Why were we exposed to McEnroe? We were only boys. How could we resist the pressure to play tennis, to wear short shorts and elasticated terry towelling headbands? Broadcasting McEnroe should have been illegal.

The French seem to have understood. A law progressing through the French parliament bans modelling agencies from using skinny models. This will protect French girls who would otherwise be forced to copy them. Being skinny is bad. People should not be allowed to encourage it with skinny models. Of course, being fat is bad too. I wonder why the French parliament did not also ban fat models. And fat actresses. Don’t they know there is a global obesity epidemic?
Tennis and fat aren’t the only areas where setting bad examples should be illegal. One of our neighbours wears short skirts. Some people say that how a woman dresses is no one else’s business. They are wrong. I have a 12-year-old daughter. When she sees our neighbour she will be forced to wear short skirts too. Shouldn’t 12-year-old girls be protected from this pressure to wear short skirts? In a society that cares about children, women cannot be allowed to dress as they choose. The government should issue a national dress code.

And what about Jennifer Lopez? For years she has been making women with small or unshapely bottoms feel inadequate. Many have been forced to undergo surgical procedures to make their bottoms larger and rounder. Surgery! Yet our politicians just sit back and let Ms Lopez go on and on, year after year. And I need hardly explain the terrible social cost of the decades-long toleration of Dolly Parton.

The French parliament has taken an important step. More must follow. There are so many bad examples to ban.

The post Bad Examples appeared first on Standpoint.

I recently signed up to Netflix in the hope of finding things to watch when wishing to relax. Inevitably I go straight to “documentaries” and watch a newish film called The Last Nazis. The filmmakers — youngish men and women — are ostensibly in search of the few remaining Nazi criminals and on their “journey” find one old man who tells them that he can remember nothing while plying them with drink and another who gives them a meal while playing a sweet old man act. They fail to discover anything about their subjects and — ill-briefed and apparently unwilling to ask any probing questions — they plainly cannot do their job. The film is a dud, a wash-out: they didn’t get the story.

Except that then you realise that in their view they did. For this is not about the Nazis, it is all about them. A young woman does a piece to camera saying how freaky it is sitting in a room with someone who may have done all of these terrible things. One of the filmmakers says they almost felt sorry for one of the men but know they shouldn’t have. This is utterly typical of the zeitgeist. “How sitting in a room with an ex-Nazi affected me” is the sort of thing which now makes copy. Worming your way down to the truth by comparison seems not just a lot more work but so dated.

***

If there is one place on earth still running something analogous to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany it is North Korea. Satellite images and a tiny number of surviving defectors have proven the existence of these camps. Yet consider two recent, randomly selected examples of the day-to-day coverage of North Korea. The Daily Mail headlines a piece: “Summer’s here . . . and the Un has got his hat on! North Korean dictator dons jaunty headgear for farm visit.” The next day’s Telegraph showed more new photographs of the leader with the headline insight that “Kim Jong-un appears to be losing his personal battle of the bulge, with new photos released by state media showing the North Korean dictator straining the seams of a pinstripe suit.”

North Korea is not an easy problem to solve. But is the transformation of Kim Jong-un into an ugly minor celebrity, whom everyone can laugh at, our way of coping with this fact — or a demonstration of an absolutely barbarous flippancy?

***

Speaking of flippancy, if there is one thing we must now never be flippant about it is transsexualism. The transformation of a reality show celebrity and former Olympic gold medallist called Bruce Jenner into Caitlyn Jenner seems to have brought the issue of “T”s to the fore. Anyone who has read Jan (formerly James) Morris’s description of his sex-change operation in Morocco in the 1970s will know that these are not things people go through lightly. But as so often, in an effort to “catch up” public opinion goes too far and the opinion-enforcers become impossibly demanding. It currently seems to have become wrong not just to question anything about Jenner’s decision, but to refer to his previous name or put “her” in quotation marks even for when “she” was a “he”. One Guardian writer put Jenner’s “fathering” of children in scare-quotes as though it was fictional. Strangest of all is that everybody, from the US President down, is meant to find the new Caitlyn Jenner beautiful.

But what about those people who have neither the money nor the bone structure to be transformed in this way? What about people who transform into rather plain or even dowdy women instead of these Annie Leibovitz-airbrushed beauty pageant queens? Will we celebrate them? Must it be forbidden to joke about them? Ought it to be considered bad form not to find them attractive?  I see minefields ahead.

The post Nazis And Narcissism appeared first on Standpoint.

