Comfort zones are killing comedy

21 Jul 15 | Magazine, mobile

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Whenever I’m trying to fill an hour of stand-up for the Edinburgh Festival, the last thing I wonder is, “Jeez, will this set land me a spot on television?” The reasons are twofold: first, I do what makes me laugh, otherwise I get bored; second, I’ve done stand-up on television and it ain’t the apex of my career. Television producers and editors seem to have an uncanny knack for siphoning the humour out of just about anything, especially the royals, and particularly the pretty, dead ones.

Yet television comedy is held in some oddly high regard as a move up for a comic. I guess that’s because if you can’t get a TV profile going, your live shows in the provinces don’t sell very well. Why should someone in, say, Leeds, come and see you at the Varieties if you aren’t good enough to be on Les Dawson?

But to be on Les, or any television programme, your set must be “clean”. Which means few or no dirty words. Misogyny within social norms, fine, but save the word “cunt” for the wife beatings, mate. That’s right. No “cunts”, although the halls of the BBC are teeming with them. Which is sad, since “cunt” is plainly the most versatile word in the English language. It’s a verb, a noun, an adjective, and it’s really the last word on earth that, no matter how it’s used, makes my mother angry. One is also discouraged from using the word “fuck” on television, particularly as a verb. Particularly if you’re gay.

See, as an out cocksucker, there are lots of things I can get away with on stage but, on television, I’m already perceived as dangerous. TV companies treat me, in rehearsal for a taping, as though I’m retarded or a child or, worse yet, American. “Please be nice, Mr Capurro. You want the people watching to like you, don’t you? Good. We wouldn’t want everyone to think that you’re naughty, would we?”

Then they go through the litany of words I’m not supposed to use. When the show is edited and televised, other comics’ “fucks” are left in. Mine are removed. After all, being gay is dirty enough. Do I have to be dirtier with my dirty mouth?

I’m not really complaining. I’ve learned to manoeuvre my way throughout television. I can play the spiky-but-warm, take-the-cock-out-of-my-mouth-and-press-the-tongueto-my-cheek game with squeamishly positive results. Usually. But in Australia, during the taping of a “Gala” to honour a comedy festival in Melbourne, the director had a grand-mal seizure when I described Jesus as a “queerwannabe”. I saw papers fly up over the heads of a stunned, strangely silent audience. Later I found out it was the director’s script. Apparently they found him after the show, huddled in a corner, crying like a recently incarcerated prisoner who’d just taken his first “shower”.

He was afraid I’d pollute minds, I suppose. At least that’s what he told his assistant. So now, TV is promoting itself as a politically correct barometer? A sort of big-eyed nanny looking out for our sensitive sensibilities? In the six years that I’ve been performing in the UK, I’ve seen political correctness catch on like an insidious disease, like a penchant for black, like the need to oppress. Comics use the term to describe their own acts during TV meetings, and everyone around the table nods in appreciation and approval. Or are they choking? I can never tell with TV people.

Maybe they’re suffocating under a pillow of their own stupidity, since no one really understands the meaning behind political correctness, the arch, high-browed stance it panders to. The phrase was coined as a reaction to racism in the US, to respond with a sort of kindness that had been stifled when hippies disappeared from the US landscape. PC took the place of sympathy which has, since Reaganomics, had a negative, sort of “girlie” tone to it that few US politicians, especially those who served in ‘Nam, can tolerate. Being politically correct makes the user feel more in control and smarter, because they can manipulate a conversation by knowing the proper term to describe, say, an American Indian.

‘They’re actually indigenous peoples now,’ a talk-show host in
San Francisco told me while on air recently. ‘The word Indian is
too marginal.’
‘But where are they indigenous to?’
‘Well, here of course.’
‘They’re from San Francisco?’
‘No. I mean, yes. My boss’ — we were discussing his producer, Sam —
‘was born and raised here, but his parents are Cherokee from Kansas. Or
was it his grandparents?’
‘My grandfather is Italian, from Italy. What does that make me?’
‘Good in bed.’

Indigenous, tribal, quasi or semi. All these words are used to describe, politely, “the truth”. But, strangely enough, the truth is camouflaged. The white user pretends to understand the strife of the minorities, their emotional ups and downs, their need for acceptance and understanding, when all the minorities require is fair pay. I’ve never met a struggling Costa Rican labourer who was concerned that he be called a “Latino” as opposed to a “Hispanic”. He just wants to feed his family. Actually, I’ve never met a struggling Costa Rican, period. But that’s because I’m one of the annoying middle class who keep a distance from anyone who’s not like them, but who also has the time and just enough of an education to make up words and worry about who gets called what.

