A Proposal of Modesty

In 1729 Jonathan Swift wrote, what is to this day, one of my favourite pieces of satire – A Modest Proposal. In it he describes a solution for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country. This was not a proposal that Swift ever thought would be taken literally and, although it has been held up by great minds as one of the best examples of satirical writing, his suggestion was never put in to practice. As his suggestion was to eat the 1 year old children of poor people this is probably for the best.

This blog is not, nor will it ever be held up to be, one of the greatest examples of satirical writing. I also doubt that my suggestion will ever be put in to practice by those who stand to benefit the most from it. However, like Swift, I have a solution to a problem and I feel a need to tell the world – or at the very least the handful of people who read my blog.

Currently in the UK there is a lot of debate over the superinjunctions that wealthy people are taking out to protect their dirty little secrets. These superinjunctions, which the courts impose, not only prevent the party from discussing the event, they also prevent the party from even talking about the existence of the superinjunction. To quote a joke my wife told me: the first rule of superinjunction club is, you don’t talk about superinjunction club.

I said that these are only being taken out by wealthy people, this is not entirely true. Superinjunctions are also being taken out by wealthy corporations. We simply don’t know how many superinjunctions are in place in the UK because by their very nature they are secret. The problem is the wealthy part. Each superinjunction is a costly process and thus excludes the poor. This, in my mind, has developed a two-tiered privacy law in which the wealthy have access to legal tools that the majority of people don’t.

I don’t think the press should be excluded from discussing anything however if a multinational mining company can have a superinjunction excluding discussion of their polluting and environmental destruction then I see no reason why a dodgy landlord shouldn’t be able to get a superinjunction to prevent discussion about their unwillingness to fix the boiler.

If everyone has the same right to the legal protection of their privacy then let’s start seeing the legal-aid funded superinjunction hearings… maybe they have already happened and we just can’t talk about it. A world where anyone could take out a superinjunction to prevent discussion about anything that would cause people to think less about them would be a strange and unworkable world.

With the exception of a few multinational corporations these superinjunctions are mostly being taken out by celebrities (primarily, it seems, footballers) who don’t want details of their affairs becoming public knowledge. So here is my modest proposal – stop doing things that will make us think less of you.

Companies should stop exploiting cheap labour markets, stop polluting, stop being dicks. And celebrities, here’s a crazy idea, if you’re married – STOP FUCKING OTHER PEOPLE!!!

I can’t stand reading about the footballer that didn’t want a kiss and tell story about his affair because he’s married and it would be awful for his wife and children. Well you shouldn’t have had the affair in the first place. You know that football fans like to shout from the stands, but their tendency to do that doesn’t entitle you to extra legal protection when you cheat on your wife.

Personally I don’t think it’s anyone’s business and I couldn’t care less but since you hold yourself out as a morally superior family man then you have no right to hide behind a superinjunction to prevent people from finding out that you’re actually a bit of an asshole.

I’m a stand up comedian and I know that when I go to work the audience judge me. Not with the same scrutiny as a tabloid paper, granted. Still, I hold myself up for that judgment and I take it into account when I decide what topics I’m going to talk about and even when deciding what I’m going to wear on stage. My personal life is my own business and of limited interest to anyone who reads a newspaper but I don’t do things that I’m not willing to own up to and then deal with the consequences. There are obviously things I’ve done in my life that I would prefer you not know about, but since I’ve never had sex with someone who had a gossip columnist on speed dial you will probably never find out about them.

I don’t know what it would be like to live with the level of scrutiny that celebrities face at the hands of the British tabloid media. I will contest that there are a lot of footballers that are happily married with children and they don’t have the same need for superinjunctions. They, of course, didn’t cheat on their wives. They didn’t destroy a small African village. They didn’t do anything morally objectionable and as such the media doesn’t bother them in the slightest.

So I conclude my suggestion of modesty with the idea that the law is there to protect you from unjust harm. It shouldn’t be there to protect you from the harm that you willingly brought upon yourself.

