Frankie Boyle on Down Syndrome - horrific

[Lymond]

interesting blog post from a mother of a DS daughter who was blasted by a 5-10 minute diatribe containing all the old stereotypes about people with DS at a Frakie Boyle show. I'm turning off any TV show he's on in future.

blog here

Grauniad article on it here

sorry StayFrosty, I think it is the real underbelly of PC. I think that the comedians who are feted by the BBC are PC. If the BBC commissions shows with them in, then they are considered PC. Real 'PC gone mad' humour will not be given airtime.

actually she was on 5 live and i found her quite interesting.
She said that she was aware that there may be jokes with disability at their core. She is aware that his humour walks the line between the funny and the 'oh good grief , did he really just say that'. But she was not expecting the humour to be just mockery.

She compared it with jokes he made about Obama which were challenging race and stereotyping. But that his jokes about DS were putting on funny voices, laughing that 'they' are badly dressed and dying young.

I sort of saw what she meant. People can make funny jokes with race at their core when they challenge pre-conceptions or mock stereotypes. But blacking up and putting on a silly voice would not be considered funny. And effectively that is what Frankie Boyle did.
Not clever , not funny.

And pretty sad that the audience were chortling.
But back in the day people used to laugh ast Jim Davidson doing Chalkie White and the Black and White minstrels show did big business.

Welldone stillenacht's friend.

claig I don't get your posts

StayFrosty, I am trying to show why this sort of humour is prevalent, why so many of the public think it is just 'edgy' humour and cannot see the harm in it. Why Gervais thinks it is OK to carry on making jokes about the woman with cherubism, rather than apologising and stopping it.

I think the reason is as the campaigner Nicky Clark has said
"When a national broadcaster allows this behaviour to go unchallenged they are saying it?s acceptable."

I think the broadcasters and media think that this is acceptable, which is why it is so commonplace. They think it is acceptable i.e. not causing offence i.e. politically correct.

Frankie Boyle, Little Britain, Bo' Selecta and the other shows that guy does, Jimmy Carr...they are all part of the same mysogonistic gang of nasty little people.
I really don't get that they are thought of as cool.
I love Bill Hicks and Richard Pryor. They weren't PC either, but had substance behind the jokes that these lot seem to lack.

'I agree with the comments that the woman seemed to think it was ok for FB to be nasty and offensive as long as it didn't offend her which is suggested by her comments about expecting some jokes about disability.'

As Pagwatch said,Sharon's reason for being offended was that there was no point to FB's jokes about DS. His jokes were not poking fun at people's attitudes to DS - they were simply mimicking DS voices and mocking them. On the Five live interview Sharon made it quite clear that she had expected any jokes made by FB about DS or indeed anything else, to have a point, rather than just mock.

Channel 4 had to apologise but I doubt they really reprimanded the presenters as they would have done for other matters. I don't think they treat disablism as seriously as some other forms of discrimination.

In other cases where employees have made discriminatory or offensive statements, these employees are sacked. Yes these statements were not made on the BBC, but I think that the BBC will employ Boyle and Gervais in the future.

We will have to disagree about Boyle and Gervais. I think that they are PC comedians, I do not think that they are non-PC. I think that their views are considered acceptable by the media who think that they are just 'edgy'. I think that they are like Brand, considered 'on the edge' but not offensive enough not to be hired again.

claig - I agree with you totally

well i think you are wrong, it is not pc to take the piss out of the disabled.

no thats NOT what claig is saying I believe..but I could be wrong..am a bit tired

". I think that they are PC comedians,"

well seems like she is saying the, but as I said earlier I don't get her posts.

at stille..

I know what you mean.

I too am reading Claig as expressing the reason why no one will deal with this. That the media have chosen to view these horrible attitudes to disability as just being edgy ratherthan offensive or abhorrent.

I don't think Claig is saying the jokes are fine. I think Claig is saying that as long as the mainstream media are happy to court these views as just being edgy then the issue will not be dealt with. Just as race jokes were treated thirty years ago - edgy and boundary pushing but fine.

But I may be wrong too. I am knackered

I think she is trying to say that they dress their rants up as 'PC gone mad' and that the media like them because they pander to society's need to backlash against the PC world we live in, so they are the media's reaction to PC gone mad and hence quite PC for the media.

God that was a bit waffly but I know what I mean and I didn't articulate it v well sorry

pag - thats it.Spot on - much better put than me

shall we all hold hands and see if we can connect in some spiritual way with what Claig is trying to say. A sort of vulcan mindmeld thing. Except you might just all end up tired and doing a tescos order.

pag

These comedians think they are being PC because they are 'pushing boundaries' apparently and making us feel uncomfortable by expressing our unspoken thoughts on issues such as domestic violence and down syndrome, therefore forcing us to examine our own attitudes.

That's the theory, anyway, and what Claig was trying to express, I think
(feel free to correct me)

I am certainly not saying that the jokes are fine, I am saying that they are disgusting. I think it is disgusting that the media do not censor these comedians. I think it is disgusting that the public are being influenced by these people and the entire media establishment into laughing along with these comedians. This is the media establishment that says that it is PC and cares about PC. I don't think they do care, they just pay lip service to PC, they don't pratise what they preach. I think they are responsible for giving airtime to these offensive comedians, I think the media think that these comedians are witty and 'edgy' and OK.

In the same way, I think that the authorities didn't treat the case of Fiona Pilkington anywhere near seriously enough. She and her son were hounded and tormented for years by gangs of thugs and little was done to stop it. If it had been domestic abuse or racism, the authorities would have acted immediately. But they left a woman and her son to die because they didn't think that disablism was serious enough.