To the targets, the people we’re trying to protect – the downtrodden, the homeless, the forgotten – we must appear naive and bored, like nuns. It’s a lesson in tolerance that’s become intolerant. As if to say: “If you don’t think this way, if you don’t think that a black person from Bristol is better off being called Anglo-African, you’re not only wrong, you’re evil!” It’s pure fascism, plain and simple. It’s as if Guardian readers had unleashed their consciousness on everybody else, and so it’s naughty to make jokes about blacks, unless you’re black, and bad to make fun of fat people, if you’re not fat, etc. Suddenly, everyone is tiptoeing around everyone else, frightened they’ll be labelled racist because they use the word “Jew” in a punchline. Or horrified someone will think them misogynist because they think women deal better with stress.

Stand Up For Satire in Support of Index on CensorshipIndex on Censorship has been publishing articles on satire by writers across the globe throughout its 43-year history. Ahead of our event, Stand Up for Satire, we published a series of archival posts from the magazine on satire and its connection with freedom of expression.

14 July: The power of satirical comedy in Zimbabwe by Samm Farai Monro | 17 July: How to Win Friends and Influence an Election by Rowan Atkinson | 21 July: Comfort Zones by Scott Capurro | 24 July: They shoot comedians by Jamie Garzon | 28 July: Comedy is everywhere by Milan Kundera | Student reading lists: Comedy and censorship

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Somehow we’ve forgotten that it’s all in how you say it. To read a brilliant stand-up comic’s act is pedantic, but to see it performed is breathtaking. That’s because what we say might be clever, but the way we arrange and self-analyse and present is where the fun comes in. Same with all those words we use. They’re not “racist” or “dangerous” by definition.

Speaking of definitions, let’s talk about the word “gay”. Lots of people I meet are concerned about what I should be called. Is it gay, which pleases the press, or queer, which pleases the hetero hip, since they think gays are trying to reclaim that word? The fact is that all those words are straight-created straight identifiers. Gay is a heterosexual concept. It’s a man who looks like a model, dresses like a model and has the brain of a model. He has disposable income, he loves to travel, and he adores – thinks he sometimes is – Madonna. He’s a teenage girl really and straights love objectifying him the -way they do teenage girls. Or the way they do infants. Try watching a diaper commercial with the sound off. It’s like porn. You’ll think you’re in a bar in Amsterdam.

I’m about as comfortable with the word “gay” as I am with kiddy porn. I’d prefer to be called a comic. Not a gay comic. Not a queer comic. Not even a gay, queer comic, or a fierce comic, or an alternative comic. It’s just the mainstream trying to pigeonhole me, trying to say, OK, he’s gay, so it’s OK to laugh at his stuff about gays. Which is why, partially, in my act, I make fun of the Holocaust by saying “Holocaust, schmolocaust, can’t they whine about something else?”

The line is meant to be ambiguous, initially. It’s meant to start big, and then the actual subject gets small, as I discuss ignorance about the pink triangle as a symbol of oppression, which has since been turned into a fashion accessory. Like the red ribbon, it makes the PC brigade feel like they’ve done their part to ease hatred in the world by adorning their lapel with a pin. When pressed, they’re not even sure what oppression they’re curing, or why they should cure oppression, or how they’re oppressed.

But if you make fun of that triangle, or this Queen Mum, or that dead Princess, suddenly you’re — why mince — I’m the bad guy. I’ve broken away from the pack. I’m not acting like a good little queer should. I’m not being silent about issues that don’t concern a modern gay man, like hair-dos and don’ts. I’m being aggressive, I’m on to. And those straights, those in charge, the folks looking after “my minority group”, don’t like rolling over.

Nor are some cocksucking idiots happy about being bottom-feeders either. Which is why I come out against abortion in my act, and in support of the death penalty since, in the US at least, the two go hand in manicured hand. There I go, losing my last supporters: young women and single gay men. How can I say: “If you wanna talk Holocaust, how about abortion, ladies? 50 million. Can you maybe keep your legs together?”

That is truly evil. No, not really evil. Just wrong. Why? Particularly when I’m only opposed to abortion as a contraceptive device. Who decides what I can and cannot say? Isn’t it the people that aren’t listening? If I’ve got a good joke about it, a well-thought-out attack and a point to make, why is it bad? Why is the world dumbing down almost as fast as Woody Allen’s films? Why does it bother me? Why not just do my same old weenie jokes, keep playing the clubs and sleep with closeted straight comics? Just doing those three things – particularly the last – would keep me very busy and distracted, which is what “life” is all about.

