I'M NOT BIGOTED, MY SENSE OF HUMOR IS:

Guilt-free pleasures: It's nonsense to applaud acts such as Borat and Little Britain for being 'non-PC', says Stewart Lee. It's the fact that the writers are truly aware of what's offensive - and what life was like before political correctness made things better - that makes them so funny (Stewart Lee, January 3, 2007, The Guardian)

There's a vast difference between the casual, inadvertent offence prevalent in my childhood and the choices made today by performers and writers of my generation, operating in a post-PC world, where they are aware of the power and meaning of the taboos they choose to break. Linguistic theorists who define the terminology of political correctness suggest that grammatical choices made in language influence both the speaker's and the listener's ideas and actions. This would seem to be common sense, so it would be churlish to argue against the idea of attempting to ensure basic levels of politeness and consideration in official, public discourse.

I am a great fan of political correctness, even though, as one of the writers of Jerry Springer the Opera, I was routinely praised for apparently attacking it, and feel that any indignities we suffer from PC's overzealous policing are a small price to pay for all that it has achieved. Is anyone apart from Robertson's jam really inconvenienced by the extinction of the golliwog?

So why, then, do some sections of the viewing public insist on seeing attacks on PC where there perhaps are none?

Stephen Merchant, co-writer of The Office and Extras with Ricky Gervais, says: "We're endlessly cited as being non-PC, and yet we sit and agonise for ages over what we put into the scripts, and over whether our choices can be defended, both morally and intellectually," he says. "We may push things, but we're always motivated by satirical imperatives." But the duo's scripts do use non-PC language? "Yes," explains Merchant, clearly slotting back into a tramline he has had to follow many times before. "But we deal in taboos and hot areas by appearing to approach them from a non-PC standpoint, but as soon as you even introduce topics that PC has declared off limits, people assume you are trying to be dangerous and politically incorrect. Often we're all unsure of what to say, for example, in the company of someone who is disabled. These are areas ripe for comedy because of social anxiety, not because the subject itself is intrinsically funny. A joke about race, and about how we react to race, is not necessarily a racist joke. That is fundamental. Political correctness has made the world better for those who might otherwise have been unfairly marginalised, but there is the problem of the idea that you cannot discuss different areas for fear of being politically incorrect."

Pity the poor liberal, whose comedy depends on violating his own ideology.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 3, 2007 8:58 AM