'I suggest you don’t get too relaxed with the heavy-handed presence of the public censor.' Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
Have you heard the one about the Labour WhatsApp chat that got leaked? It was called “Trigger Me Timbers” and specialised in offensive banter. Health Minister Andrew Gwynne was the first and most high-profile group member to lose his job this week, before a second MP was reprimanded by the whips. Eleven local council members were also suspended for their contributions, reportedly including Gwynne’s wife. When I read about it, I laughed. Not at the sickening depravity of these people, you should understand, but at some of their material.
In particular, the puerility of Gwynne’s imaginary letter to a constituent raised a chuckle: “Dear resident, fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.” And I also enjoyed the Alan Partridge-like specificity of his death wish towards Nick the irritating cyclist: “I had positive visions of him getting mown down by an Elsa Waste HGV while he’s cycling to the Fallowfield Loop. We couldn’t be that lucky!” Most of the other stuff wasn’t up to much, though there was a passable riff on Black History Month involving Justin Trudeau.
As others in the press queue up to pass pained judgement on all the racism, sexism, homophobia, and ageism, I find myself at a loss. It seems a kind of amnesia has collectively infected nearly everybody, and I am one of the few remaining people with immunity. For I still remember the existence of a human activity called “joking”, and a particularly mordant variety of it called “black comedy”. As I recall, it used to be quite popular in the olden days, but has since gone the way of VHS and spangles. Quite possibly, everybody now thinks the name is racist.
Even weirder, the same affliction also seems to have obliterated a meaningful difference between “public” and “private”. Reading the press coverage with half an eye, you’d be forgiven for thinking Gwynne had hired Stockport Town Hall to try out a bold new stand-up routine. “Public” has now become synonymous with “potentially leakable” — which in practice means anything written down at all. You can question participants’ wisdom in committing their gags to a group chat — and, even more so, placing trust in whichever snake in their midst eventually grassed them up — but clearly they never intended the bantz to go mainstream.
An essential element of black or dark humour is the breaking of taboos. There are flagrant transgressions of morality codes; incongruent switches between earnest and bawdy registers; knowing double meanings, referring to things that can’t otherwise easily be said. Jonathan Swift did a lot of the latter — see a poem of his called “Oyster” (“No Colchester oyster/ Is sweeter and moister/ Your stomach they settle/ And rouse up your mettle.”) In the 20th century, this style of humour became especially literary: think of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert calling the teenage Lolita, perfectly accurately, his “ageing mistress”; or Evelyn Waugh’s Basil Seal inadvertently eating his lover Prudence in a cannibal feast in the appropriately named Black Mischief.
But black comedy was in the street, playground, and pub first. In the 17th century, there were hundreds of iterations of a song called “The Black Joke”, where “joke” also stood for what one contemporary explainer called “the monosyllable” or “a woman’s commodity”. Under communism, Poles would tell gags about starvation and Jews would jokingly remember Auschwitz with fondness. Eighties America had Challenger disaster jokes, while Eastern Europeans found comedy in the aftermath of Chernobyl.
In the Nineties, the UK had the Diana version (sample: “Why is Di like a mobile phone? They both die in tunnels.”) These lines were barely about Diana the woman at all — or, indeed, about poor mobile phone reception — and much more to do with the public mood at the time. They were the privately anarchic counterpoint to the oppressively monolithic tide of grief washing over the nation, the equivalent to getting a fit of the giggles at a funeral. The more unseemly it was, the funnier it became.
Since social media is the new street corner, it’s only fitting that the fun would have migrated there. Giving a group chat a silly title is the new version of naming your pub quiz team “Gossip Girls” or “Breaking Bald”. And since moral codes are everywhere these days, the world should — in theory, anyway — be our oyster, as it were. Surrounded as we so often are by the earnest, the pinch-lipped, the fanatical and the hypocritical, verbal transgressions beckon temptingly from every angle. Yet most feel constrained from taking them up.
Part of the problem is that our age is simultaneously blighted with tedious people who want to make the whole practice of joking a taboo as well. Academics — not a demographic well-known for their airy badinage — have been doing their best on this front for ages. A joke, we are told with a stern face, creates an ingroup and an outgroup. Now, you might have thought this was superfluous information, since quite obviously it does. The outgroup is the person looking puzzled and saying “I don’t get it”, while the ingroup laughs uproariously at your lines. On the other hand, if the joke is poor, the outgroup is the odd person smirking, and the ingroup are the silent and bemused ones. That is part of the glorious jeopardy of joke-telling — will you bring these people into your world for a shared moment of laughter, or place yourself on the other side of theirs?