Snakes, he told me, turn up in the unlikeliest books — dystopian novels, biographies, exotic cookbooks. However prepared he thought he was, the word “snake” would jump off pages at him, triggering the same pulse-racing fear he would have felt had a real snake slithered out of the book’s spine, like a suitably vertebrate bookmark.

I was thinking about Snake Man (I forget his real name) when I saw a recent inflammatory op-ed in the Columbia University student newspaper. Four female undergraduates consider the ways in which texts and other material studied in literature classes make some students uncomfortable.

They put forward a case for “trigger warnings” — advance alerts to potentially “offensive” material such as rape scenes or racial violence (the term has been hanging around US campuses for more than a year now), and caution against marginalisation. They write:

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a fixture of Lit Hum [Literature Humanities], but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.

Sadly, these ill-conceived views are not confined to Columbia. Although trigger warnings are yet to catch on in the UK, students at a number of US universities, including Santa Barbara in California and the University of Michigan, have also requested them. Some professors are already supplying trigger warnings for their courses.

It makes you wonder how students sensitive enough to require a trigger warning would cope with reading the warning itself, where there is little to soften the impact of the description of the very thing they’re trying to avoid. This is prime territory, after all, for encountering a “snake” in the grass.

Beyond that, however, and more disconcerting, is the emphasis here on the offensiveness of the “Western canon”. The term crops up three times in the Columbia Spectator article, a piece of writing no longer than this page, alongside other references to “Western society” and the “Western world”. For this isn’t just about student welfare. What begins as a cry for sensitivity in teaching difficult topics descends quickly into what is in fact a complaint about the dominance of Western thought. Trigger warnings are here revealed for what they really are: tools not merely for censoring febrile material for the few, but for redressing the balance of canonical literature.

Students are kicking back against what they perceive as “a set of universal, venerated, incontestable principles and texts that have founded Western society”. These are texts, they seem to say, which cannot speak to them, at least not without causing offence in the process. What is wanted is something to counterbalance the weight of tradition.  

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of the founding texts of Western literature, is an easy target. One student, they report, a survivor of sexual assault, felt “triggered” when studying Ovid’s descriptions of Daphne and Persephone, who are abducted by the gods Apollo and Hades respectively. In the case of the former, Apollo, stung by Cupid’s arrow, pursues the young Daphne because he wants to marry her. As she flees he prays she will not trip and harm herself. He is inspired by divine Love to grab her, but as he does so she changes into a laurel tree. Apollo ravages the tree.

Leaving aside the point that many Western texts have Indo-European roots, the kind of culturally and socially representative approach to literature that the Columbia students seem to desire could never address the problem of sensitivity. It’s not as though rape, war, and racism are any less endemic to life than they are to world literature. The canonical 18th-century Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, contains scenes of pillage. There are violent episodes in Ramayana, a Sanskrit epic not unlike Homer’s Odyssey. It is impossible to create a blanket warning to protect against every anxiety. Not that the problem lies with literature, or even, as the Columbia students seem to believe, with the methods of teaching it. It lies, rather, with the readiness with which some of these young people are imposing themselves upon the material they are given to study.

It is one of the great joys of reading to imagine yourself in another person’s shoes, but when doing so triggers intrusive thoughts the book needs to be read in a different way, rather than not read at all.

Snake Man required hypnosis and cognitive behavioural therapy to recover from his phobia. As part of his therapy, he was encouraged to confront his fear, which entailed reading about snakes and eventually touching one at a children’s petting zoo.

While the same approach would not work for all anxieties, there is something to be said for reading as a means of desensitisation. Given time, studying Ovid’s rape scenes in the context of a mythical world populated by gods and hybrid creatures could have a distancing rather than a triggering effect. What this wouldn’t do, however, is diminish the more damaging idea that rumbles beneath some requests for trigger warnings — the idea that it’s the Western canon, rather than its readers, that is out of touch.

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First, then, the definition. In 1861 the Clarendon Commission identified nine old schools that were thought to qualify, including Charterhouse, Rugby, St Paul’s and the very wealthy foundation of Merchant Taylors’. The public schools, as the term betrays, came into being as schools that in some way served the nation, as the three great collegiate schools at Winchester, Eton and Westminster have done for many centuries.  David Turner lays much emphasis on the role played by the first school to have been imbued from the start with the humanist principles of the Northern Renaissance, St Paul’s, founded by John Colet in around 1509. It was national because it served the elite of the national capital (if parents could not pay the cost of wax candles to be taken to school every day, their children would not be welcome — no cheap, smelly, vulgar tallow here!); and at various points in its history it was favoured by the high-born as well as by the professional classes, without ever having large numbers of boarders.

