Who’s trying to ban humour?
I’m sure a lot of you have heard that the UK may be about to pass a law intended to ban “incitement to religious hatred”, which plugs a loophole in the existing law on racial hatred. Apparently a group of comedians including Rowan Atkinson (best known for the BBC TV series Mr Bean) are frightened that merely making well-known jokes about different religious groups will cause them to fall foul of the law.
The Evening Standard, yesterday, quoted a few jokes which campaigners think might break this new law:
A Jewish grandmother was in the park with her two small children and met an old friend. Exchanging greetings, the friend asks: “And these must be your grandchildren. How old are they?”
“Well,” says the grandmother, “the doctor is four and the lawyer is two.”
What does a Jehovah’s Witness do when she loses her faith?
She rings your doorbell for no reason.
Now, there was a time when Jewish mama jokes would have been thoroughly unacceptable, for obvious reasons, but now they are just irrelevant, except perhaps to Jews. In this country, nobody knows someone’s Jewish until they tell you, unless they are obviously the religious Jews who are easy to tell from their clothing, and mostly live in north London. The first joke could, in fact, just as easily be told about Indian mothers (or indeed fathers) – I remember watching two episodes of the BBC’s Indian comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, which ended with Spitting Image-style reworked pop songs. In this case it was Paul Simon’s Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover redone as Fifty Ways to Leave Your Mother. People used to be sensitive about anti-Semitism when Jews were still seen as a persecuted minority, but most of these jokes would be seen as just irrelevant to people who have never met real east European Yiddish-speaking Jews.
As for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, these people take it upon themselves to knock on doors to proselytise, not knowing if the people inside the houses are in any mood to talk about religion. People also complain about “charity muggers”, people who try and stop you in the street to sign you up for direct debits to their charities. But JWs have been round for considerably longer, so there’s going to be more jokes about them, and (unlike in some countries) there is no question of them being persecuted for their beliefs, or for their refusal to do military service, as has happened in Eritrea for example.
None of the jokes the Evening Standard cites actually mock any actual religion (except for a Zen pun, where a Buddhist says to a hot-dog vendor, “make me one with everything”). They mock the attitudes of members of certain religions, such as a nun who, when a girl says she’d like to be a prostitute when she grows up, she asks her to repeat herself and then says “thank God! I thought you said a Protestant”. But actually, people do take offence to people mocking their religion, as religion is precious to a religious person.
It seems that every time the issue of offensive “humour” comes up, the right-wing press will always speak up in defence of this type of humour. A while ago the Daily Mail printed a whole page or more full of offensive jokes, most of which I’d never heard before. And it really does no good – mocking other people always lowers the tone of any discussion. Why can’t people joke about things everybody can find funny? It’s rather like the school bullies who say that their attacks are “only a joke” when in fact they are hurtful, and the joke is only for the people making it.
As for whether these jokes could fall foul of a “religious hatred” law, I don’t see how they could given that there’s no hate in them, except if they were issued within the context of a screed attacking a particular religious group. In the 19th century there were actually showmen who travelled with anti-Catholic presentations which mocked the Catholic religion, and also travelling anti-Catholic orators who caused riots. If these sorts of people crop up today, they need to be taken out of circulation in order to keep the peace, because otherwise individuals in the communities affected will take their own action, which of course will lead to a further upsurge in hostility, as has recently happened in the Netherlands.
I would suggest that the law on racial hatred be changed to one on “communal hostility”, based on race, religion, caste or other non-criminal basis. This way, the emphasis is placed on the hatred or hostility, and it lessens the possibility of making criminals of people who tell old jokes and engage in reasonable debate about any religion.
