only to take a step back and look at the absurdity of things, horrible or not.
Take something we all take for granted like Blackadder Goes Forth. On the face of it making a sitcom about a war which cost the lives of so many people is pretty dark at best. With hindsight it's easy to forget the potential for offence - portraying the british war effort as anything other than heroic, showing the war dead as flawed selfish characters and the danger of taking advantage of one of the world's greatest loss of life for laughs.
Luckily it's brilliantly done. It finds that very thin line of absurdity through the middle of tragedy almost perfectly.
People had misgivings about it at the time though, and no doubt it offended some for the reasons given above. Can you imagine the outcry if it was made today, and the Daily Mail ran with the headline
"BBC disrespects heroic war dead with trenches 'comedy'"? It's all too easy.
The Brass Eye Paedophile Special is probably the most divisive example of something which offended people, but in my opinion at least, was fully justified, funny and brilliant.
Child abuse is a fucking tough subject to make a comedy about. Of course the paedogeddon episode isn't directly about child abuse at all. It's about the hysterical media reaction to the point of glamorisation of paedophilia, not only finding the absurd in the media reaction, but cynically highlighting the dark scaremongering hyperbole that the papers will resort too, just to increase sales.
Which in my mind, whilst it was controversial, it really highlights where satire is really important, even if it does risk offending people. Would anybody have had the guts to make a serious documentary in the same vein of the Brass Eye episode? I don't think so. Jokes are easier to walk away from, but can still ask important questions.
It's also important to note how many of the personalities who publicly came out as 'offended' completely missed the point. Beverley Hughes MP, called it "unspeakably sick" before admitting she hadn't actually seen it. Tessa Jowel asked the Independent Telly Commission to reinstate censorship. But best of all you got this (which I've posted before I'm sure):
[url width=800 height=739]http://chilled.cream.org/graphics/charlotte.jpg[/url]
I've meandered through this massively, but the risk of offending people has to be a part of comedy, because comedy is important in breaking down the absurdity of real life, and sometimes those being mocked deserve it, offended or not. You can't judge it by simple numbers, twenty people were offended so that's too far. Especially when the whole act of being offended is now rarely people being legitimately offended, but people being offended with an agenda.
Television would be fucking shit if Mary Whitehouse had got her way.
I've just spent an hour writing that. I'm out of tef rant practice.