Their patronage by professional parents is, as Turner shows, the most interesting thing about these schools, even about Eton and Harrow: far from cultivating an exclusive poshness, there has always been space for those whose less grand parents sought advancement for their children. They have been a ladder for social ascent even when the quality of education they have offered has left something to be desired. Admittedly, they have been expensive, and are becoming more so as the facilities they offer are transformed into those of five-star hotels. There have never been enough scholarships, and to win one of those it helps to have been educated first at a very good prep school, which itself will be costly, so breaking into the system has never been easy. This problem has become more acute as middle-class parents find themselves without the means to pay the fees demanded, and the schools themselves have become increasingly reliant on foreign students, from China, Russia and elsewhere.

That, of course, takes one to the moral dilemma. Why should the excellent education on offer at Westminster and Winchester be so hard for people of modest or even middling means to obtain? We might be willing to pay for education, as we might also be willing to pay for private healthcare, but there remains at the back of our brains a moral scruple that itches a little. To some extent, this issue was addressed when a large number of schools inhabited a middle ground between grammar schools and public schools, in the Direct Grant system of scholarships that Labour swept away in the 1970s. These schools, it is true, were hobbled by the heavy representation among their governors of local government representatives; in this way their independence was compromised. When the Direct Grant ceased, Labour expected these schools to turn comprehensive or to shrivel, but many of them became completely independent and flourished as never before. Then there was the Assisted Places scheme set up by the Conservatives to provide scholarships at an even larger range of schools, including some of the ancient ones; the very first act of Blair’s new government was to sweep that system away as well.

The argument was about buying privilege, about the ease with which those who emerged from these schools could make their way in the City, in the professions or indeed in political life. It paid rather little attention to the main task of these schools, which was to educate. In the 19th century, the ideal of educating the whole person came more and more into focus; and the Clarendon Commission worried about the usefulness of the teaching that was offered in the nine schools it examined: plenty of Greek and Latin, but where were modern languages? Even mathematics was often treated with disdain. I can vouch for the fact that the cases David Turner cites in his book of science-less education around 1900 still occurred in the second half of the 20th century. I was asked at the age of 13, “Do you wish to do Greek, or do you wish to do science?” I very much wanted to do Greek, so I left school without any qualification in science (other than plenty of mathematics). 

It was the sort of school where the number of boys achieving Oxbridge awards each year was a matter of great pride; but that did not cancel out an insistence on building character that has been typical of these schools at least since Dr Arnold’s time at Rugby. Education was understood in a broad sense, and was not simply measured by exam grades. Once upon a time headmasters insisted that their schools provided training in “leadership”; nowadays talk of this aspect is rather muted. Yet, as Turner’s book shows, it cannot be entirely bad if there are places that produce a disproportionate number of eminent scientists, prominent politicians, great generals, and some of the leading young actors in this country. And this is even truer if, as he maintains, these schools have opened up opportunities for the middle classes, helping people work their way further up the social ladder. That rather few of those helped in this way have come from working-class backgrounds reflects the ending of the Assisted Places scheme and similar projects. 

In late-13th-century Florence you were at a serious disadvantage, in theory at least, if you came from one of the more eminent families, the so-called magnates. A culture of inverted snobbery came into being, with all the complications one might expect: people redesignated themselves as members of the popolo (“people”), adopting surnames such as Popoleschi in case anyone missed the point. In other words, there was plenty of opportunity to maintain the pretence of being just an ordinary bloke, while nothing could be further from the truth.  Much the same happened in ancient Rome, where patricians opted for plebeian status, like the infamous careerist Clodius, who was really a Claudius but could not become Tribune of the People while he was of patrician status (his scandalous infiltration of the rites of the Vestal Virgins, dressed as a woman, is a good story, but not relevant here). This wish to be counted as of the people is once again a characteristic of champagne socialists, but it is widespread across British society; its badge is the glottal stop that replaces the letter “t” in the speech of Harriet Harman and others. 