Don't Blame Us

I recently read a comment piece in a newspaper that discussed several cases where comedians have been attacked in the media or even sued for what they’ve said on stage. The jokes discussed were quite obviously jokes and the article praises the outcomes of the court cases in concluding that. This is a topic that I’ve read about almost as often as I’ve heard offensive jokes told on stage. It was a pretty stock standard article that didn’t particularly progress my thinking on the subject but like so many before it, it concluded with the standard and ominous prediction of the end of comedy.

Some people think that it’s the media blowing every joke out of all proportion and that the media gives these isolated people a voice that amplifies the disapproval. I actually think there is some validity in that claim but I don’t think it’s as much a cause as it is a symptom. I’ve read arguments that said that because political correctness is running wild comedians are running out of topics to talk about and in protest they’re becoming more offensive. Firstly, there are still a lot of things to make jokes about, fear not. And secondly, I think that’s rubbish because in my experience comedians aren’t organised enough to all turn up to a picnic together, let alone collectively attack carefully selected targets.

Some comedians try to push boundaries and do it in a brilliant and clever way that should be, and often is, appreciated by the masses. Other comedians have neither ability nor intellect, they merely want to get a reaction and in their tiny minds shock is as good as a laugh so they use a sledgehammer to offend. Thing is, a few people will be offended equally by both styles and we’re just going to have to let them be. To quote some guy who has been quoted by a lot of other people, “haters are gonna hate.” More alarmingly though, the majority of people will laugh equally at both styles and won’t see the difference.

So far we have the media and political correctness being to blame. As a comedian, let me suggest another hypothesis. It’s the audiences’ fault. But how? Audiences aren’t telling the comedians what to say, they’re the ones being offended by those hateful jokes. But the audience is telling the comedian what to say. This may come as a shock to the majority of the couch dwellers but comedians don’t just tell jokes to the TV audience. They go out and gig in some of the most inhospitable pub gigs throughout the world. They watch as their carefully crafted subtle word plays are ignored and heckled. Then they sit there and watch the ‘old-school’ comedian with jokes older than God storm a gig that didn’t laugh all that much at their stuff. Comedians are people too and when this happens on a nightly basis it has a tendency to dent their confidence.

After a while the comedian will have 2 types of jokes. They still have some clever witticisms that pepper their set, the jokes that remind them they’re better than the gig they are forced to play. Then they have the cruder, ruder, bare-knuckle jokes that the morons living in some random country town expect and demand. The ironic wife-beating joke is misinterpreted nightly as a good old-fashioned wife-beating joke. After a while even the comedian forgets to tell the pullback and reveal they originally wrote that shows they’re not a wife beater after all.

There are jokes that I hear that I find grotesquely offensive. I’m rarely offended by the statement/joke but, if I am, I’m often infinitely more offended by an audience’s decision to laugh at it. I recently heard a relatively new male comedian address the topic of women fighting on the front line. He proposed a fictional scenario where he was in a situation of certain death with a solitary female soldier. She asked him what was going to happen and he told her that he was going to rape her because if he’s got to die anyway he’d prefer to get his end away first.

I have obviously paraphrased this man’s comical poetry but as offensive as the piece was, the audience loved it and they applauded the man brave enough to say what they had all been thinking. I couldn’t believe it. How could they validate this man’s material in that way? I wouldn’t say that the audience was overflowing with mensa members but surely common decency would preclude them from laughing at that? Apparently I was in the minority that night.

Whether or not I found this comedian funny is beside the point. The audience did, they loved him and they loved that particular joke the most. And if audiences continue to love that joke with any level of consistency he’ll write more jokes like this. Then he’ll start playing bigger venues and he’ll continue to write more jokes like this. New comedians will try to emulate his success and they will mould themselves around his example. Then TV executives will come and see him perform to this enormous fan base of adoring followers and he’ll end up on TV. Sure he’ll tone it down a little, because it’s TV, but the producer won’t want to risk stifling his creative genius and will allow him some artistic freedom to deliver what his fans want. Now he’s doing a joke on TV that the media will gladly write more comment pieces about. You’ll then have to write a strongly worded letter to the TV station for allowing this to happen and insisting that this show be axed.

