PC or no PC, that is the questionPC or no PC, that is the question
It may be thought, and often said, that your run-of-the-mill leftie is very hard to amuse. They look for overtones, undertones, sub-tones, grunts and "philosophy"; they assume that in everything something severe must always be afoot.
This can be disquieting for a writer who is only, for the moment, clowning.
Truly the "left" is want to take itself seriously, indeed. When you wake each morning relentlessly caught between the twin poles of socialism or barbarism it's a touch difficult to crack a smile.
Take the Communist Manifesto, for instance — there's not a jolly word in it. I ask you: where's the fun in being sentenced to centuries of class struggle? It is such notions that are sure to put a damper on your day.
"Where you goin', pa?" "Out, ma." "Out where, pa?" "Class strugglin', ma."
There's never a joke to relieve the constant tension between bourgeois and worker — one's best interests are irreconcilably hostile to those of the other. The long-term effect of such denunciation and abuse leaves precious little room for a hit and a giggle between opposing class forces. So us poor sods take it out on the missus, the mother-in-law, the local ethnic or the cat.
Perhaps you are thinking, now that Political Correctness has supposedly been overthrown, we're in for a season of frivolity. Out of mothballs come all those jokes we thought it best to frown upon.
I think not.
"Tonight's lecture", George Smilovici wrote in the Australian Journal of Comedy, "is entitled 'Comedy and Political Correctness — are they compatible?'. I was playing around with other options like, 'PC — the "final solution" to language' or 'Comic Interruptus' or 'Where's the fun in fundamentalism?' or 'Wash your language' or 'Who took the Dic out of Dictionary?'... but I didn't want to offend anybody."
Sure George. (Don't call us, we'll call you).
We lefties may seem a mordant bunch of bastards, but we know that taking the mickey out of the forever-on-hand, ubiquitous minority is all about doing someone else's dirty work for them.
So when someone laments, "Where have all the good Aborigine jokes gone?" (as the aforesaid journal once bemoaned), all I can say is that I don't care.
"Where you goin', pa?" "Out, ma." "Out where, pa?" "Same place as yesterday."
By Dave Riley