In case all this seems a digression from the topic of public schools, consider this. The Office of Fair Access (Offa) has entered into agreements with universities to ensure that they are making a full effort to identify disadvantaged students and offering them the financial and other support they will need. The “Guidance to the Director of Fair Access” issued by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills threatens that universities that fail to meet their target without good reason will be banned from charging the full fee of £9,000 per student. The real problem comes further down the line, as universities propose their way of addressing these demands. In Cambridge, it is assumed that one can measure the proportion of relatively disadvantaged students by increasing the number of state school entrants so that it matches the proportion of students in state schools who secure three A grades at A-level. It is hard to think of a cruder, more misshapen measuring stick. The category of state schools includes the remaining grammar schools as well as leading sixth-form colleges (which may be carefully selective), and a high percentage of the children coming from these schools also come from what can fairly be called middle-class backgrounds. Some children have switched from independent schools to state schools, such as a very good sixth-form college in Cambridge, to ensure that they are listed as state school entrants. In any case, something like 31 per cent of children in independent schools receive some financial support from the school so that they can continue to be educated there.

Everyone should applaud attempts to encourage children from genuinely disadvantaged backgrounds to apply to the best universities. That, indeed, is what Offa says it aims to achieve.  Much good work is done at leading universities to attract such candidates. But admissions tutors have also sometimes imposed quotas, and have told their colleagues that they can have no more boys and girls from public schools above the assigned number, forcing them to admit academically inferior candidates who may be ill-prepared for the demands of a top university and will struggle to keep up with their peers. Meanwhile, good students have been sent away with their tail between their legs, assured that they did not meet the standards required, when the real reason for rejection was positive discrimination.  The catchphrase “well-taught” sometimes signifies: “comes from an academic public school”.

Quotas leave many of us very uneasy. Years ago I came across a book in Cambridge University Library that tried to defend Mussolini’s regime, then in power in Italy. Surely, the author argued, it was necessary to address the over-representation of Jews among university professors in Italy? No one is suggesting that this discrimination is on that scale, but I would suggest that it lies along the same spectrum.

Positive discrimination helps no one, least of all those who are catapulted into a role for which they are not really prepared. There is a marvellous passage in the Bible, not a work most people turn to nowadays for moral guidance: “You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not favour the poor, nor honour the powerful” (Leviticus 19:15). That sense of balance needs to be restored.

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The combined effect of these censors’ work is a society in which, on both important and trivial matters, people are not as free to speak their minds as they should be. The time is therefore ripe for a book that takes account of these various assaults on freedom of speech and perhaps prescribes some solutions. Mick Hume, former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, founder of Living Marxism and the editor-at-large of the online magazine Spiked, has answered the call and produced Trigger Warning. Is the fear of being offensive killing free speech, he asks in the book’s subheading. He answers with an emphatic “yes”.

At his best, Hume delivers his supporting evidence in excoriating swipes. He savages those who pledge their commitment to freedom of speech before adding a “but”. The effect of that word, he writes, “is not simply to qualify your support, but to dissolve it altogether”. Hume calls today’s censors “reverse-Voltaires”:

The champion of free speech Voltaire said (in his own words this time): “Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.” The mantra of the reverse-Voltaires is more like: “Think of yourself and don’t let others enjoy the privilege of thinking any differently.”

Hume has spent his career writing pugnacious columns so, unsurprisingly, he knows how to deliver a rhetorical knockout.

But, unfortunately for Hume and his readers, a good book and a good column require different ingredients. He may be on the right side of the debate but I am confident that Trigger Warning will change no one’s mind. Those who realise that speech is over-regulated will find themselves nodding along. But those who disagree will not be challenged by Hume. This book, then, is a missed opportunity. What could have been a thorough, forensic skewering of 21st-century censorship and the flimsy logic that props it up instead amounts to little more than an extended column, a series of trots on the hobby horses beloved by Hume and his colleagues at Spiked, which these days serves as a kind of Marxists Anonymous, a place for Brendan O’Neill and his friends from the RCP to swap stories.

More disappointingly, Trigger Warning contains little in the way of advice as to what to do next. Polling commissioned for a report I wrote for the New Culture Forum last year found that one third of people in Britain believe they cannot speak freely on controversial subjects like immigration and religion. More and more are realising what Hume knows to be the case: that Britain, the home of Milton, Mill and Orwell, is a place where the censorious have the upper hand. It is a place where tweeting a joke can mean jail; where libel laws allow the powerful to silence the weak; where people are fired for expressing mainstream political opinions; and where a nebulous right to not be offended shuts down debate. Nowhere are the toxic results of the fear of offending more gruesomely clear than in Rotherham, where the abuse of more than 1,400 children, mainly by men of Pakistani heritage, remained hidden because councillors feared that by tackling the problem they could be “giving oxygen” to racists. 