Ladies and gentlemen, you’re perfectly entitled to be offended by that joke you saw on TV. Good for you for having the courage to speak out against it. But the answer isn’t to try to ban comedy. The solution is the fix the cause of the problem. Go and watch comedy in the small clubs. Go and pack out little gigs with likeminded educated audiences. When the comedian with the clever jokes comes on, and they’re out there, then show them the appreciation and encouragement they deserve. When the ‘old-school’ comedian comes and tells you the homophobic joke just stare at him, heckle him do whatever you like but don’t laugh. Make him realise that those jokes aren’t going to cut it and he will either change his ways or quit comedy (either way is fine by me).

If your political party isn’t going in the direction you want it you don’t get to have a meeting with the Prime Minister. You get involved at the grass roots and you push for change with the next generation. Comedy needs you to do the same. If you want the next generation of TV stars to be the TV comedians you want then you need to get involved now.

Recording My Conversations

I went to Perth, the place I grew up in and the place I left. Perth is a place that I left 10 years ago and a place that you don’t have to take a keen interest in in order to be completely up-to-date. I come back every couple of years and about the only thing that normally changes is that the traffic lights up the road have changed their signal priority and that has caused morning congestion that everyone seems to know about and have an opinion on. It’s a quaint place is what I’m trying to say. It’s like being in the country village that has convinced itself that it’s a capital city but hates all other cities because they’re ‘just too busy’.

However this trip back was different. An interesting thing occurred (and by ‘interesting’ I mean shocking). Just when I didn’t think this place could be more disinterested in it’s own slow decay yet another liberty has been taken away without so much as a titter.

In the very near future all conversations that anyone has in a Perth taxi will be recorded and kept in a giant database by the Western Australian Police. I’m not surprised that someone in government suggested it, I’m not surprised that cabbies are fine with it and I definitely not surprised that the Western Australian public aren’t interested in it. West Australian’s aren’t moved by anything unless it threatens the mining industry.

Surely the taxi drivers should fear this. How many taxi drivers have you met in your life who offended you with an out-of-left-field racist remark? Maybe I’ve just been unlucky and got the handful of homophobic xenophobes who drive taxis but the ones I’ve met are obviously unconcerned by their every remark being recorded because they don’t see anything wrong with what they’re saying. Anyway even if communists like me are offended by it the police force, who will be the only people with access to it (apparently), are just as racist as cab drivers.

The state government is saying that this will make WA taxis the safest in the world. It will protect cabbies from violent members of the public and it’ll protect the public from cabbies. On the first point, I understand cabbies wanting to do everything possible to protect themselves and I am appalled when I see a story on the news about a taxi driver being attacked. They are just doing a job, a job that I wouldn’t like to do, and they shouldn’t be assaulted whilst doing it. I will make a slight admission that I really wanted to punch a cab driver in Liverpool (UK) once but that was only after the most homophobic rant I have ever heard, and I’ve watched Christian television.

It’s the second point of the government’s argument that alarms me. Protecting the public from taxi drivers. Here’s an idea, stop employing rapists and thugs. A crazy idea I know but give it a go for a while and let’s see if it works. I know that most cab drivers are law-abiding citizens and often good people just trying to make some money to feed their family. But as the old saying goes, ‘when a few bad apples rape women it gives everyone a bad name’.

My main concern is what’s going to happen with these recordings. Most of my conversations in taxis revolve around how long the drivers shift has been and how bad traffic is. The pure logistics of recording and storing that many banal conversations is mind blowing. You’ll have terabytes of nothing remotely interesting at all. But what about the rare occasion that something interesting is said in a cab. Be it when you take a call without remembering you’re being recorded or a drunk conversation when you say something that should be kept a secret.

