Padraig Reidy: Laugh? I nearly died. Of hunger

08 Jan 15 | Europe and Central Asia, Ireland, News and features

This week the Plain People of Ireland (both the physical and metaphorical place — more on that later) wailed, gnashed teeth, shook their fists at passing clouds and, of course, took to Twitter to express their horror, over a situation comedy.

Well, not an actual situation comedy. More an idea, that may turn into a script, that may, at some point, but probably not, turn into a comedy series. Still though…

It started harmlessly enough, in an end of year feature in the Irish Times (a newspaper not noted for sensationalism). Bright young things told of their plans for 2015. One, scriptwriter Hugh Travers, told the paper about his planned script for a sitcom called Hunger, which was in development stage with the UK’s Channel 4. The comedy would be based during the Irish famine. “I don’t want to do anything that denies the suffering that people went through,” said Travers, “but Ireland has always been good at black humour.”

Oh Hugh, how right you are. If there’s one thing everyone knows about us Irish, it’s our great sense of humour. We are, no doubt, a great bunch of lads when it comes to laughing.

But we are also, and let us be clear on this, a people with a profound sense of our own history; a nation carrying with us the struggle of generations and the ghosts of our patriot dead.

Or, to put it another way, we’ve got baggage. Playwright Brendan Behan said that: “Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.”

A large part of that baggage, that psychosis, comes from the great famine of the mid 19th century.

The famine of 1842-1847 was probably the bleakest period in Irish history. At least in population terms, the country has never really recovered. Over a million died and millions more emigrated.

Not that Ireland had been bread and roses before that. Over a century before, Jonathan Swift had addressed poverty and hunger in rural Ireland with his satirical pamphlet “A Modest Proposal” (“A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public”, to give it its full title), which suggested a scenario where poor Irish people with large families should sell their children as food.

Even so, the 19th century famine was the worst of the worst, exacerbated by a government in London that was, at very, very least, negligent, and most certainly culpable. I will not get into a debate about whether it should be classified as a genocide or not, except to say that opinions either way on that judgment are too often based on what “side” one is on rather than evidence.

In any case, to get into that argument is to play into the hands of the brouhaha that followed Hugh Travers’ optimistic announcement of his plans in the Irish Times.

The fuss was kicked up by Niall O’Dowd, editor of Irish-American website Irish Central and, to judge by his extensive Wikipedia page, a very important man indeed.

New York-based O’Dowd wrote an article on his very important website, furiously denouncing the Channel 4 sitcom he couldn’t possibly have seen because it doesn’t exist.

It’s worth quoting the main thrust of his piece:

“What’s up next?? A sitcom on The Holocaust maybe with funny fat Nazis eating victims alive?

Or how about a comedy about Ebola with black kids dying on screen and doctors telling funny jokes about them?

‘Sure you are being way too sensitive,’ I can hear people say, ‘time to have a laugh about the Famine. Did you hear the one about the starving children? Some of them ate grass…Ha Ha Ha.”

Much like a homophobe denouncing gay sex, O’Dowd displays a remarkably vivid and well, dark imagination about what a comedy set during the famine might be: surely, he suggests, the thing that we are being asked to laugh at is the very worst thing you can dream of (Don’t get too smug about this point by the way; the converse of this could be that your relative lack of an outrage impulse stems from your relative lack of imagination. I know that’s true of me).

O’Dowd wonderfully went one further, writing another article for Irish Central in which he imagined the script for the proposed sitcom. Suffice to say, it was not funny, but not not funny in the way the author intended.

O’Dowd’s real problem, it seemed, was that Channel 4 was a British company making hay out of an Irish tragedy: he barely examined the fact that the originator of the script is an award-winning Irish author given an open brief. That would bring unwelcome complexity to the issue.

Last Monday, I was invited to discuss the issue on BBC Ulster’s Nolan show. I joked beforehand that the slot would degenerate into listing topics that we were and were not allowed to make comedy of. That was exactly what transpired, as my interlocutor, Irish commentator Jude Collins, began listing incidents and asking “Would you think that was funny?” — everything from 9/11 to the death of Ian Paisley (why the peaceful death of an old man was a tragedy on a par with the starvation of a million people was not made clear by Collins).

The problem with this line of thinking is that it’s not actually a line of thinking at all. It is mere positioning. Collins inadvertently demonstrated that once you start proscribing fit topics for comedy, you can’t stop. It’s always possible to find someone, somewhere who would be upset by practically any joke of substance. A caller into the show skewered Collins by pointing out he had stood against born-again Christians who had attempted to ban a comedy play based on the Bible (as reported by Index). Were they not offended? Did their feelings not count?

