So now Netflix has removed The Mighty Boosh and League of Gentlemen

[Doyoumind]

Should they be cancelled or is it going too far? They weren't like Little Britain, imho. Perhaps they were offensive. How far does it go though? Will there be anything left to watch pre 2020?

Of course the bible must be banned too and any movie about it. Let's not forget that god condones slavery in it. I trust we can get those collected and destroyed by the end of the week?

@JustAnotherPoster00

Why dont some of you on here treat yourselfs to a boxset of Love Thy Neighbour, I'm sure youll think its hillarious and all meant in good fun so theres no racism in it FFS

Why are some of you so adamant to defend what the majority of POC are telling you is offensive, does your 'viewing pleasure' count more than how they feel within the society they live? And the same people call the 'woke' generation entitled

Can you print a list out of safe entertainment and books? That will make this much easier in the long run. I'm sure some kind of committee could be set up right?

We'll need a list of safe words too as apparently saying someone who smashes their way into a shop and steals a TV can''t be called a thug as looters find it offensive.

Why are some of you so adamant to defend what the majority of POC are telling you is offensive

Is this true though? Plenty of black people on here not seeing what the fuss is about. It's called a conversation, an exchange of ideas. I will definitely listen to black voices on this and I don't wish to be racist and want to examine my ideas, but I'm not going to immediately and completely surrender my own judgement just because I'm white. In any case, black people have various different ideas on this.
I can't speak for 'Love Thy Neighbour', before my time and I've never seen it, but I gather it's about a black family moving into the neighbourhood and the prejudices of the white neighbours. How is that in any way comparable to a fantastical figure who steals people's wives and gets them to live in a circus elephant? Or in the Boosh, a figure called 'Spider' because he has eight penises (was that even blackface? I thought they were meant to be Latin American). Little Britain had a stron anti-racism message with the racist woman from the WI who threw up whenever a person of colour was around, and Marjorie Dawes who was shown to be a bully and an idiot for never understanding the Indian woman and sterotyping her. Having one black character in the series (not in traditional blackface, but made up as an actual character) was just one part of the show, and that character was not made fun of for their race. I know some would like to have any kind of dressing up as a different race/ethnicity banned completely, and I understand why some would feel strongly enough about it to feel that way. I'm just saying I can't see any underlying racist messages in any of these shows that they're pulling.

Thug in British term is a reference to Thugee, a British imperialist fantasy of violent Hindu gangs roaming the land.

There is also 'Hooligan,' which did much the same for the Irish.

I can't speak for 'Love Thy Neighbour', before my time and I've never seen it, but I gather it's about a black family moving into the neighbourhood and the prejudices of the white neighbours.

As I vaguely recall, the (running) joke was the black family got the better of the white one every time, and that the undoing of the whites was usually their prejudices ...

They need to remove white chicks then

The 'joke,' if you could call it that, was that the men were equally bigoted, that Rudolf Walker was a 'black racist' who responded to taunts of 'sambo' and 'nig-nog' with retorts of 'honky' which is just as bad, until the fight was broken up by their entirely reasonable wives who could not see what the fuss was all about.

There is also 'Hooligan,' which did much the same for the Irish.

Not loved by all on these boards, but Stewart Lees "Context" from series 3 of Comedy Vehicle is a masterclass in how context is all, and which uses a slew of offensive words to demonstrate nuance.

Well worth watching to either gather material to carry on being offended or have a laugh. Or both, if it's possible.

Jimmy Carr (again not beloved of all) has done quite a lot of serious book-worthy material ("The Naked Jape" in fact with Lucy Greeves) on humour. He likes to point out that humans laugh before they realise the full implications of a joke. Which suggests that humour bypasses our higher critical faculties. And if that is the case, then can we be blamed for finding some things funny, if it's an unconscious response ?

As I said, from the recollection of a 7 year old ...

feel free to use my recollection as to what stuck (the situations) and what didn't (the language) for some study-of-one ...

Laughter is fundamentally an expression of relief, and exhaling of breath in praise of the fact that you never slipped on the banana skin, nor would you ever be so careless as to do so.

DGRossetti Thanks for the resources, I'd be interested in reading that. I've always liked Stewart Lee but feel a bit differently since he started telling women which rights he thought they should accept having taken away from them. Perhaps they stopped his TV series at the right time...

MockersGuidedByTheScience I know my history too, but it's nonsense to suppose that ordinary people who used it meant "oh you are acting like an Indian cult member from history"

Words mean what the majority (in that region) mean by them and in context. Toilet water isn't from a toilet after all and game need not be a dead animal.