The police say that no one other than the police will get access to the recordings and that it’ll only be listened to if a crime was committed. But every freedom that’s taken away was taken for a good reason in the first place. It’s the unexpected consequences that should alarm you. Lawyers are already predicting that these recordings will have to be released under subpoena and the reasons for the courts granting access are untested. They could be wide ranging to a point where in a few years people refuse to speak when in a taxi.

The final concern is who else will get access to the data, government bodies around the world don’t have the best record for keeping private things private for too long. Privacy is the issue that we should all care about but so few do.

Let’s be honest, almost nothing of interest is ever spoken in Perth. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to say something and expect it to be between them and the person they said it to. So I propose a solution: let’s all get in Perth taxis and admit to doing the unspeakable. Admit to committing crimes, admit to committing adultery, admit to being Azaria Chamberlain if it makes you feel better, go to town. We’re not actually going to commit crimes, just admit to them. Tell the cab driver whatever comes to mind. As long as you don’t admit to something you actually did you’ll be fine. But let’s see if the police start following up on these ‘leads’. If they want to record us, let’s waste their time until they stop listening.

I Can’t Act – Part 2

So on Wednesday night I went to a 2 hour acting drop in session. I promised to write about it and thus I am. However I can’t help but feel like I’ve written a joke about a tragedy and now I’ve got that uneasy sense of ‘too soon’. I want you to know that I didn’t have high expectations for the course and as we all expected it wasn’t very good. But it isn’t the event that inspired this blog, it’s the people who went along to it. Writing about the people makes my ‘too soon’ alarm go off because they were truly tragic. This was a group of people who just needed a hug.

The course was run by a man named Glen. A nice guy, probably a good teacher and very passionate about what he does. I liked him and he was definitely the least wanky person there (this was unexpected). Glen had us playing theatre games designed to break down our inhibitions and become more comfortable with people. These games are helpful to warm up with before doing something useful. Unfortunately we played these games for the entire session and nothing useful happened. After 15 minutes I was bored. I wasn’t self-conscious or thought that what I was doing was embarrassing, which the games were meant to help us overcome. I was bored and thought what I was doing was a waste of time. We spent half the time playing games that revolved around us remembering everyone else’s name, something I might find useful if I get that role in “Phonebook – The Movie”.

Also there was the marketing manager named Michael. Michael was also a student of the college, he was also very passionate about what he does. Unfortunately he was the most wanky person I have met since getting to Sydney. Michael is an uncomfortably positive person. I hate positive people as a rule. We were never going to be friends. He just loved the course and was ‘blown away by the journey of self discovery’ that he had taken. Wanker!

The other ‘students’ were a collection of the desperate for love, desperate for friends and desperate for a slap in the face. We started with an introduction of who we were and why we thought an acting course would be good. I said that I wanted to get just good enough to not feel like a moron when I go to castings. Something I knew wouldn’t be solved in a 2 hour drop in session but a lovely goal all the same. The other responses made me die a little inside.

We had 5 people who used to be in a theatre group when they were children and remembered how good it was for making friends. They are all now lonely, in their mid 20’s and desperate to do anything to meet someone who could be their friend. It’s quite sad that they feel like they need to spend $500 to meet friends. If you put $500 behind a bar you’ll make loads of friends. Some of them may even remember your name, which is more then any of them did after half an hour of name remembering games.

Three people had just finished university and had a fear of entering the workforce so they were looking at acting as a way to live in poverty for a little longer. Two people actually failed to project loud enough for me to hear their desperation. This was not a big room and even through my clear disinterest I accidentally heard the others.

Last but not least – one guy turned up late because he had gone to the wrong room. He had spent 20 minutes with the French language choir before he realised it wasn’t an acting drop in session. When asked, he admitted that he didn’t speak any French but just assumed it was some sort of vocal warm-up that he didn’t understand. I doubt that that was the first time he had been in a room where people were saying things that he didn’t understand.

They all giggled their way through the games. They were all awkward and confused but they all had a good time. Some of them even left together and went to a bar. I guess, for them, the night was a success. They just had different expectations to me. Who am I kidding? I got exactly what I expected. I just wish it wasn’t ‘too soon’ to write some stand up about it.