One of the biggest scourges of our time is “ironic bigotry”—the modish new invention that allows one to say absolutely unconscionable things, but then end it with “Joking!!!!,” thus serving . . . well, thus serving the purposes of Satan, as I explain here.
The problem with progress is you never know who is going to benefit from it. The groundbreaking cancer medicine that saves a dictator; the human rights legislation that frees a rapist. When people are driven to improve the world, they always imagine saving the good people—innocent children, kindly mothers—and not the bad. Marie Curie did not toil to save Scrooge McDuck.
But, of course, when the world gets better for kind people, it gets better for unkind people, also. The shiny, dazzling future does not, sadly, leave the ass-hats behind.
And, so, to comedy. Over the last few years, there has been a rise in a new kind of comedy—one which got its most public outing yet during Seth MacFarlane’s hosting of the Oscars, three weeks ago. I’m sure you know what happened by now—the jokes about domestic assault, “powerful” Jews, the word “nigger,” the nine-year-old African-American actress Quvenzhané Wallis still being too young to have sex with George Clooney; all topped with a song called “We Saw Your Boobs,” in which MacFarlane named every actress in the room who’d done a nude scene in a film—four of which centered around rape, or assault.
In the controversy that followed, the defense of MacFarlane was that he was satirizing a more bigoted era. MacFarlane himself did not look at, say, multi-Oscar-winning writer, actor, and director Jodie Foster, and immediately think of her breasts in the rape scene in The Accused. Of course not! But people used to. And he was just—as every good comedian should—acknowledging the historical elephant in the room.
I have noticed that comedians—white, male, straight comedians—have been acknowledging this elephant for a while, now. They have been acknowledging the hell out of it. Until MacFarlane on the Oscars, it had previously been in more select, partly concealed environments—characters in the postmodern sitcoms of Ricky Gervais, say, or edgy entertainers on the boys’ clubs of Top Gear or Mock the Week. Ironic bigotry, faux misogyny. Pretend racism, satirical homophobia—all the comedy tropes we might, lightheartedly, group together under “being Satan’s craven ventriloquist dummy, for cash.”
So. Here’s the problem: in all these instances, the comedians were not acknowledging an elephant that wandered into the room—they brought the elephant into the room. All artists start with an empty page, or a silence—and this is what they wanted to talk about. Over and over. In a world of medicine and fast beats and revolution and prosthetic lungs growing in petri dishes, and universes dying at the end of telescopes, this is what they want to talk about, time and time again. Women and niggers and puffs, and funny dwarves, and mongs.
And how this feels to anyone who has struggled with who they were born as. It is as if you had, some years ago, been in a traumatic car crash. And you had a work colleague who, every morning, greeted you with, “Hey! How you doing? God—do you remember when you nearly died in that terrible car crash?”
The first few times, you would think, “This person is acknowledging the bad things that happened to me—and I thank him.”
But by the end of the week—when he said it, every morning—you would be going, “This is a raging pervert who wants to remind me about bad things that have happened and see me get upset about it. This guy is nursing some kind of raging Taboo Boner. This dude has watched Crash too often.”
Because the thing about bigotry is that it’s like the flu. Every couple of decades it mutates into a new strain that catches you by surprise. Feelings buried that deep in the bone have a terrible, prehistoric smartness—they can rewire whole blocks of their DNA in order to survive. They find new hosts to quietly mutate in: Sitcom writers. TV presenters. Sports commentators. Oscar hosts. It lives in “banter” and “lads being lads.” Its first symptom is saying something that makes other people awkward—then greeting the resultant wince with a peevish, hurt “Hey—I was just joking.”
Which, if I might translate this down into its absolute, finite instruction, means, “Laugh, bitch.”
So, on the flanks of progress, ride ticks. Ironic bigotry is a parasite—it snacks on things people have wept over, and died for. When I see a straight white able-bodied millionaire making an “ironic” joke about when a nine-year-old African-American girl will be old enough for George Clooney to have sex with her, it’s a little bit like watching someone using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to mop up their spilled beer, or write a note to their cleaner.
As it turns out, ironic hatefulness works in pretty much the same way as real hatefulness. In 2013, we have no need for nostalgia for jokes about uptight women, powerful Jews, horny gays, repulsive transsexuals, and the weirdness of other ethnicities. Because you know what—I can remember these kind of jokes from yesterday. From ten minutes ago. From now, right now.