and Offensive
anymore inappropriate, vulgar, or even more
race fuelled than before - the face of comedy had changed and Davidson either failed to
realise, or just didn’t care. Perhaps Davidson
saw himself as an anomaly; maybe he believed
a comic enjoying success for such a substantial period of time was within their right to have
that opinion, or maybe he just didn’t know what
else to joke about. Whatever viewpoint he adopted, it ultimately led his career to a withering
end.
It seems likely that Davidson believing he was
an anomaly was to his downfall, but much
like all things in life, racism in comedy has an
anomaly with many grateful up-comers ready
to exploit it. A ploy used by many comedians,
predominantly those who are relatively new to
the comedy scene, is performing jokes about
their own race or ethnicity.
Chinese comics, for example, seem to have
obtained license to joke, about Chinese race
or culture. The reasoning behind this isn’t completely clear; one argument could be that if the
so called ‘victim’ of the joke isn’t offended, the
the audience shouldn’t be either. Another potential justification is that sometimes, some
people are offended, yet as the creator of the
joke can laugh about it, why draw attention to
it?
This niche in comedy seems to be on the rise,
some comics, uprising comedienne Shappi
Khorsandi for example, has routines dedicated
to the art of making fun of her race. Her first
televised performance at ‘Live at the Apollo’
consisted almost entirely of jokes about her
Indian upbringing, (to her credit they were executed admirably) yet it appears unlikely this
genre of comedy will continue unscathed for
too much longer. Some see it as a device deployed to conceal a lack of ability to analyse
other parts of society in a humorous manner,
therefore it may be popular for a while, but
added substance will be needed to avoid just
being the flavour of the month.
Thankfully, the size and quality of comedy
seems very much to be on the rise, in turn the
tolerance to other areas of comedy appear to
be growing day by day, where a twitter apology
is often enough to soften any potential complaints. Yet tolerance towards racism has, and
rightly so, been gradually withdrawn.
As society progresses our standard of comedy
progresses with it, to the extent that in the modern day it seems that, with the aforementioned
exception, racist humour is very m Ս