Trigger Warning is not just a shallow take on an important subject; it is a sloppy piece of journalism. For example, in the book’s first chapter Hume writes: “To borrow a phrase from the techies, free speech might be called the ‘killer app’ of civilisation, the core value on which the success of the whole system depends.” In fact, he is not borrowing from the techies but pilfering, without attribution, from a neoconservative, Niall Ferguson, who has written a best-selling book called Civilisation: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power.

Spiked journalists make a living railing against the oversensitivity of the Left. But their attacks have become just as predictable, just as knee-jerk, as the ex-comrades they love to loathe. Contrarianism runs through everything they write. Hume’s rebellious streak has doubtless helped him expose the absurdities and hypocrisies of those who pledge their support for freedom of speech one day and suppress it the next. But contrarianism can blind, too.

When it comes the question of what to do about Holocaust denial, an issue given renewed prominence last month with Tony Blair’s recommendation that Britain criminalise it, Hume forgets to turn his contrarian autopilot off. Defenders of free speech are right to oppose the bans on Holocaust denial that are in place in many EU countries. Censorship cannot kill a bad idea. Hume, however, must take things further: Holocaust denial should not only be legal, it should be free from taboo as well:

In many circumstances, the Holocaust becomes less an historic atrocity to be taught, discussed and understood in its political context and more a matter of religious orthodoxy, a moral parable about human evil to be learnt by rote. This put the accepted version of what happened and why beyond question, something that secular authorities were no more prepared to have debated than the Pope might be willing to haggle over transubstantiation.

Later, he asks the reader to be as outraged as he is that “those who question the history of the Holocaust are treated as the secular equivalent of heretics today, pariahs to be cast out of civilised society”. Is that such a bad thing? It is hardly a free-speech travesty that David Irving, Britain’s most notorious Holocaust denier, is persona non grata at respectable universities. Perhaps the words of Charles Grey, the judge who in 2000 dismissed Irving’s libel claim against Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth & Memory, might remind Hume of the nature of the “historians” he thinks we are wrong to ignore.  Grey said that Irving, “for his own ideological reasons, deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence” and “for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light”. He went on to make clear that Irving was “anti-Semitic and racist and that he associated with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism”.

To ask, as Hume does, for a fair hearing for all ideas, even after they have been exposed as lies motivated by hatred, is to stretch moral relativism past its elastic limit. Freedom of speech is such a vital liberty because it allows us to sort good ideas from bad ones, not because there is no such thing as good and bad.

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Mason’s long forehead sits above jutting eyebrows and heavy-lidded blue eyes undimmed by age. An accentuated nose and deep lines around a mocking mouth augment his comic persona. He is dressed in black; his hands shine luminously against the darkened stage. For the next two hours his face and a microphone are all he has to reduce the audience to helpless laughter.

How often do British comedians make fun of Barack Obama? Mason shows him no mercy. “Obama said, ‘You can’t go into Crimea’ and Putin said, ‘I am going into Crimea’ and Obama said, ‘It’s up to you’.” Jackie mimics the way Obama relies on his teleprompters (or tchotchkes, as he prefers to call them): “Without them he can’t even say hello.”

Jackie Mason has made an art form of getting wound up and the more wound-up he gets, the more exuberant is his Yiddish. He never bows to political correctness, and nobody is spared from his satire, including not only David Cameron, both Milibands and Hillary Clinton, but gay and black people and anybody else that other comedians tiptoe around. He certainly doesn’t spare his audience. “All these are jokes, Mister,” he says to one unlucky man in the front row. “Do you even know what I do for a living?” To another: “As a man who doesn’t look too intelligent, what would you say?”

He likes taking the world of celebrities down a peg or two. Should the Oscars be the biggest media event of the year, he wonders. “You could put an end to cancer, and it would mean nothing compared to the fact that an actor made a movie. What’s more important: a movie or a toilet?” When people come out of a movie, he concludes, “Some liked it and some didn’t. But when people come out of a toilet — they’re the happiest people in the world.”

Time and again he turns to his favourite schtick: the Jews. “This show is already too good for these prices. Are any gentiles in this audience?” A loud “yeah” sounds from the (actually very diverse) audience. “This is a good time to get out,” he says. “Gentiles always love me.” His melodious voice drops. “I only have trouble with Jews. Half of the Jews are crazy about me and the other half says — ach, he’s so Jewish, I can’t take it. Why does he have to sound so Jewish, can’t he talk like a noymal person? Jews are the only people embarrassed by a Jewish accent. Never heard a Jew say I don’t like him, he sounds too Spanish, but Jewish — ach. Makes them feel like a refugee.”
Mason’s routine sounds improvised, but it’s carefully crafted and his comic timing is still spot-on. “No Jew is ever comfortable and happy,” he says. “When the show is over, the gentiles will stand up and walk out, there will be no problem. The Jews will get up and say, there’s something wrong with my leg. When I walk like this, I don’t feel it, but when I go like that, I do. I’ve never seen a completely healthy Jew. If it’s not bothering you, it’s bothering your wife.” The audience loves it.

