Fuck the Motherfucker

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is this article.

Ann Widdecombe, who's only famous for being fucking awful, has been paid by the taxpayer to voice her boring opinion on the BBC, and I watched the whole thing like a big idiot because I didn't realise it was an hour long.

It's wonderfully ironic that Ann Widdecombe would reference Father Ted in her opening paragraph, before embarking on an article that just screams "Down with this sort of thing". Are You Having a Laugh? – Comedy and Christianity follows no one's favourite former Tory MP as she explores comedy's "abuse of Christianity". I didn't even realise Ann Widdecombe was into comedy, but apparently she's enough of an expert to present a show all about it. Personally, If I were looking for someone to host a programme on the relationship between comedy and Christianity, I'd probably get someone who has actually seen Monty Python's Life of Brian. But I guess I'm weird like that.

Instead, Ann Widdecombe watches excerpts from the controversial classic and deems it unfunny, thereby undermining every subsequent opinion and making her basically wrong. Obviously I'm being facetious, humour is entirely subjective and if she doesn't find it funny then that's fine. But then it just seems like Ann Widdecombe is giving her opinion on what is funny, and I don't particularly need to know that. She loves panto, incidentally.

I would, however, argue that you really ought to see the entire film before you can make an informed judgement. And yes I appreciate the hypocrisy, given that this blog is mostly me slagging off films that I've not seen. But then I'm not presenting a show about them on the BBC. Constantly arrested for obscenity, the comedian Lenny Bruce would beg judges to be allowed to do his act for the court. Instead, police officers would just read out transcripts of his shows, free of all context and nuance, condemning a desperate Lenny Bruce: "This guy's bombing and I'm going to jail for it."

Ann Widdecombe describes the end of Life of Brian as "quite horrific", which seems unfair. It's many things, but horrific is not one of them; smart, silly, sensitive, satirical and ultimately uplifting. "Always look on the bright side of life..."

Her other main target is the Goodness Gracious Me sketch in which the Indian characters go to church, and end up putting chutney on the Communion bread. The sketch was banned and cannot be aired, so we have to watch Ann Widdecombe watching it. Why she is allowed to see it while the public aren't is unclear, but she calls the ban just and feels "wounded" by the sketch. She claims that "the body and blood of Christ were mocked" but I'm not sure that's the point of the sketch at all; it's about a clash of culture, as is every fucking sketch in Goodness Gracious Me. The punchline is surely not on Christianity, but on the ridiculous Indian stereotypes.

Her argument is that Christ just should not be mocked; "comedy should keep its hands off what is sacred." She puts this to comedian Marcus Brigstocke who replies, "it's not special." And he's completely right. Nothing should be outside the reach of comedy. In fact, comedy is probably the best way of dealing with these controversial issues. Lenny Bruce called comedy "the only honest art form", before being driven to bankruptcy and ultimately death by a legal system which objected to his mocking of religion.

One of the show's best comments comes from writer Cole Moreton: "People are making up for 500 years of Christians telling them what to think and how to feel." Comedy tackles Christianity as it does any aspect of society, especially one that exercised so much control for so long. Religion ought to be held to the same scrutiny as any issue, and as Marcus Brigstocke explains, "There are not lines that we as a society should decide cannot be crossed. There just aren't." Anne Widdecombe's claim that Christ is "too big to be mocked" is meaningless; nothing is "too big to be mocked." On the contrary, the bigger something is, the more it invites mockery. Not literally, I'm not saying we should bully the tall, awful though they are. But a crucial role of comedy is to puncture the inflated, and it doesn't get much bigger than claims to divine authority.

Do comedians use religion to get an easy laugh? Sure, so stop watching Mock the Week. Some of the best comedy satirises religion and does it incisively and sensitively; Richard Herring's Christ on a Bike, Stewart Lee's 90s Comedian, Robin Ince, Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce, South Park and of course Life of Brian. Not Ricky Gervais. But they don't "abuse" Christianity, they highlight its hypocrisies and ultimately stem from compassion. And you might get offended along the way, but you don't have a right to not be offended. Personally, I'm offended by Ann Widdecombe's views on sex and abortion and women priests. But you don't see me going on about it...

Then Baroness Warsi shows up and says fuck nothing of interest.

I'll leave you with some beautiful blasphemous comedy from Tim Minchin, thanks for reading!

Deep Inside

There are only three things in the world that I hate, and one of them is this article from the New Statesman.

I've written about my love/hate relationship with the New Statesman before. When I open my copy, there are a few things I hope not to see. An article by A A Gill, for instance. Zac Goldsmith's face. Russell Brand talking about Transcendental Meditation. Last week's issue included all three of those things. What are the chances?

