4 February 2011

It's not funny because it's not funny

Jeremy Clarkson just doesn't get it

Here's the thing that offends me about Jeremy Clarkson; he thinks he's funny, but he's not. He has a psuedo-sense of humour if you will. He doesn't get what funny is and I believe this is why his interpretation of what's funny causes so much offense. That and being such an ugly bigot.

Having no sense of humour coupled with his bigotry and fancying himself as some sort of crusader for the anti-PC cause makes for such an unpleasant man you have to wonder how he's so popular. The reason of course does not reflect well on the nation.

Jeremy Clarkson said you can't have humour without offense. This is demonstrably not true and symptomatic of his inability to understand anything you can't put petrol in. Good quality comedy just has to be original, spontaneous and intelligent. Some offensive jokes are very funny, but the offensive part is usually either ironic or necessary for the joke. Jeremy Clarkson is just offensive for the sake of being offensive.

His entire sense of humour revolves around perpetuating stereotypes of various groups of people. Green campaigners, feminists, the disabled, etc etc. Usually it's nationalities though, usually the Germans. The Germans reek of sausage, Mexicans are always asleep, the French don't wash and the Italians are cowards and so on..

Everyone has prejudices of course and it's silly to take the moral high ground over them. But we must understand purely from a comedic point of view that stereotypes are not funny. They're not funny because by definition they're not original as they're just the repetition of various caricatured foibles and they're also not intelligent as anyone can repeat something they've heard somewhere else. And they can't be spontaneous either.

Perpetuating stereotypes is comedy cheating in my opinion. It's lazy and cheap and a lower form of wit than sarcasm. Clarkson's crimes against humour are worse in fact than those of Bob Monkhouse. He was an awful man. Awful. Someone so desperate for fame he was prepared to do anything to achieve it.

Bob Monkhouse had no sense of humour so he simply chose to memorise about 50,000 jokes. He had massive joke books and he'd pour over them each night so that no matter what the conversation he'd always have an amusing joke ready that fit the subject.

This gave the impression of spontaneity, but was the complete opposite. Eventually the general public couldn't take it anymore and someone volunteered to bust into his house and steel his joke books. He was devastated of course because he appreciated the consequences. This rendered him jokeless. It's no coincidence he died soon after.

It is for similar reasons Jeremy Clarkson is so vociferous about political correctness. He knows it is the panacea for his sense of humour. Without the freedom to remind us the Australians are descendants of criminals he'd only have his knowledge of cars to fall back on which is fine when he's presenting Top Gear, but would render him speechless in all other walks of life.

It is for this single reason I can't quite muster the same howls of outrage over political correctness as the rest of the nation.

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