Born Yacov Moshe Maza in Wisconsin, Mason grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. At the age of 25 he was ordained a rabbi, like his three brothers, father and grandfather before him. At services, he used to tell jokes to highlight a point. Before long, people mainly came to hear his jokes. Gentiles came too. “Everybody said: ‘Rabbi, why don’t you become a comedian?’ Then I said to myself, maybe that’s a great idea.” 

From humble comic beginnings in the Borscht Belt in upstate New York, Mason rose to be a star in the 1960s. He became a regular performer on The Ed Sullivan Show, shared a stage with the Beatles (“four kids in search of a voice who needed haircuts”), and had a row with Frank Sinatra. His persona epitomises generations of Jewish humour.

Though Jackie Mason is still underrated in Britain, he has achieved more than many British comedians. He has done eight Royal Command Performances and shows at the Royal Albert Hall and Royal Opera House. But he has always been an outspoken defender of Israel. Not everybody likes that here — least of all the BBC.

A story from the Talmud comes to mind. A rabbi is walking through a Persian market when the Prophet Elijah appears to him. The rabbi asks Elijah: “Is there anyone here who merits a place in the world to come?” Elijah points at two men walking by. Burning with curiosity, the rabbi asks them what they do for a living. “Jesters,” they say. No doubt Jackie Mason knew this story when he switched careers. But he ends his show  just as a rabbi might: by blessing and thanking his audience.

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But for a comedian whose career was built on controversy, Gervais has become very keen to avoid offence. And his humour is suffering.

Gervais’s decision to enter comedy at the age of 37 suggests that, far from a driving ambition to make people laugh, it was a calculated career move. Most of the two decades prior to his 2001 breakout in The Office were spent managing bands and radio stations. A background in brand management, therefore, underlies all his comedy. This fed into The Office with great success. The mockumentary following the life of David Brent, general manager of a Slough paper company, was, and remains, hilarious. It is perfectly tuned into our collective fear of loneliness and failure. That it spawned a successful US version, a notoriously difficult feat, demonstrates Gervais’s talent for targeting shared human emotions.  

The career-savvy Gervais cancelled The Office after two short series, calculating that it was better to leave fans wanting more than to have his programme peter out. Fear of his comedy being misunderstood drives Gervais like nothing else. At least, such is the impression given by his next series Extras, which might have been subtitled “the anguish of the artist”.

The first series, a self-indulgent reflection on the trials of an undervalued actor, carried some vestiges of The Office’s humour. Gervais gives good empathetic underdog. But in a more narcissistic second series, the undervalued actor transformed into misunderstood screenwriter revealed a moping, resentful Gervais. Simple, gentle comedy was relentlessly lampooned; an obsession with the pure irony of his own comedic output etched into every one of his scripted lines. One imagines him insisting on retake after retake, bleaching out the fundamental reactiveness of comedy.

The root of comedy lies in stand-up: a comedian must be able to throw caution to the wind, be funny live and respond to an audience with spontaneity. But Gervais’s talent as a stand-up is shaky. His on-stage schtick is ironic political incorrectness. But little apart from the shock effect ever seemed to hold his Animals, Science and Politics live shows together. Without the ability to cut and retake scenes, Gervais’s capacity for creating a narrative is impeded. Fans — and he certainly has those in abundance, with 8.4 million Twitter followers — nevertheless clamoured for a fourth tour. An obliging Gervais thus announced Humanity in 2013. Then in December 2014, he backpedalled — too busy producing films.

So Hollywood, with its endless retakes, scripts and fear of spontaneity, lured Gervais away from his original brand of comedy. Those notorious appearances at the Golden Globe Awards indicated the diluted form of comedy America would demand. Weak scripted gags such as, “It’s going to be a night of partying and heavy drinking. Or, as Charlie Sheen calls it, breakfast,” were never going to offend anyone important (certainly not Sheen). The Globes were an advertisement for the Gervais Provocateur brand. 

This role of comic “provocateur” was one with which Gervais happily played along to launch his US career. Why else would he have appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine dressed as Jesus with the word “atheist” scrawled across his chest?

