Ricky Gervais does not need to sell tickets on the basis of local political controversies, but his Dublin gigs could hardly have been better timed given his reputation as a serial offender against Woke sensibilities.
Or indeed against any sensibilities, as he would be better known until recently as someone who provokes the outrage of religious believers.
That, of course, is considered to be acceptable, but there is almost zero self-awareness on the part of our own cultural hall monitors in relation to the double standards associated with their mirth at the comedic assaults on nuns and Trump as opposed to their hyper-sensitivity on behalf of themselves and their pet “protected characteristics.”
Barry Egan’s piece for the Sunday Independent reviewing Gervais’s gig is possibly as good an insight as you might get into that attitude – if you accept maybe that making a living writing about the doings of vacuous people enjoying their Warholian moment in the celebrity sun qualifies one as a social commentator.
I was not in the 3 Arena so am relying on second hand reports, but if Egan’s reference to the Gervais joke about the biological absurdity that forms the basis for transgender ideology is meant as an example of just why Gervais is so intolerant and perhaps even “hateful” – with all the implications which that will carry once the Government/Sinn Féin/Labour/Social Democrat supported Bill is passed – then perhaps Egan has misread the room.
The reason that any joke about men posing as women is so “offensive” is that the absurdities of transgenderism have become the hill on which virtually the entire “left” from bourgeois liberals to unreconstructed Marxist has chosen to die. Where once the heroes of the traditional left were stentorian miners and Rosie the Rivetter, now he/she/they/them are men in frocks.
As I pointed out previously few if any of those who take offences at “transphobic” comedy chose to be offended by Frankie Boyle’s jokes about people with Down Syndrome or a woman being raped by her intellectually disabled son.
The reason why Boyle was awarded a bye ball – and that Féile an Phobail in Sinn Féin-controlled West Belfast defended the invitation to have him perform there – was that he is one of “theirs;” a Celtic supporting pro Scottish independence Green-voting leftie. Which is fine. Anyone else who joked about such matters, but voted Tory or Lib Dem, would be persona non grata, of course.
Gervais makes it somewhat difficult for them because his serious public utterances would suggest that his own politics tend towards the left of the spectrum. This makes him part of that dying breed of traditional leftist who still adhere to the original concepts of social justice – whether ill-conceived or no – rather than the fundamental totalitarian strain that has survived under a new guise of Woke intolerance.
Another historical resonance with the drive to suppress comic “transgenderism” is that among the primary victims of the totalitarian left in power were people who dared voice the truths that contradicted the fundamental absurdities of Stalinism or Maoism or Castroism, all of which required that people not only stayed silent about the official absurdities that governed their lives but were made declare their belief openly.
1 + 1 = 3 if the state decides that 1 + 1 = 3. Just the same as a biological man can be a woman if the state decides that a biological man can be a woman.
At the end of the day, like O’Brien the torturer in Orwell’s 1984, the totalitarians know themselves that all of the lies are just that, lies. We saw some of this manifest itself during the Great Covid Panic. The only thing they are interested in is that others believe or that if they do not, that they profess with some degree of sincerity that they believe.
A cruder attempt than Egan’s to make Gervais part of the case for the Hate Bill team was that essayed by Longford Mayor and Fianna Fáil Councillor Uréumu Adéjinmi, who retweeted Newstalk’s Ciara Kelly’s defence of the right of Gervais and other comedians to be offensive accompanied with the pronouncement that “If someone says they are offended, THAT’s the line!”
Which is the whole burden of the legislation: that it is the perception that something is offensive and “hateful,” on the part of an individual or someone who decides to take offence on behalf of a “protected characteristic” of which they themselves are not a member, that will form the basis of a complaint and possible prosecution.
You can be certain, therefore, that were the legislation to have been enacted by now that somebody would almost certainly have initiated proceedings against Gervais. That is the very real scenario that will be in place once the establishment has weathered the current controversy and allowed the Bill to proceed.
And it will proceed because the stated “difficulties” of Sinn Féin for example are no more genuine than the Minister’s hints that she might revisit parts of the proposal.
On the one hand, the controversy surrounding Ricky Gervais has potentially allowed its supporters – even the less serious of them mentioned above – to attempt to use it as a reason to restate why the legislation is necessary. On the other hand, the response to that – which younger people assure me is strong evidence in social media land of being “ratioed” – then it has not been successful.
Do not allow it to be.
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