How can we be at a stage where a comedian who makes rape jokes is fine but one who defends women is banned?
SO, let me get this right: At the Edinburgh Fringe, comedians who make jokes about killing and raping women are welcome but comedians who defend women’s rights are not?
How else are we to explain the surreal situation where Frankie Boyle, notorious cracker of misogynistic gags, is having the red carpet rolled out for him at the Fringe, while Graham Linehan, whose chief thoughtcrime is to understand what a woman is, has just been ruthlessly cancelled by one of the Fringe venues?
On Tuesday, the Leith Arches in Edinburgh pulled the plug on a comedy night organised by Comedy Unleashed, which was due to take place this week.
Mr Linehan was on the line-up, you see, and his wrongthink, his outrageous belief in biological sex, his insistence that people with penises should stay out of women-only spaces, apparently makes him morally unfit for the kingdom of comedy.
McCarthyite intentions
Yes, he may have created such comedy classics as Father Ted and Black Books.
But his embrace of “gender-critical” thinking, his solidarity with women who would prefer that men stay out of their bathrooms, refuges and sports, makes him persona non grata, it seems.
The Leith Arches’ (now deleted) announ-cement of its McCarthyite intentions was written in a fittingly infantile style.
“We DO NOT support this comedian”, their statement wailed.
“He WILL NOT be allowed to perform”, said their furious edict, clearly written by someone who loves the caps lock.
Then came the killer line: The Comedy Unleashed show is “CANCELLED . . . with immediate effect”.
It is such a craven statement.
Bom-barded with complaints by trans activists, those modern Mary Whitehouses who are hell-bent on extinguishing culture that slights their fragile souls, the Leith Arches was essentially pleading: “Please don’t come for us! We beg forgiveness for our moral error!”
When surrounded by a mob demanding the metaphorical scalp of some man or woman who has dared to utter a blasphemous thought, we have a choice.
We can either stand firm and say: “No, we will not silence this person just because he offended you.”
Or we can say: “Take him, do what you will with him, but please leave me alone.”
Courage or cowardice — that’s the fork in the road when the mob’s after you.
And the Leith Arches opted for the latter.
It opted to save its bacon rather than stand up for artistic freedom.
Surely no self-respecting comedian will agree to perform at this venue that so timidly does the bidding of liberty’s enemies.
What’s more, what a blow the Arches’ authoritarian decree must have been to those who say cancel culture is a myth; to those censorship denialists who watch as women are hounded off university campuses, sacked from their jobs and threatened with rape and death just for saying “men are not women”, and who snivellingly respond: “That’s not censorship. It’s just the consequences of their actions. Suck it up, ladies.”
The Leith Arches’ statement confirms what many of us have known for some time: That censorship is on the march.
That no sphere of culture, not even the once raucous realm of comedy, is safe from the regressive idea that people’s feelings count for more than liberty itself.
That the right of writers, artists, tweeters, feminists and comics to say what they think is true is increasingly taking second place to the right of certain activists to glide through life without ever encountering a difficult idea or sore word.
We can now see the dire consequences of the modern elevation of self-esteem over freedom — a situation where even comedy is policed, where even jokes are sacrificed to the flames of the digital inquisition.
And yet there are contradictions in cancel culture, too.
The aforementioned Frankie Boyle will be at Edinburgh, getting them rolling in the aisles of the Assembly Rooms.
This is a bloke who has long courted controversy.
His latest headline-making foray was an ironic musing on whether he would rape or kill Holly Willoughby.
Hypocrisy and prejudice
For the record, I don’t think this means Mr Boyle should be cancelled.
Of course he shouldn’t be.
Freedom of speech is for everyone, from the bland to the offensive, the lovable to the obscene.
But it is striking that a comic who says women are real is cancelled while a comic who makes jokes about abusing women is welcomed.
It speaks to a moral disarray in the cultural establishment; to a strange, swirling climate not only of censorship but also of double standards, hypocrisy and prejudice.
The blacklisting of Linehan is a black mark on the Fringe.
A once edgy festival seems to be morphing into conformity where only those who obediently bow to the new orthodoxies are welcome.
It’s not funny.
- This article first appeared in The Spectator magazine.