But a CV of offensive comedy threatened to hamper his TV project Derek, in which he played a dim-witted retirement home worker. In an overhaul of the Gervais brand, the comedian decided in 2012 to remake himself as king of the “comedy of kindness”, a rebranding which worked so well that Gervais has earned a spot on the Independent on Sunday’s 2015 Happy List, for making the world a happier place.

Derek was billed as a mockumentary, akin to The Office. Yet Gervais assiduously denied any hint of mockery. Derek, he insisted, was about “kindness [being] more important than anything else”. Including comedy: without the “mock”, Derek was not offensive. But it was also not funny. As one TV critic succinctly summarised, it was “sub-Forrest Gump sympathy milking”. 

By forgoing stand-up for film production, Gervais has turned his back on the spontaneity at the heart of comedy. Why is he producing the upcoming Netflix film Special Correspondents? Because “having shaken up the TV industry, Netflix is about to do the same to Hollywood. It’s great to be part of the changing future.” He was made “an offer I couldn’t refuse”.

That is the soulless, processed statement of a corporate head, and it exposes Gervais for what he has become, and perhaps always was: not a comedian, but a manager—now CEO—of Brand Gervais.

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On May 2 in the Dallas suburb of Garland, two Islamists attempted to critique Pamela Geller’s “Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest” with assault rifles. A massacre was averted only because a guard suspended the attackers’ freedom of assembly with a Glock pistol. Two days later in New York, there was extra security at PEN’s annual black-tie dinner. When PEN’s board had conferred its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award on Charlie Hebdo, six of the dinner’s table hosts had resigned. Two of the six, Peter Carey and Michael Ondaatje, are global figures; two, Rachel Kushner and Francine Prose, are names in America; and two, Teju Cole and Taiye Selasi, need all the publicity they can get. “6 pussies,” Salman Rushdie tweeted, before remembering that he is a man of letters. “Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character.”

Politics, J.K. Galbraith claimed, means choosing between “the disastrous and the unpalatable”. Geller is unpalatable; the PEN refusés are disastrous. Geller does not discriminate between Muslims and Islamists. She has praised the thugs of the English Defence League; the guest speaker at Garland was Geert Wilders. She demonises her critics; she called the Daily Mail part of the “enemedia” for blacking out images of the Garland cartoons. When her organisation, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, campaigned against the “9/11 Mosque”, it attacked the First Amendment rights of American Muslims. Geller is a bigot, deliberately testing the margins of tolerance and legality. She is, then, exactly the kind of person that the First Amendment exists to protect.

The First Amendment does not protect “fighting words”: speech, acts, or images that are likely to provoke a punch. But do the Islamists have the right to be throwing punches? In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that the American National Socialist Party could march through Skokie, Illinois, swastikas and all. Public funds supported the exhibition of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in 1987, and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary in 1996, which rendered Jesus’s mother in pornographic cut-outs and elephant dung. The Garland cartoons are aesthetically worthless, but Americans have the right to draw and display them: there are no laws against poor taste, or even insult. Geller is frequently wrong and hateful, but she is brave and right to warn that Islamists wish to intimidate Americans into restricting their First Amendment rights. This is how America rolls, at least in the red states.

While Geller guards free speech’s wild frontier, over in the blue states the PEN writers surrender disputed territory without a fight. All of them called the Charlie Hebdo massacre, in Peter Carey’s words, a “hideous crime”. None of them mentioned the associated murders of Jews at the Hyper Cacher supermarket. Rachel Kushner accused Charlie Hebdo of “cultural intolerance” and promoting “a kind of forced secular view’, which is kind of hypocritical of her. Carey denounced PEN for ignoring “the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognise its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population”. Teju Cole called himself a “free-speech fundamentalist”, but wanted to fill PEN’s “headspace” with “more progressive” causes, like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and “the awful effects of government spying in the US”.

Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway would call the PEN Six “a rotten crowd”. Issuing a trigger warning about an organisation that protects their freedom of expression, and publicises the persecution of less fortunate writers abroad, they bit the hand that feeds, and shot themselves in the foot. They seem not to understand that France’s constitutional laïcité is the European sibling of America’s constitutional neutrality. Unfamiliarity breeds contempt, and provinciality.

“If PEN as a free speech organisation cannot defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures,” Salmon Rushdie said, “then frankly the organisation is not worth the name. What I would say to Peter, Michael, and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.” Yet Rushdie did not comment on Garland, where people were nearly “murdered for drawing pictures”. Nor did PEN’s president, Andrew Solomon, extend to Geller his defence of Charlie Hebdo: “There is courage in refusing the very idea of forbidden statements.”

