The latest comedy series on BBC1 by David Walliams and Matt Lucas is not racist, but it is full of crude racial stereotypes
Imagine the BBC commissioning a new television series composed of the following elements: a rich Middle-Eastern billionaire who owns the busiest airport in the country, but who is so mean and stingy that you have to pay to access the safety equipment; an Asian man (with a beard, of course) who attempts to enter the country using the passport of a white teenage girl (which the white, racist and xenophobic immigration officer allows); a middle-aged black woman played yet again by a "blacked-up" white man, who utters "Praise the Lord" at the end of every sentence, is too lazy to run her coffee shop and who spends her time shopping for cheap bargains at the airport; two Japanese schoolgirls ? you guessed it right, white men with modified eyelids, eyebrows and lip-curves ? waiting anxiously at the airport for an ostensibly minor celebrity's autograph and photos; and of course, the token sexist Muslim who, in his inability to talk in complete sentences, calls every female "a bitch" and sexualises anything in a skirt.
Laughing already?
These are, of course, nothing more than crude racial stereotypes. But that the very organisation which sacked Carol Thatcher for calling a tennis player a "golliwog" should commission such a series in the name of comedy, for me, defies belief. Yet, it was precisely sketches of these kinds that dominated the new series from David Walliams and Matt Lucas, Come Fly With Me.
Don't worry ? I am aware of the modern tendency to take quick offence at every minor political or artistic transgression, and I would be the last person to call this sketch show racist. It wasn't. No racial supremacy of any kind was asserted, nor did the duo discriminate, explicitly, against ethnic minorities. Nor would I suggest that the show be brought to a halt; the measure of progress in any society is the degree of censorship in place, the relation being one of inverse proportion.
But I would emphatically question the taste, or lack thereof, employed in the writing and making of such shows. Tastelessness in comedy has become somewhat endemic, especially among the comedians who, having been schooled in a predominantly male (and yes, white) terrain, still think casual homophobia and racism are funny.
Watch a random episode of Have I Got News For You or any of the other weekly political satires, and it usually doesn't take that much time for one to find a joke that exploits the sexuality of Peter Mandelson or David Laws, or the many supposedly low-skilled jobs held by immigrants from eastern Europe and south Asia. One ought to bemoan the state of British comedy if these are the best witticisms they could come up with. HG Wells, who saw a certain "cloacal obsession" in Irish wit, would have easily identified in these shores a certain phallocentric compulsion that accentuates ethnic and cultural differences. And now that the originality of it all has been lost, as much as any insights that came with it, it has reached the point of exasperation, and rightly so.
I cannot understand the logic by which things we would find otherwise objectionable in the extreme are deemed permissible, at their offensive best, in comedy alone. To say that it is for the sake of art is to escape artistic responsibility, even when one subscribes unconditionally to art pour l'art. For what exactly is the point of reiterating a conventional set of racial and sexual stereotypes? Do they promote integration or tolerance? Do they make a worthwhile statement on the dynamics of our society? Are such reiterations even witty? Not art by any stretch of the word, but mere exploitation of the artistic licence for cheap laughs.
I, for one, cannot find it funny.
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