This is Jimmy Carr’s now somewhat infamous joke that he made a couple of weeks ago during one of his stand-up comedy shows. It caused a bit of media furore (inevitably) and I bring it up now because one of the guys I work with brought it up at lunchtime in the pub.
He said he was offended by this joke, and that it should not have been made. It’s not that it wasn’t funny (to him), but that it was offensive to the many servicemen and women who have given their lives and bodies for this country.
The media coverage of the joke has been along similar lines. The Metro rather predictably attempted to take the moral high ground, and quoted some people linked to military personnel who had lost limbs, or come back from Iraq/Afghanistan disfigured in other ways.
What struck me from reading that article is how pretty much every person said that the joke was offensive on the grounds of someone else being offended by it. Even the actual amputee said that he could take it in good humour, but that others wouldn’t be able to.
In general, it’s amazing just how often this kind of argument happens. It’s not that anyone is personally offended by a joke, a statement, an advertisement, a quote, a picture. It’s that they expect someone else to be offended.
We’re being offended by proxy!
I personally found the joke funny. I’m not the world’s biggest Jimmy Carr fan, and find a lot of his material formulaic and boring, but this was a genuinely original joke. It has that little tinge of being funny with a hint of “ooh, you shouldn’t say that” attached, and that’s what makes it even more funny.
The line is there: it’s between the mild feeling of someone saying something that probably is offensive to someone, somewhere, and being outright offensive to pretty much everyone. Comedy constantly approaches that line, and adjusts where that line sits.
That’s comedy’s aim, to make people laugh, and to challenge society’s perceived boundaries.
It’s not as if you can say something is not funny because it might offend someone. Hell, we all laughed at the various Michael Jackson jokes earlier this year, but no-one really paused and thought “hey, this guy has a family, a loving family, and maybe all of these jokes are offending them”. We carried on regardless.
And that’s the point: people have their own lines, over which they believe comedy shouldn’t cross. For some, it’s disabled servicemen. For others, the Royal Family. Because of these many, many different lines, it’s impossible to state that certain subjects are not suitable for comedy, or are off-limits.
I firmly believe that every single possible subject is suitable for comedy. It can be your choice to be offended, but it shouldn’t be possible to censor comedians from talking about certain subjects.
If they’re not funny, then fine, they’re bad comedians. They’re not bad comedians, nor unfunny, because they choose make jokes out of offensive situations.