But it’s commonly supposed to be much worse than this. Many jokes don’t so much create outgroups as bully existing ones; they “dehumanise” and are part of “delegitimisation strategies”. They trade in racist, sexist and homophobic stereotypes; they mask aggression and contempt; they “punch down”. In vain might you point to distinguished satirical forebears. For now Swift is a misogynist, Waugh is a racist, and Nabokov is either a paedophile apologist or a kink-shamer, depending on who you are talking to.
In fact, two different things are going on here. Forty years ago, as I remember things anyway, there was no particular taboo about making jokes based on racist, sexist, or homophobic stereotypes. In my Scottish school playground, your currency as a funnyman was cemented by the number of terrible anti-Irish or anti-English jokes you could tell. Saturday-night TV lived for jokes about the ditziness of blondes, the bossiness of mothers-in-law, and the campness of gay men. Equally, though, as no taboos were being broken, these jokes didn’t count as especially “black”. Some of them were blue, but that’s different.
Yet now in the overreaching present, whole swathes of discourse have become effectively off-limits. These include not just unambiguously bigoted jokes, but any joke at all that vaguely references an ethnic minority or a woman or a gay person. If you want to be funny, you are best sticking to anodyne puns or Christmas cracker fodder, and even then the whole process can feel dangerously freighted with risk. To some, it is a time for repressing any intrusive comic thought at all for fear of what comes next. But for other more anarchic souls, it’s exactly the right time to start a WhatsApp group called “Trigger Me Timbers”.
That’s because making jokes the target of modern morality codes has enabled a whole new variety of black humour, where it didn’t previously exist. Now you can deliberately transgress those codes for shock value and the amusement of your mates. The more ponderously sanctimonious, humourless, and offence-seeking your conspecifics become, the greater the urge to puncture the mood by making a joke about some sacred totem of theirs: pensioners, say, or gay men, or Diane Abbott. And that was what Gwynne and co. were clearly doing in their group chat, at least partly. They were in the Labour Party, for God’s sake.
When the context is Stalinist Russia, black jokes against the regime, muttered on street corners to trusted confidantes, are viewed as a noble assertion of the indomitability of the human spirit. When you are in a Labour group chat slagging off Angela Rayner, it seems they most definitely are not. Gwynne’s edgelord schtick may not be to your personal taste, and you may be enjoying his demise for political reasons. Still, I suggest you don’t get too relaxed with the heavy-handed presence of the public censor. For all you know, it could be Breaking Bald next.
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SubscribeLet us remember the Guardian’s trust is reputedly founded on Slavery money- is this true or is it a myth ? .
Who cares? The days when a self-selected and hypocritical elite could tell the rest of us what to think and expect us to doff our flat caps and say ‘aye aye yer honner’ will soon be gone for ever.
Democracy is coming.
Shutting both the titles would make the world a happier place!
The hypocrisy and double dealing of the Guardian’s business decisions should hardly come as a surprise.
Guardian Media Group, when it sold its 50% stake in Auto Trader to Apax Partners in 2008, used a tax-exempt shell company in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying corporation tax. GMG realised over £300 million in profit on that sale – yet paid not a sou in Corporation tax. This was all perfectly legal.
Over the years Guardian Media Group has invested hundreds of millions in offshore hedge funds. Keeping it under the radar and beyond the grasp of HMRC. Again, all perfectly legal.
And yet, the high-minded journalists of the Guardian love nothing more than thundering their disapproval of large multinationals – Starbucks, Apple, Vodafone etc – and the unnamed “super-rich” not “paying their fair share.”
Guardian columnists (especially Nick Cohen before his excommunication) regularly get their knickers in a bunch over such tax avoidance – though oddly never train their guns on their employer, the sanctimonious Scott Trust. Why do multinationals warrant such opprobrium whilst GMG escape any criticism? What, pray, is the difference? They too are not breaking laws, merely using every legal loophole they can find to their best advantage.
After the Panama Papers story brought a lot of this to light there were many (individuals and companies) who leapt to their own defence, suggesting that even their most opaque business dealings were legal – according to the letter of the law – yet that simply wasn’t good enough for Guardian journalists who sniffily pointed out that such obfuscation was immaterial. They might be legal by the letter of the law, but not by the spirit.
Hey ho, merely another chapter in the ongoing ‘do as we say, not as we do’ saga that is the Guardian’s entire modus operandi.
As I noted the other day, the Guardian is by far the most destructive publication in the UK. Its circulation is paltry, yet its influence is pervasive and pernicious. The Guardian has an “on-air” wing in the shape of the BBC. It is also required reading for the legions of metropolitan fauxialists who manage practically every quango and institution in the country. Not to mention that it is the go-to news source for the vast majority of the teaching profession.
