The racism tightrope
Frankie Boyle's USP is the guilty laugh. If Jimmy Carr is 10 on the guilty laugh scale, Frankie Boyle is 11. Sometimes you might find yourself laughing, even though you don't want to. And guilty laughs can be the best ones - think of the times you had to try and suppress a giggle in the classroom, or in church, or whatever. (My mind wanders back to a cub scout carol service back in about 198something when the boy sitting next to me deliberately sang "bum" instead of "balm" in To Be A Pilgrim, and I dissolved into a quivering heap of guilty laughter for about half an hour, no matter how hard I tried.)
Is he racist? I'm not so sure, but the thing with trying to walk that racism tightrope is that every now and then you're going to fall off. In this respect, he's not much different from Rod Liddle at the Spectator or Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail - always trying to go for the laugh, no matter how offensive it might be seen by some people, and so long as there's a sliver of deniability in there somewhere.
What's irritating is that the least obviously racist thing he does - using racial swears in the context of assuming that someone else is saying them - is the latest target, after Katie Price had a crack at Boyle the other week. I've done it myself with words like 'darkie' or the term 'Bongobongoland'. Does that make me a racist? I don't think so, but maybe I'm wrong on that one. On the other hand, when he makes a joke about Venus Williams's pubic hair being like velcro, well, is that OK because it didn't contain a racial taboo word?
If you've been to a comedy club, you'll know that the stuff Boyle comes out with is pretty small potatoes - away from television, jokes about rape, paedophilia, disability, race and everything else are sprinkled around, and get roaring laughs as well. But this is the recorded medium, and Boyle is someone who's in the firing line. You don't have to be a genius to see why he was a target while working for the BBC from their natural enemies; now he's working for the Sun as a columnist, it's the same again.
When you go and walk the racism tightrope, as Boyle does, and as Liddle and Littlejohn do from time to time, you are going to fall off every now and then. Sometimes it's so close to the knuckle it's halfway down to the elbow. And people have every right to complain - if they're offended, if they don't like it, if they think it's pretty feeble material, if they think it's plain just not funny, if they think it denigrates the people who are bringing it out. That's all fine. (That's a step away from calling for a ban, just to clarify. I might detest pretty much everything Littlejohn ever writes but I don't want to see him banned. Loathed by the vast majority of his readers, or fired, or fall in front of a bus*, fine - but banned? No.)
So where does that leave us? Frankie Boyle is trying to push the boundaries. Is he a modern-day Lenny Bruce? Probably not. Is he just trying to get guilty laughs? I reckon so. Sometimes he hits the target as well and makes me laugh - sometimes he doesn't. I don't take offence, but then again I'm not in any category who could take offence, so perhaps I'm not in a position to judge just how offensive these things are. Sometimes Jimmy Carr strays over the line from representing a comic persona whose one-liners are misogynistic into sounding like someone who's just a misogynist. But people laugh. Whether it's a guilty laugh or not, I don't know, but they do. Is it OK for Richard Littlejohn to make jokes about suicide? Sure, it's OK for him to do it, but I don't find them funny, and it's my right to say I think it stinks, and there's no justification for it, and, above all, it's not fucking funny.
Is Frankie Boyle all that different? Not really. Is there an important part of comedy that should be challenging, should push the boundaries, should take risks, even on television? I think there probably is. Does that mean people can just be out-and-out offensive towards minorities and get away with it? Well yes, in principle, I suppose; but it's the job of anyone who values the output of a broadcaster or publication to demand higher standards than that, and to demand that comedy, if it is offensive, is at the very least funny in the first place to someone. Is Tramadol Nights funny? I don't know, I saw the first one and haven't watched since. That was enough for me.
Further reading: Brokenbottleboy - Frankie Boyle is Bernard Manning in a suit made of irony
Indian Poof - Frankie Boyle a racist???
* Not really, of course.
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December 23rd, 2010 - 15:46
*not really of course (but maybe, a little, not much, but kind of, ish?!?!)
December 23rd, 2010 - 15:54
Hmmm… I do think Frankie’s actually a bit more sophisticated than people give him credit for (I think his whole shtick is to some extent a satire on modern media trends), but maybe that’s just me. Plus I find the concept of a ginger Glaswegian alcoholic making a living from being as offensive as humanly possible funny in it’s own right. Maybe you need to be Scottish to fully appreciate that one…
Does he offend me? Yes, occasionally. If you’re not offended by him from time to time, then you’ve lost all feeling. That’s (at least partly) the point, isn’t it? He’s the dark mirror held up to our own debased humanity and the hideous excrescences it produces in the media. Then again, maybe I’m just making excuses for my own jaded, misanthropic nature…
And yes, he does get it wrong sometimes. That’s what happens when you take chances. I’d far rather that than all the anodyne crap that’s been focus-grouped to death…
December 23rd, 2010 - 16:18
Irony irony irony. In today’s Daily Mail their report on the Boyle racism outrage contain a quote from someone from a group that campaigns to improve relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West.
And the Daily Mail is really good at doing that arn’t they?
The Mail also complains that Boyle made jokes about Muslims women wearing burkas. Oh and they don’t have a problem with Muslim women wearing burkas do they? Nah!
The message is clear….
We can be racist because we are the great and the good tabloid press. Anyway we arn’t racist it’s just that those wet lefty liberals say we are!
December 23rd, 2010 - 16:22
I actually watched this particular episode of Tramadol Nights and, to be brutally frank, you’d have to be a total moron not to realise that Boyle was taking the piss out of racism.
The only tightrope that Frankie was walking on that show was the one where the comedian knows perfectly well that some people are incapable of looking beyond the ‘bad words’ to see and understand the context in which they’re being used.