But I imagine that when people go for a night out, they wanna see something different. It’s a big deal finding a babysitter, getting a cab, grabbing a bite and sitting your tired ass into a pricey seat to hear some faggot rattle on for an hour. So I try to offer them a unique perspective. One that might seem overwrought, desperate, or strangely effortless, but one that might make them look at, say, an Elton John photo just a bit differently next time

Look, it’s not my job to find anyone’s comfort zones. I don’t give a shit what people like, or think they like, or want to like. I’m not a revolutionary. I’m just a joke writer with an hour to kill, who wants to elevate the level of intelligence in my act to at least that of the audience.
If in doing that, I get a beer thrown at me or I lose a “friend” (read: jealous comic) then so be it. In the meantime, I’ll keep fending off my growing array of fans that are sick and tired of being lied to and patronised.

Gosh, get her! I mean me. Get me, sounding all holier than, well, everybody. Strangely enough, the more I find my voice on stage, the more serious comedy becomes for me. Maybe I should go back to telling those “Americans are so silly” jokes before I lose my mind, and throw all my papers up in the air.

Scott Capurro is a San Francisco-based stand-up whose performance at the
Edinburgh Fringe in August ended in uproar after he ‘made jokes’ about the
Holocaust. His book, Fowl Play, was published by Headline in September
1999

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This article is from the November/December 2000 issue of Index on Censorship magazine and is part of a series of articles on satire from the Index on Censorship archives. Subscribe here, or buy a single issue. Every purchase helps fund Index on Censorship’s work around the world. For reproduction rights, please contact Index on Censorship directly, via [email protected]

#IndexAwards2015: Digital activism nominee Nico Sell

12 Mar 15 | Awards, Digital Freedom, mobile, News and features, United States

Digital activism nominee Nico Sell

Digital activism nominee Nico Sell

Nico Sell is a US-based entrepreneur and activist for online privacy and secure digital communication. Sell is the CEO of Wickr, a private messaging app with watertight encryption technology. Messages sent using the app self-destruct after a length of time adjusted by the sender – from six days to one second – and are then overwritten by gibberish data on the sender’s and receiver’s phones, making them impossible to recreate.

“Wickr is a messaging app that allows you to send pictures, videos and files, but the only difference is that only you have the keys, so we don’t see who any of our users are, or what they are sending. We are essentially just a transports of gibberish, and it’s used by a lot of human rights fighters around the world for those reasons”, Sell told Index on Censorship.

Wickr’s secure encryption and lack of a central database distinguishes it from similar apps such as Snapchat, which was hacked in January 2014 and had its users’ details posted online. After the breach, downloads of Wickr increased by 50 per cent.

Files leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed the extent to which the US National Security Agency had covertly retrieved users’ personal data from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and others. Many other countries were also shown to be extracting information from tech companies: the Venezuelan government, for example, has been accused of broadcasting human rights activists’ Skype calls on national television to intimidate them.

But Wickr was designed to run without a master key that could decrypt its users’ messages, which means it has no user information to hand over to the authorities if they demand it. Indeed, in early 2014 Sell rebuffed an FBI agent who informally requested that she implement a backdoor into Wickr, so that its data could be acquired if necessary.

Wickr has been downloaded more than three million times since launching in 2012. Since then it has added secure photo- and video-sending features. In December 2014 it was launched in desktop form. Sell hopes that billions of people will eventually use either Wickr or services incorporating it, and envisions its technology being used for “all the financial transactions in the world”.

Sell has also acted as a venture catalyst for more than 20 successful digital security companies and has co-organised Defcon, the largest hacker conference in the world, for over a decade. She is the group’s liaison with federal agencies seeking the services of white-hat hackers, who probe organisations’ websites for flaws in their security systems.

Sell told Index that she got involved with this field of work when was introduced to The Dark Tangent, founder of Defcon, about 15 years ago. She began working with him, and was “educated by the very best hackers in the world.”

“That’s where they taught me things like why lawful intercepts is something we don’t want to do, because if you can break into it, what that means is a backdoor for the good guys will always mean a backdoor for the bad guys,” she said.

“I think security and privacy naturally go in hand together, but I think just understanding the underlying technology and what’s going on making privacy obvious.”

Every year at Defcon, Sell runs a nonprofit training camp for children and teenagers called R00tz Asylum, which she is also CEO and co-founder of, in which digital skills such as white-hat hacking techniques are taught.

“So we teach them things like how to eavesdrop on cell phone calls, look at other people’s text messages that are going over the wireless network, turning on your interfacing camera on your computer or smartphone or smartTV, and how to break into lawful intercept machines,” Sell said. She added that the point of this, is that people need to understand hacks so that better systems can be built.

Sell raises awareness of the need for individuals to take more care over their digital privacy through frequent public engagement talks. At these talks, she hands out stickers for her audience to place over all their front-facing cameras. She also explains why she always wears sunglasses in public – to block facial recognition software – and keeps her phone and passport in an unhackable Faraday cage.