Having said that, Zac Goldsmith's piece on democracy was actually very good (if slightly undermined by the fact that he was a non-dom until about a year ago.) and A A Gill's piece didn't infuriate me. Probably because I didn't read it, I'm not an idiot. But while these two failed to make me annoyed enough to write a blog, Russell Brand succeeded.

I've read some of his articles in the New Statesman before, and I've been pleasantly surprised. Generally when I read stuff he's written, my opinion of him improves infinitely, as I'm not confronted by his voice and hair, so I can disassociate the text from the writer, and pretend it's written by someone else. But not this time; this time I could hear the words on the page being shouted in his voice, and there was no escape.

Russell Brand denounces Richard Dawkins' targeting of 'mental' creationists (which is actually not Dawkins' fault, and probably more to do with the platforms on to which he's invited by TV companies for the sake of entertainment) and explains that it's not just mental people who are religious; look at Gandhi, St Francis of Assisi, the Dalai Lama, Andrew Sachs. (I may have added one he didn't say.) They're all religious too, and it is them 'to which we should turn when questioning the existence of a power beyond man.' But why? Because they did good things? I never understand that argument, that religious do-gooders are somehow proof of the existence of God. A lot of atheists have done 'good' things too, Thomas Paine, Bob Geldof, Dexter. And a lot of religious people have done 'bad' things (over 99% of US prisoners are religious). But that's all utterly irrelevant. Everyone in the world could be religious and it wouldn't make them right.

He also tackles the argument that religion causes war, claiming that we would still fight without religion. Obviously that's true, but we would fight less. And fighting less seems appealing. 'My last serious argument was about a croissant,' writes Brand, which is amusing enough. But his argument here is that even if there was no religion, we'd fight over things like croissants. The problem with that argument is that fights over religion are a lot more bloody and devastating than fights over croissants. Unless you really like croissants. Maybe if you're... French, I guess? So if I had a choice between horrendous wars over religion and trivial arguments over croissants, I'd obviously go for the latter. Russell Brand's shot himself in the foot a bit there. Sort of like here. He's just so scandalous.

Then he says, 'through Transcendental Meditation,' and that's when I start to hear his voice. Vividly. That's when I should have stopped reading. That's when I should have skipped to the great article by Alain de Botton, or just closed the magazine, or thrown myself out of the window. But like a cunt, I carried on reading. 'Through Transcendental Meditation, twice daily I feel the bliss of the divine.' Katy Perry, presumably.

He continues, 'through the mental repetition of a mantra, eventually my chattering monkey mind recedes.' Now he seems to be confusing spiritualism with mental illness. He goes on, 'gently banishing concerns of the past and drawing the inner eye away from speculation and want.' And lets face it, it must be hard to cast aside your 'want' when you're worth three million pounds and living here:

What a spiritual, immaterial man he is.

Brand doesn't need me to tell him that his enlightenment is not proof of God. Because he then points towards some kind of design argument; there was nothing, now there's something, it looks designed. This is a line of argument that I cannot stand. It starts by following a logical enough style of reasoning (things can't just randomly appear, that makes no sense!) and then leaps to the conclusion that God done it. I thought we were following some basic standard of logic? Apparently I was wrong. It seems that while it's just silly to think that a universe can emerge from nothing, it's perfectly justifiable to then point to a magic being. Either follow some sort of scientific reasoning or don't. If God's just going to be used to plug gaps in science, then, to quote the genius biologist-comedian-rapper Baba Brinkman, 'I say banish God into the gaps.' (And I implore you to listen to that Baba Brinkman song. It's 'the best of the best of the best of the best...')

Finally, Russell Brand asks: 'Could a witless miasma of molecules and dust ever have created anything as ingenious and incredible as Richard Dawkins?' Yes! It fucking did! Well, it wasn't 'a witless miasma', it was natural selection. Earlier Brand claimed: 'I have Dawkins to thank for my own understanding of the fantastic discovery that is evolution.' I hate to break it to you Russell Brand, but that thing you have of evolution is not an understanding. People who dismiss evolution tend to say things like 'look how complex we are as a species, how can that be chance?' It isn't chance, it's a rigorous process of selection! To put it into terms you'll understand, it's more Project Runway than Britain's Got Talent.

But still, that Gene Simmons joke was good.

I'll leave you with the Incubus song that this blog is named after, enjoy!

Party Politics

As you know, I love everything in the world, with the exception of three things. One of those things that I love is the New Statesman magazine.

I have a subscription to it, because it's great, particularly Laurie Penny, Mehdi Hasan and of course Mark Watson. But occasionally there are articles in there that piss me off. Or just make me go 'what?'. Here are 4 things that this week's issue have made me think about.