December 23rd, 2010 - 16:37
Sadowitz ain’t ginger and hasn’t always lived in Glasgow but he’s (a) much angrier and (b) a lot more fun.
December 23rd, 2010 - 16:49
http://www.tombeasley.uni.cc/2010/12/23/tramadol-nights-edgy-comedy-reaches-boyle-ing-point/
I’ve written a post on Tramadol Nights and the race issue here.
December 23rd, 2010 - 16:58
If we’re judging whether Frankie Boyle is a racist on the basis of the Tramadol Nights routine then no, he’s not a racist.
This issue seems to have confused people because the words he used were so raw: if he’d said ‘fuzzy wuzzie’ instead of p*ki then the satire, which it was, wouldn’t have been misinterpreted. It’s a fairly heavy-handed kind of satire which seems to have wrong-footed a lot of normally sensible people (and the Daily Mail).
December 24th, 2010 - 09:43
“It’s a fairly heavy-handed kind of satire which seems to have wrong-footed a lot of normally sensible people”
Probably precisely because they are exactly the people it was aimed at.
Thinking more about this, the thing that really strikes me is that people have got their backs up about what is probably the most legitimately satirical material in the entire series so far. It’s not like there hasn’t been plenty of not-very-funny, gratuitously offensive material with no redeeming satirical value whatsoever to complain about.
December 23rd, 2010 - 19:43
I definitely think Boyle is different from Littlejohn. The reason being that for Littlejohn, the motive is to be hateful and he just feebly attempts to be funny along the way, but for Frankie the motive is to be funny via the medium of being offensive. I can’t prove this is the case but it strongly feels that way. For example, I’ve never got the impression that Frankie is actually prejudiced against any group, but you can’t say the same thing for Littlejohn.
December 23rd, 2010 - 22:49
Try and find a reference to this on or in the Sun, incidentally. You won’t, even though normally they’d be up in arms over such a potential slight on “Our Boys”. Same with the Katie Price thing, something they’d also usually cover in excruciating detail. Funny that, eh?
December 24th, 2010 - 12:22
It’s a mistake to look at all the instances of racist language in this episode through the same lens. True, when he was discussing the way the media reports war, he was satirising their lazy white-centric reporting, and similarly for the Ministry of War gag.
But those aren’t the only instances of racist language in the show. If the early sketch of the woman dressed as Mario saying “hello to all you Pakis out there” was satirising something, I must confess it was too sophisticated for me to grasp. I mean maybe it was to do with moral relativism, because Boyle’s professor character did describe it as “probably wrong,” but really it seems like the whole joke was just a set-up to justify saying something beyond the pale. Nothing against that, of course, but when you’ve already got the actually-funny gag of the mushroom ejaculating coins I question exactly what the tacked-on shock racism was supposed to achieve.
More telling, I thought, was where Boyle compared watching his wife give birth to catching her being unfaithful. It was always a “black cock” that she was being unfaithful with; the phrase was repeated several times. Why black? It didn’t seem to affect the context of the joke, just tie into the old (and somewhat dehumanising) myths of size and sexual prowess.
I appreciate Paul Sinha (the Indian Poof link)’s take on this; he couldn’t really criticise Boyle for using language like that because he does it himself and surely racial equality isn’t served by denying the same analytical view to people who aren’t targeted by it. But on the other hand is racial equality particularly well served by Tramadol Nights’ approach? It didn’t feel particularly like it when the black newsreader was getting a faceful of Cookie Monster spunk.
But maybe I’m falling into the trap that so many reviewers have with Tramadol Nights. Boyle has made it clear that he’s not interested in the quality of his material, only what boundaries it pushes. He has the excuse that any cut material was “too edgy” rather than “not funny” so the channel doesn’t dare push him to cut, to tighten, to question whether a roll-on gag is worth pursuing. Which is why a lot of the sketches feel way too long and rambling (the Knight Rider one and the History of PCP come to mind) and the show as a whole feels kind of lazy. I really like Frankie Boyle but the irony is he needs to push against those boundaries; take them away and he feels like he’s not trying.
December 24th, 2010 - 12:51
“I don’t take offence, but then again I’m not in any category who could take offence”?
An unfair, discriminatory or stereotyped attack on any group is an attack on the idea of equality. As someone who believes in equality, I am in a group that takes offence at such attacks, whoever the named target is.
Whether Boyle’s comedy is actually discriminatory in this instance is a separate issue, but the idea that if you’re white you can’t take offence at racism is nonsense.
December 24th, 2010 - 13:28
The tabloids are taking the moral high ground in leading the outrage. But they are racist (with the exception of The Daily Mirror who is a pretend left-wing tabloid) but what they do is try to show they are less racist than other racists.
The main point is that whatever racist jokes or gags comedians like Frankie Boyle come out with, regardless of how offensive or sick they may be, the racism of the tabloid press is far far worse and far more dangerous.
Why? Because their racism is presented as fact. The Mail, The Sun and The Daily Star peddle racist lies about immigrants, asylum seekers and Muslims which they portray to their readers as being factual news and the way things are in this country.
Boyle, or another comic making Pxxi or other jokes may be offensive but they are just jokes. But when the tabloids write and publish stories about Muslims trying to ban Christmas or Britain being “swamped” by immigrants they have far great social consequences than any joke a comedian can tell. The jokes are fiction, the news stories are presented as fact, regardless of whether they are or not, and nine times out of ten they are not.
Those race relations pressure groups seeking to news the tabloid media to exploit the controversy about Boyle’s programme for their own agendas (however worthy their agendas are) should be asking themselves whether those newspapers who they are eager to give their quotes of outrage to are suitable outlets for them to promote their causes.
January 9th, 2011 - 06:06
I just think his material about the disabled (both on and off this show) are not unalike to jokes about other races from the 1970′s: lazy stereotypes.