Emerson called politics “a government of bullies, tempered by editors”, but the editors led the bullying of Geller. An unsigned editorial in the New York Times attacked Geller’s “provocative” behavior. The Harvard law professor Noah Feldman suggested that Geller had “deliberately” provoked the assault; if so, she was “morally culpable” for her attackers’ deaths.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-Up, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The depiction of Muhammad, and the application of standard critical methods to the history of Islam, have become test cases for the practice of Western freedoms, and the capacity of states to protect their citizens. It is possible to assert the right of speech without falling into Geller’s strategy of contempt or the PEN writers’ trahison des clercs. When editors vacillated over reprinting Charlie Hebdo cartoons, Timothy Garton Ash made a first-rate suggestion: to create an independent website, on which all media could publish the cartoons simultaneously. Without such a mechanism, terrorists will define the bounds of free speech.

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Jazz hands, for those mercifully unaware, are a splayed hand movement (often accompanied by clownish gurning) beloved of cheerleaders and mime artists. It is an infantile gesture. Yet apparently such childish signs of approval are the only sorts with which today’s hyper-sensitive university students can cope. Online magazine Spiked! investigated levels of free speech in British universities and branded 40 per cent “Red” for enforcing explicit bans on specific ideas and movements.

Such bans may be sensible, in light of evidence that young British jihadists were influenced at college by radical Islamist preachers. But there is a world of difference between protecting impressionable youngsters from religious brainwashing, and the extreme molly-coddling that has led universities from Birmingham to Exeter to ban songs, such as Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”, and newspapers, such as the Sun (excluded from 30 students’ unions because of the distress caused by Page 3 nudity), as misogynistic. University College London last year shut down a Nietzche reading group because of the 19th-century philosopher’s putative links to fascism. Oxford University, whose Union has hosted controversial figures from Gerry Adams to Richard Dawkins, recently cancelled a debate on abortion amid claims that it threatened student “mental security”. And long before the NUS conference, Edinburgh University’s Student Association had enforced a policy preventing students from using “hand gestures which denote disagreement” at meetings.

Thanks to such vigilante political correctness across Britain’s universities and the proliferation of “safe space” policies, today’s graduates may leave university without encountering anything to upset or challenge the views they held upon arrival. Such extreme pastoral “care” is a killing with kindness that clearly leaves students ill-equipped for later life. How will they react in the real world, where they might discover that their boss is a right-wing pro-lifer, or where they may walk into a tabloid-selling newsagent with “Blurred Lines” playing on the radio? Mollycoddling into one’s twenties can only make eventual exposure to contradictory opinion brutal, painful and, yes, anxiety-triggering.

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This isn’t new of course; identity politics has been around for years. The real question is why race and gender have so thoroughly usurped social class in the supposed hierarchy of oppression.

Today’s activists are far more concerned with the colour of a person’s skin and their gender than they are with their social class. Projects such as the Media Diversified Directory seek (admirably in my view) to increase the presence of BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) voices in the media, while campaign groups such as the Labour Women’s Network and Panel Watch fight to ensure that public policy is not a testosterone-fuelled echo chamber for boorish men.

There is something to be said for all of this; but there are no comparable organisations seeking to do the same for the working class. I edit Left Foot Forward, a left-wing website, and consider myself a socialist. However, unlike many on the Left, I think social class is a far more accurate indicator of how much “privilege” a person has than either gender or race. I take this position because the evidence overwhelmingly points in that direction.But I find myself increasingly out of step with mainstream left-wing opinion, as evidenced by the vitriol increasingly directed at Dwems (Dead White European Males) by left-wing activists and the ubiquitous talk of “equality” when yet another upper-middle-class woman is parachuted into politics. Socialism today appears to mean half of a boardroom stuffed with middle-class men and half with middle-class women — not forgetting a sprinkling of middle-class ethnic minorities.

Yet perhaps this ought not to come as a surprise when the Left itself is so overwhelmingly middle-class. Being left-wing today requires far fewer sacrifices than in the past. You can wear a keffiyeh and wax passionate about white privilege while drawing a large private income with little chance of being knocked off your perch by a usurper from the lower orders.

Put like that, it is no wonder class politics has gone out of fashion like a bad pair of chinos. In obsessing about the comparatively superficial privileges that white skin and maleness bestow (superficial when compared to the disadvantages that come with being poor), student activists and “diversity warriors” may simply want to shift our gaze away from the economic inequalities they do very well out of.

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