Paul Kirkley: Do 8 out of 10 people prefer a celebrity scandal to the real thing? Plus the wisdom of the nans
The demonstrations outside Jimmy Carr’s show at Cambridge Corn Exchange last month threw up some chewy philosophical questions for the age. Was it a peaceful protest or an angry mob? Is this cancel culture or consequence culture? When does defending freedom of speech tip over into facilitating hate speech? Does anyone have the right not to be offended? Are there any subjects that we shouldn’t make jokes about? And does it make it worse if they aren’t even funny?
Personally, I have mixed feelings about all this – unhelpful for a newspaper columnist, I know, but that’s centrist Cambridge for you.
The most important thing to state from the outset is that people have a legitimate right to protest, and good on ’em. What was it Malcolm X said? “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.”
Nor can I condone Carr’s vile anti-Gypsy Holocaust ‘joke’, or the flimsy framing of his provocative Netflix special, His Dark Material, as some sort of socio-political experiment in exploring the boundaries of outrage and cancel culture. Because it’s not big or clever, or even particularly difficult, to shock people, is it? There are hundreds of career-ending things I could write on this page, without even trying, but what would that prove? What, ultimately, is the ‘value’ in shock value?
What I did find mildly sinister, though, was city council leader Anna Smith’s comment that the Corn Exchange show was only going ahead because of a “contractual obligation” – suggesting the authority would otherwise have been happy to no-platform Carr. That, to me, feels like a questionable path to go down, setting up the council as some sort of modern-day Master of the Revels, adjudicating on the moral fitness of every strolling player that happens to wander into town.
Who would be the ultimate arbiter of such judgments? And where would it end? Do you ban Jerry Springer: The Opera – another show that was the subject of protests when it came to Cambridge a few years ago – because it’s offensive to Christians? What about the current London revival of The Woods, the 1970s play by the right-wing, Trump-supporting David Mamet, with its provocative (to some) stance on sex and gender? What if Salman Rushdie stopped by on a Satanic Verses anniversary book tour?
Plus, you have to ask: why now? Jimmy Carr has a long history of jokes you and I would probably consider to be beyond the pale – including a truly horrible one about gang rape victims he would happily trot out from time to time. And yet he is, I believe, the Corn Exchange’s most prolific repeat booking, having played the venue dozens of times over the years. What’s changed between then and now, beyond the mildly intoxicating headwind of a Twitter storm? And are Twitter storms the sort of thing our elected representatives should be fanning the flames of – and, in the case of the Corn Exchange protest, even acting as a de facto promoter for? (Cllr Smith talked up the protests in advance, and arranged for the venue to be illuminated as a mark of solidarity.) Especially when it wasn’t Carr himself who had to run the gauntlet of the protests: while he slipped in unmolested through the stage door, it was ordinary theatregoers who were left to bear the brunt of this civic-sponsored intimidation.
I don’t doubt that for many of those who gathered outside the Corn Exchange – particularly those drawn from the sizeable traveller communities on our doorstep – the anger and hurt they felt was real and sincere. But the whole Jimmy Carr affair does raise interesting questions about who we choose to focus our anger on – particularly when it comes to the pitchfork-wielding villagers of social media.
Why, for example, has Jimmy Carr received more attention for making a tasteless ‘joke’ about genocide, than the Chinese government does for committing an actual, ongoing genocide against the Muslim Uyghurs?
Let’s give Twitter’s flaming torch mob the benefit of the doubt and say it’s because, unlike the Chinese government, Jimmy Carr is a problem they feel they can actually do something about: he’s British, for a start, and benefits from the patronage of British broadcasters and live venues. After all, no-one is hiring President Xi Jinping to present 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, are they? (Though it would be amazing telly if they did.)
And yet… in the detention camps of Xinjiang, the Chinese are using forced Uyghur labour to make products for western brands alleged to include Apple, Amazon, Nike, Adidas and Marks and Spencer. Are the people who stood outside the Corn Exchange with placards claiming “genocide is not a subject for mockery” also protesting outside Marks and Spencer or the Apple shop? Not that I’m aware of. Are they boycotting Apple products? Probably not, because that’s personally inconvenient. Which does make you wonder if there isn’t a bit of performative outrage among at least some of those protesters – the modern equivalent of the old crone knitting by the gibbet, or a family day out at the witch dunking.
Jimmy Carr is far from the only example of this, of course. Why, for example, is JK Rowling a bigger social media hate figure than Bashar al-Assad? Her critics would no doubt argue it’s because everyone knows Assad is a wrong ‘un, while Rowling is a figure beloved of innocent British schoolchildren – a wicked viper in the nest.
But I suspect there might be a much simpler explanation, which is to be found in our wider love-hate relationship with celebrities. Genocide in Xinjiang, ethnic cleansing of the Tigrayans in Ethiopia, wholesale slaughter in Syria and the Yemen… these are all things people either prefer not to think about at all, or about which they feel a helpless fatalism. (And even if they could do something about it, it would involve the hard yards of actual activism, as opposed to the quick, effortless dopamine hit of online clicktivism.)
Jimmy Carr and JK Rowling, though? That’s basically showbiz gossip, isn’t it? File them alongside OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, Mel Gibson, Ellen Degeneres, Rosanne Barr, Kevin Spacey… Yes, there are genuinely shocking and upsetting acts and allegations at the heart of some of these stories. But who doesn’t love a bit of celebrity scandal? At the end of the day, why would we rather talk about Jimmy Carr talking about genocide, than talk about actual genocide? Because, loath though we might be to admit it, the former is simply more fun. It’s outrage, but it’s also good sport. I don’t know if there’s a word for that phenomenon, but maybe we should invent one. Funrage, perhaps?
On a related note, I remain endlessly fascinated by who the moral guardians of social media choose to make persona non grata, and who gets a free pass. JK Rowling, for example, is endlessly targeted for wanting to have a conversation about how best to balance the rights of women and trans people, to the extent she was even erased from HBO’s recent Harry Potter reunion documentary. John Barrowman remains cancelled – and effectively unemployable – for being a childish dolt who kept waving his willy about in public. And David Walliams and Matt Lucas are treated like hate preachers for some bad taste jokes and dressing-up they did in the ’90s and noughties.
At the same time, David Bowie and John Peel remain unassailable heroes, with everyone apparently willing to overlook their questionable history with underage girls. Sean “women need a good slap occasionally” Connery is still everyone’s idea of virile, alpha-male cool, and Sid Vicious – suspected by many of literally murdering a woman – is still the ultimate punk icon, his face adorning T-shirts, mugs and cute Funko Pop figures. And John Lennon wasn’t exactly an angel, was he? All of which maybe suggests that the best defence against reputational damage is… being dead?
Adding fuel to my theory about celebrity scandals being a fun distraction from more existential horrors, here I am wittering on about Jimmy Carr and Harry Potter when war has returned to Europe, and Vladimir Putin is literally threatening to blow up the world.
With Covid-19 barely in retreat, the Russian invasion of Ukraine feels like the latest – and potentially most deadly – chapter in the disorienting ‘permacrisis’ that seems to have gripped the world over the past six years or so.
You can’t help but feel sorry for the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, whose much-mocked 1992 assertion that we were witnessing “the end of history” – in which the ascendancy of liberal democracy marked the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution – has become the new “peace in our time”. I’ll tell you who got it right, though – our nans. Because didn’t they always tell us: if it’s not one thing, it’s another?
See you next month. I hope.
Read more from Paul Kirkley, Columnist of the Year at the UK Regional Press Awards, in the Cambridge Independent each month.