So although circulation figures are ever dwindling, it informs the worldview of a great many people who influence the agenda and shape the country’s -and our children’s – future. The Britain hating, race-baiting, class-envy, history-revisionist, climate-catastrophising, woke, pc leftist clap-trap that we all complain about, is in large part down to the Guardian dripping its poison every day, thirstily imbibed by readers who influence and skew the national discourse.
The G’s ongoing narrative is wholly at odds with reality – they have a dystopian worldview and narrative predicated on catastrophism – it seems almost as though they are willing such a future into existence, Presumably so they can console themselves in a sanctimonious circle-jerk of “I told you so”.
The Guardian proudly trumpets “Comment is free… but facts are sacred”. Yet facts are so routinely ignored in favour of their preferred narrative that I wonder how the Editors still put out CP Scott’s dictum every day with a straight face.
And of course Comment is decidedly not Free on the Graunaid’s web-site. See how long a comment in suppport of, say, foxhunting, lasts before it is deleted.
Anyone who “donates” even a brass razoo to The Grauniad needs their head well examined. I agree with all your opinions and the facts are beyond dispute.
Ah the morality of the left . Sacrificing humans and families for reward.
This Observer/Guardian/Scott Trust kerfuffle has many of the elements of an episode of Midsomer. So many characters, plot and subplots. So many unknowns.
This article is inaccurate insofar as the Guardian barely has any reputation left to damage.
True enough.
It’s amusing to read lefty journalists that think that ink-stained wretchdom is a sacred trust. Maybe you chaps should transform the Guardian / Observer into a Church of Activism. Or something.
I remember back in ‘93 when the Observer effectively became the Sunday Grauniad. The late great Paul Johnson wrote at the time, “What do you Guard? For whom do you Observe?”.
Yes. I used to be a faithful reader of The Observer until it became clear, following The Guardian‘s takeover, that the paper’s ethos had been ruined by ‘progressive’ prejudice. It can never be the same as it was, but new ownership might change it for the better. We’ll have to wait and see.
“Moreover, The Guardian and the Trust are sitting on a £1.3 billion cash mountain, with millions added every year from donations by readers of its website and figures such as Bill Gates.”
Now that’s a story I’d like to read: where does the Trust/Guardian get most of its money? Apart from Gates, are any other billionaires footing the bill and why?
Ironically given its editorial enthusiasm for taxing the rest of us, the Trust was originally set up to avoid inheritance tax and has since been re-constituted multiple times to be more tax efficient since.
It’s money comes from owning print titles and investing in new media. It is very cash rich largely because it sold off assets over the last decade or so, including the Autotrader title for £600m.
The Autotrader was it’s saving at the time, the Guardian had 50% and flogged it off. It has no paywall but gets subs from it’s wokie readers and can always tap up the Lord Alli set for bigger amounts than the £15 a year most people would offer.
The Guardian doesn’t like talking about the Autotrader reading class these days, it considers them part of Hillary’s deplorable class of people.
Basically now it’s a glorified blog site wittering rather than reporting, with a shrunken news site and even more shrunken print version.
Having its stories circulated on Twitter/X (which they still are despite it flouncing off officially) is a two-edged sword as it acts as much as a don’t bother paying, as a come-on.
The Gardian goes cap in hand to its readers every day, telling them how poor it is and how much it needs their donations to keep going.
I was thinking of throwing my hat into the ring with an offer to buy both The Gaurdian and The Observer. Moreover, I would pledge to retain all existing staff and columnists. I would, however, make one tiny change by adding the strapline The Home Of Satire below the banner. None of the staff would get the joke, but then they don’t realise how funny they really are. There’s irony in that, as well as satire.
Try: off-guardian.org
The rush is probably the Guardian is still losing money and a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush,
Business is volatile and they are smart to take the opportunity before them.
The Guardian newspaper itself may lose money but the Scott Trust has more than enough to cover it. Guardian Media Group also includes various other profitable media businesses and a new media venture capital fund.
The simple answer is that the Trust has had a strategy of selling-off legacy media holdings for the last 15 years, including things like regional print media and local radio. Selling the Observer title is just the next step. Their online brand is already consolidated under the Guardian banner, so it makes little sense to maintain a separate Sunday operation.
The Observer seems to have made £3.4 million last year. Not very much, but still enough to make it odd that the Scott Trust might be preparing to pay the lossmaking Tortoise Media to take it away.
Still, it is clear from yesterday’s edition that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are just super, so on what grounds might anyone object to the title’s acquisition by the decidedly non-lossmaking BlackRock?