When asked about the relationship between online privacy and freedom of expression, Sell said:

“I think it’s vitally important. 52 per cent of the world still lives under dictatorship, and I think that what brought my founders together is that there was the belief that private correspondence is a universal human right, and in fact, the most important human right that we have for the next decade as we’re bringing all of these billions of people online and having a way for them to have private conversations without interference from government, or even a bigger threat, is corporations who are buying and selling this information.

“It’s our belief that if we can provide this vital right to everyone no matter our frontier, then we can have more evolution instead of revolution, because you don’t get pent up energy and people backed in a corner if there is open communication and education. So we think it’s vitally important in society as we all get connected over the next decade.”

This article was posted on 12 March 2015 at indexoncensorship.org

2 Feb: Index magazine debate: Do we need a First Amendment in the UK?

12 Jan 15 | Events

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On the day when the four surviving copies of the original 1215 Magna Carta are being briefly brought together for the first time, join us to debate whether we need a US-style written First Amendment?

With a panel hailing from both sides of the Atlantic, speakers include former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, academic Sarah Churchwell, Artistic Director of the Bush Theatre Madani Younis and political analyst Peter Kellner.

Please note that the debate is invitation only, please email [email protected] if you are interested in attending.

WHERE: British Library, London
WHEN: Monday 2 February 2015, 5:30pm

This event is presented in association with the British Library

Google asks DC to explore free speech in digital age

30 Apr 13 | Digital Freedom

Washington DC was awash this weekend with some of the biggest names in journalism, technology, civil society and government — and not just for the star-studded White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

On Friday, Google hosted its first Big Tent event in DC with co-sponsor Bloomberg to discuss the future of free speech in the digital age.

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Each panel was guided by hypothetical scenarios that mirrored real current events and raised interesting free speech questions around offence, takedown requests, self-censorship, government leaks, national security and surveillance. The audience anonymously voted on the decision they would have made in each case, but as Bill Keller, former executive editor at the New York Times, acknowledged, “real life is not a multiple choice question”. Complex decisions are seldom made with a single course of action when national security, privacy and freedom of expression are all at stake.

The first panel explored how and when news organisations and web companies decide to limit free speech online. Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond said that governments “go for choke points on the internet” when looking to restrict access to particular content, meaning major search engines and social media sites are often their first targets regardless of where the offending content is hosted online. Drummond said that Google is partially blocked in 30 of the 150 countries in which it operates and cited an OpenNet Initiative statistic that at least 42 countries currently filter online content. Much of this panel focused on last year’s Innocence of Muslims video, which 20 countries approached Google to review or remove. Drummond questioned whether democracies like the US, which asked Google to review the video, are doing enough to support free expression abroad.

Mark Whitaker, a former journalist and executive at CNN and NBC, said staff safety in hostile environments is more important in deciding whether to kill a story than “abstract issues” like free speech. Security considerations are important, but characterising freedom of expression as “abstract” and endorsing self-censorship in its place can set a worrying precedent. Bill Keller argued that publishing controversial stories in difficult circumstances can bring more credibility to a newsroom, but can also lead to its exile. Both the New York Times and Bloomberg were banned in China last summer for publishing stories about the financial assets of the country’s premier. This reality means that news organisation and web companies often weigh public interest and basic freedom of expression against market concerns. Whitaker acknowledged that the increased consolidation of media ownership in many countries means financial considerations are being given even greater weight.

The second panel debated free speech and security, with Susan Benesch of the Dangerous Speech Project standing up for free speech, former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales coming down hard on the side of security, and current Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Jane Holl Lute backing up Gonzales while recognising the vital role free speech plays in a functioning society.

In the first scenario posed to this panel, audience members were split on whether mobile networks should be shut down when a clear and imminent threat, such as the remote detonation of a bomb, arises. Lute said, “the first instinct should not be to shut down everything, that’s part of how we’ll find out what’s going on,” whereas Benesch focused on the civil liberties rather than surveillance implications of crippling communications networks.

In cases of extremism, which the panel agreed is often more easily and quickly spread via digital communications, Benesch endorsed counter speech above speech restrictions as the best way to defend against hate and violence. 94 percent of the audience agreed that social media should not be restricted in a scenario about how authorities should react when groups use social media to organise protests that might turn violent.

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt closed the event by highlighting what he considers to be key threats and opportunities for digital expression. Schmidt believes that the world’s five billion feature phones will soon be replaced with smartphones, opening new spaces for dissent and allowing us “to hear the voices of citizens like never before”. Whether he thinks this dissent will outweigh the government repression that’s likely to follow is unclear.

Big Tent will make its way back to London next month where Google hosted the first event of its  kind two years ago. The theme will focus on “innovation in the next ten years” with Ed Milliband, Eric Schmidt and journalist Heather Brooke as featured speakers.

Google is an Index on Censorship funder.