1. This article by Lord Falconer annoyed me. He argues that we should vote No to AV because this defeat will cause the Lib Dems to leave the coalition. Now, I'd be very happy to see an end to the coalition government, but I'd be much happier to see the introduction of a better voting system. In fact, what Falconer is doing here is, at best, misunderstanding the significance of electoral reform. However this seems unlikely, considering he was Lord Chancellor/Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs for 4 years. This leads me to believe that what he's actually doing is putting the interest of his party before the interest of the people. To Charles Falconer, party politics is more important than democracy. We all know that AV is far from perfect, but it's a step in the right direction and it's better than what we're stuck with at the moment. Falconer wants to deny us this democratic enhancement, which we've been waiting for since long before his government reneged on such a promise about 15 years ago, just so he can see the Lib Dems defeated. This is a weird, selfish, short-term attitude. Don't get me wrong, I hate the coalition, I just think that people's votes actually meaning something is more important than Lib Dem baiting, which I'm getting bored of. Remember that it was the current electoral system that gave us this government in the first place. If you want to change it, you need to change the system.

2. Eek, that was a bit too much political-grandstanding for my liking. Let's turn the page in the New Statesman to the interview with comedian Frank Skinner which I can't show you because it isn't online, hence why I buy the magazine. Frank Skinner talks about being catholic, and mentions that when he was on tour with transvestite comedian Eddie Izzard, Izzard said to him, 'let's make a pact - I'll talk about being a transvestite and you talk about catholicism,' to which Skinner replied, 'no, because people in the modern world are much more accepting of transvestism than any kind of religious belief.' It's important to say that Frank Skinner is not saying that this is a bad thing. But the thing is, I don't think it's true. It should be the case though. Because transvestism is a tolerant practice, unlike a lot of religion. Skinner goes on to answer this question: 'How do you feel about the catholic church's hostility to gay and woman priests?' He replies, 'it's like it is with friends - often, there are things about them that you don't like but all the good stuff about them keeps them back...Catholics should be ahead of the game in liberating oppressed groups, not 500 years late.' Personally, I don't think it's 'like it is with friends' at all. Of course our friends do things that might annoy us (mine don't, mine are all perfect), but these are tiny things. So we might say, 'yeah he supports West Ham, but you know what? He's my friend, and we all have our foibles, and I still accept him.' We do not go, 'yeah he oppresses minorities and halts social progress and contributes massively to the spreading of aids and defends the abuse of children, but you know what? He's my friend, and we all have our foibles, and I still accept him. Ruined my wedding though.' At least he acknowledges that catholicism is '500 years late' in liberating oppressed groups, but it seems that being '500 years late' in liberating oppressed groups is an integral part of catholicism, built right into its foundations. I struggle to work out what this 'good stuff' is.

3. Oops, that turned into more ranting. Let's turn the page again... ooh, a bit about the Japanese earthquake. The thing that confused me about this was the phrase, 'the Japanese are an extraordinarily resilient people.' What, like, all of them? Generalisations like this confuse me. Of course, it's a great compliment to the Japanese people, and my thoughts are obviously with them. But I'm sure there's at least one Japanese person who isn't extraordinarily resilient. They might be more, I don't know, whatever the opposite of resilient is. I'll look it up. Apparently it's 'inflexible.' Yes, I can imagine there are at least a handful of inflexible Japanese people. But seriously, it's just that kind of hyperbole that journalists tend to use that makes me go, 'what?'. It's a very broad generalisation, and seems to be acceptable because its a positive thing to say. About an entire nation. If it was negative, it would not be acceptable. A journalist wouldn't write, 'the Japanese are an extraordinarily angry people', or, 'those French, what a bunch of cunts.' Well, unless they wrote for The Daily Mail obviously. (Which reminds me, read this.) It got me thinking about offensiveness, which is something I think about all the time. I'm not easily offended at all; my view is that people should be able to say what they want, as long as they're making a valid point. I'm a massive comedy geek and some of my favourite comedians use material that some may find offensive, but they use it to actually say something, to actually put across a valid idea. Some of my least favourite comedians use material that some may find offensive, but for no purpose, other than to be offensive, and that isn't enough. But anyway, occasionally I'll go on Facebook (that's always my first mistake) and see status updates cheering on the Yids, the affectionate nickname given to Tottenham Hotspur FC. I'm jewish, but only by race, not by belief, I hate religion, blah blah blah. And while this doesn't offend me, it does make me uncomfortable to see what is essentially a derogatory term for a people being thrown about by football fans who (hopefully) don't know what it means. I'm not saying this should stop, it's just interesting that it's acceptable in the mainstream, when equivalent words such as paki and nigger are, quite rightly, not.

4. Sorry, that also turned into more lefty blathering. I genuinely don't mean to do that. This blogs all gone a bit wrong. To reward you for your patience, here is a fantastic photo from the New Statesman:

I love the way it looks like Obama was mid-speech when Clinton burst in doing a Fonzie-style 'aaay!'

Anyway, thanks for reading this blog. It was named after a song by the brilliantly genred swing-core band Catch-it Kebabs. I will leave you with that song, enjoy!