Clarkson does what we no longer dare | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog
Nick Cater says we need Jeremy Clarkson on TV here because we’re too scared to make his kind of jokes ourselves:
YOU only have to read The Sydney Morning Herald to see how easy it has become to take offence and how difficult it is to crack a joke. On Friday the tabloid devoted two mirthless pages to the semantic crimes of Jeremy Clarkson, who was reprimanded for sexist, racist and homophobic humour.But now? In the age which gave us Nicola Roxon, with her proposed laws against giving “offence”?
Clarkson’s most egregious expressions were published in a handy list. He described one car as “very ginger beer”, which, as you won’t be amused to learn, is slang for a gentleman who is good with colours. He declared Romania was “Borat country, with gypsies and Russian playboys”, and proposed a design for “a quintessentially German car” with Hitler-salute turn signals and a “satnav that only goes to Poland”.
None of that should be considered the least bit funny; we can be sure that these are verbal blunders with no satirical or ironic intent because they are printed under the headline “Foot in mouth”. Nanny blogger Mia Freedman wagged a finger in all the right places, telling the Herald that Clarkson and his fellow Top Gear presenters were “dialling up sexism under the guise of ‘aren’t we being naughty boys’.” Indeed they are, Ms Freedman, and therein lies the program’s charm.
Australians, as we know, don’t make anything any more. We can’t even make people wince in a way that once came naturally; we are forced to import British television programs to satisfy our need for umbrage.
A generation ago, Australia was a net exporter of semantic subversion. The trade peaked in the early 1970s when The Adventures of Barry McKenzie introduced the upright Poms to the one-eyed trouser snake…
A year earlier, Richard Neville, then editor of the satirical magazine Oz, was charged with “conspiring to produce a magazine containing divers lewd, indecent and sexually perverted articles, drawings and illustrations”.
Politics has become a bland and humourless business in these cheerless, roxinated times. It is an offence not only to crack a joke, but to be in the proximity of the cracker. As The Australian reported in October: “Treasurer Wayne Swan admitted poor judgment yesterday for not objecting soon enough to an offensive joke.”