Those who raised their voice attempting to prevent the development of the famine script they couldn’t even have read — including the tens of thousands of Irish people at home and abroad who signed an online petition against the comedy — were simply parading their ignorance, much like the mullahs who condemned Salman Rushdie while boasting that they had not read the “blasphemous” Satanic Verses. They should think twice, or even once, before raising their hackles again.

This article was published on 9 January 2015 at indexoncensorship.org

Brazil bans election-based comedy

17 Aug 10 | Index Index, minipost

Brazil has banned broadcasters from showing programmes that poke fun at the country’s presidential candidates. Ridiculing the candidates could result in a fine or even licence suspension. Brazilian producers and comedians intend to fight the ban, with one comparing it to a Monty Python sketch. It is not the first time that politics and comedy have collided in Latin America. In July, a Nicaraguan comic revealed he was offered money not to ridicule presidential candidate Daniel Ortega in his performances.

Nicaragua: Government offers comic bribe

26 Jul 10 | Index Index, minipost, News and features

On 23 July,  popular Nicaraguan stand-up Luis Enrique Calderón has revealed that he was offered money by government officials in return for not ridiculing President Daniel Ortega in upcoming performances organised to celebrate the comedian’s 20 year career. The humorist, renowned for satirising famous personalities and politicians, contacted First Lady Rosario Murillo ahead of the event to gain their support for the act. Yet senior political advisor Fidel Moreno responded by offering to pay Calderón’s mortgage and give his children scholarships if he did not criticise the president or government. Calderón turned down the offer. However, since the rejection, he has received anonymous phone calls warning him that the July 29-30 concerts may yet be cancelled.

Testing the Polanski waters

02 Jun 10 | Uncategorized

Most of us don’t really know what it means to be censored. When it happens, it’s usually small-scale and irritating: an excised joke about Roman Polanski in an article I wrote for the Times is my most recent vexation. Hardly on a par with being beaten by secret police in the middle of the night, I think we can all agree. And besides, I replaced him with Voldemort (in the joke, not socially), so who’s the real victor here? Not Roman Polanski, that’s for sure. His propensity for litigation didn’t make The Ghost a better film, after all. It merely makes him slightly harder to joke about than most evil wizard the world has ever known. One who, nonetheless, has the grace not to sue when you mention his sexual proclivities in the pages of Vanity Fair, which makes Roman Polanski objectively worse than Voldemort on the issue of free speech. Although Voldemort is a little worse than Polanski on the issue of death curses and scarring children with his wand. Thank you. I’m here all week.

But my point is, I never really mind when a joke or a reference has to be cut at the lawyers’ behest. They have a job to do, and their job is (at least in part) to protect me from getting sued. There are people I’m related to who do less to take care of my interests than lawyers I’ve never met. So well done them.

And the best thing about them asking if I could change a line to keep myself out of court is it proves that I tried. By far the most common story on the subject of comedians and bad-taste jokes is that someone (Jimmy Carr, Frankie Boyle) said something terrible, and everyone should grovel apologies and crawl over broken glass until honour is satisfied. And so the narrative about humour in the UK today is that it over-steps boundaries, takes advantage of the weak and vulnerable, bitch-slaps those who least deserve it.

But actually, the narrative of modern comedy should be almost the opposite of that. Far too often, comedians don’t make a joke — during a radio or TV recording — which they think will be funny. They self-censor, in other words. They do this not to avoid the opprobrium of the Daily Mail, but rather because they assume the joke will never be broadcast.

Last week, Radio 4 broadcast an episode of Heresy, which Marcus Brigstocke, Rev Richard Coles and I had recorded a couple of weeks before. During the recording, Marcus did the most articulate, furious rant about the Old Testament’s God you could hope to hear. Rev Coles responded with an equally articulate and passionate response about the redemptive nature of Jesus Christ. To me (a non-believer with an interest in religion), it was electrifying stuff. In case you’re wondering what I was up to during all this, let me tell you: I was thinking about the construct of gods in religious texts to explain the cruel vagaries of nature — earthquakes, volcanos, famine and the like. To the untrained ear, I concede it sounds a lot like I am sitting listening to my fellow panellists instead of earning my keep. Ah, the untrained ear.

But the whole subject wrapped up that night with an assumption that Marcus’ rant and Rev Coles’ response would never be broadcast. 6.30pm on Radio 4? The very thought that anyone would be allowed to make jokes about God seemed insane. And yet, the producer of the programme and (I guess) the controller of the station broadcast it anyway. A funny, thoughtful, balanced debate about God went out in the comedy slot, because it was good. And that wouldn’t have happened if Marcus weren’t the kind of comic that says what he’s thinking rather than worrying about what might get cut.

So this is why I’m glad that I tested the Polanski waters, even when I had to then re-write the joke: not trying is the thing we should fear. Failing is fine.