Pretending to know the real meaning of someone else's words is a tool used to manipulate. If someone has a real argument they don't need to resort to that. The very real mistreatment of black people (and others) in western societies should stand on its own and it does need addressing.

At this rate the current surge of interest in doing something to fix it will just end with some banned TV shows and words.

It's how we treat people, surely ? It all comes down to this. People behaving like the Witchfinder General are only interested in themselves. They put themselves on a pedestal of purity but couldn't care less about making things better.

Intentions are irrelevant where racism is concerned. You might not have meant any harm when you said sold down the river, the whip hand or that you had been working like a black. (My dad was fond of that one. He meant that he had been asked to do far more than was reasonable.)

What you need to accept is how the receiver hears it, and how it relates to their life experience and the family lore they were raised in.

What you need to accept is how the receiver hears it, and how it relates to their life experience and the family lore they were raised in.

so we return to the request upthread for a list of acceptable phrases and unacceptable ones for us all to learn.

And - returning to a quote from Stewart Lee about the 1963 Smethwick by-election ...

...all it did was teach the Tory party to cloak their racism in more creative language ...

People are weird

Gone with the wind is now the top selling dvd on Amazon, why have people decided that because HBO have temporarily suspended showing GWTW that they need to buy it on dvd.

TMB and LoG are going to do very well out of this if people start buying their dvds too

As I vaguely recall, the (running) joke was the black family got the better of the white one every time, and that the undoing of the whites was usually their prejudices ... Similar to Phillip and Rigsby in Rising Damp.
Some comedy characters are grotesques in that they are so abominable that you cannot possibly like them or take them seriously.

Gone with the wind is now the top selling dvd on Amazon, why have people decided that because HBO have temporarily suspended showing GWTW that they need to buy it on dvd.

The Streisland effect in full swing.

why have people decided that because HBO have temporarily suspended showing GWTW that they need to buy it on dvd.

Not sure, could be a Southern states pride thing, could be racists, but part of it could also just be people who don't like being dictated to. I get mightily annoyed on threads like this where it's suggested I'm a racist for enjoying something like League of Gentleman. I've heard racist jokes in real life, and never once have I laughed, never once have I felt anything other than disgust in the person telling them. Shaming people into compliance to a view they don't hold by screaming 'racist' at them tends to make people feel very rebellious.

Gone with the Wind is pretty bad. It's a total glorification of slavery, and hardly a historical document. It was also made a long time after slavery was abolished so no excuses there.

There's also the favourable treatment of the KKK.

why have people decided that because HBO have temporarily suspended showing GWTW that they need to buy it on dvd. [] Not sure, could be a Southern states pride thing

Shades of people buying Beatles records just to burn them ...

it could also just be people who don't like being dictated to.

If racists object to being called thick all the time, they could do a lot worse than allow thickies to speak on their behalf. There's always a vocal minority who spoil it for the majority of intelligent thoughtful racists.

@hypernormal

It's the top seller in the UK, 😁

I agree it's because they've been told HBO have suspended it, I do wonder though how many will actually watch it and how many are in a rage at Amazon at the fact that it's sold out so they can't get a copy

If anyone has a copy now is a good time to sell it for silly money 😂

Gone with the Wind is pretty bad. It's a total glorification of slavery, and hardly a historical document. It was also made a long time after slavery was abolished so no excuses there.

There's a quote somewhere that "Birth of a Nation" (now there's a vile film) attacked the blacks of America from the front, while "Gone With the Wind" did it from the rear.

FatherBuzzCagney But does that means such works of art should be banned/removed for not agreeing with current day standards of morality? If so, there's a hell of a lot that's going to be deleted, as well as works of art hanging in galleries all over the world, novels, plays, music. I disagree with that approach, better to recognise these are artworks of their time and contextualise them. Artworks shouldn't be seen as spiritual guides to live your life by anyway, they are the very subjective works of individuals. A morally correct film where all the good characters win and all the bad characters lose would not provide any kind of drama, it would be infantile, utterly dire. Another poster mentioned how this fails terribly when writing token 'girlpower' characters. All that does is leave people thinking how the piece of propaganda fails to reflect reality, fails to actually change anything in real life, and ruins an otherwise good story to boot. We're not children who need fairy tales and parables to tell us how to live our lives, we can consume art and make our own minds up about the content.

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