Quote: gappy @ 14th February 2022, 11:01 AMAlright, we're getting somewhere. I don't find Carr, A. particularly funny either, and I find much of the LATA style a bit uninteresting. But, I don't believe that this isn't funny (not seen the routine in question, but we'll assume for the nonce I agree with you) because of censorship. Do you think Carr is actually desperate to say "my house is small because they give all the houses to those thieving gyppoes from overseas?!", but isn't allowed to? Is it the Apollo producers, the BBC management, or just society at large that is making him talk about small flats instead of edgy stuff, do you think?
And, would it actually be funnier if, instead of talking about small flats he was talking about how poofters walk in that weird way? A joke is as good as its construction and delivery far more than its referent.
What you're doing is the equivalent of saying that Coldplay are more polite and less exciting than Black Sabbath, which is true. But a) it doesn't mean that there wasn't plenty of safe inoffensive music around at the time, that you've naturally forgotten, and b) it would be an illogical leap to conclude that Coldplay don't sound like Sabbath in case it upsets a Pakistani (this is a tweak on a Stewart Lee line, incidentally).
I don't find any of them funny. Carr is not desperate to say anything, he's a script line reader. If after his act someone else came on, the content and delivery would be the same. His scripts are written to reflect the new social taboos (PC), not necessarily humour.
I don't think the old comedians would have delivered their comedy about gypsies or pakistanis in the language you've described, but they certainly did variations of it which reflected the social consensus, real or percieved, of that era.
Not so now, certain topics are out of bounds. Race, ethnicity, colour, Islam, immigration ... are definite no, no's. Instead we get a 'I found a mouse in my house and nearly had kittens', following which everyone laughs and claps politely.
The BBC is so bias and woke now that there are ideas in government to scrap the licence fee, which would mean it goes bankrupt and I'd be happy to see that. Once the envy of the world and now a propaganda PC organization.
