Ricky Gervais and Jeremy Clarkson are no laughing matter – The Guardian

Last week, in a much-needed and well-timed satire of snowflake hand-wringing over the Australian bush fires, the Suns politically incorrect columnist Jeremy Clarkson declared the continent unfit for human habitation and welcomed scorched whiteys back to the motherland, unaccompanied minors and all.

The inevitable complaints will have already been offset by Sun accountants against the traffic Clarkson drives through the papers website. In the short term, mass extinction can be monetised, in a carbon trading of manufactured offence versus advertising revenue. Those short-beaked echidnas did not die in vain and Rod Liddle will still receive his Sun Christmas hamper of suet and saveloy sausage.

Clarksons suggestion that Australians needed to come home, while unconsciously prefiguring the mass migrations the climate crisis will cause in this decade, could read as a slap in the face to Indigenous Australians, for whom the continent has always been home, even before it was officially discovered for them by a helpful Dutch bloke in 1606.

Indeed, Indigenous Australians had been mapping the stars, creating complex mythological cycles and learning to view massive grubs as treats quite happily for 120,000 years at least, before our ancestors brought them alcohol, forced abduction and a manmade climate crisis. But clangers like Clarksons are no longer a bar to popularity, acclaim or office.

The Wokefinder General has been praised by Sarah Vine, which is worse than losing a loved one prematurely

Does Clarkson gaze at Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girls-Blouse Chicken-Frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Johnson and wonder why he isnt prime minister?

Instead, Clarkson, a car man in idiots trousers, doggedly pursues relevance, as the harder alt-right opinion-hits available in the unregulated online shitosphere consistently outperform his quaint grandad-motorist fist-waving.

A Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, covered in actual swastikas and driven by an armed incel blogger who has a deal with Steve Bannon, has run Clarksons Lexus LFA, the one with a Honk if you hate snowflakes sticker in the back window, off the rightwing road. Clarkson struggles out of the crumpled passenger door, stamps his brogues in the ditch water and throws his driving cap down in a rage. Bah!

Both Clarksons and Turdss careers have flourished by exploiting the notion that they are lone voices of sanity against a politically correct snowflake cabal intent on silencing normal blokes like them. Their comedy counterpart Ricky Gervais has managed to monetise this notion spectacularly, saying the things that he is apparently not allowed to say, on a variety of global media platforms, for millions of dollars, with the full co-operation and approval of the legal representatives of the institutions on which, and about which, he says the things he is not allowed to say, his functionally adequate standup act having been overpromoted worldwide off the back of his pitch-perfect contribution to the groundbreaking Office sitcom two decades ago.

Last week, a slew of right-leaning sources cited Gervaiss just jokes liberal-bating Golden Globes set as vindication of a populist backlash against political correctness, investing its harmless waspish jibes with a political dimension they didnt really have. Meanwhile an obviously hoaxed article by the clearly fabricated Jo Murch in the perpetually gullible Independent created a humourless liberal straw man to vindicate the rights adoption of Gervais, probably placed by one of Gervaiss libertarian collaborators.

In the Daily Mail, Sarah Vine ripped the lid off the rotting kitchen food waste bin of her mind to retch forth some choice owl pellets of praise for Gervaiss performative outrage. For Vine, Gervais was a knight in shining armour, saviour of humanity, saviour of comedy, restorer of sanity and undisputed Wokefinder General, the latter comment surely the title of his next tour if he wants to attract only furious moronic c**ts. The Wokefinder General could be photographed in a puritan hat smoking a cigar and winking. I can see this working. Lets do this!

Vine then went on to commend the sharp edge of viciousness the Wokefinder General directed to limousine liberals and sulky schoolgirls, the latter presumably the climate-crisis activist and eco-mystic Greta Thunberg, who I dont remember being specifically targeted, but whom veteran opinion-column vultures of Vines vintage seem to have a special problem with, like the mean girls in American high-school movies who shit in the clever ones shampoo bottle.

Of course, when I did a joke about Vine, in my critically acclaimed Content Provider show, she condemned its vicious prejudice. They dont like it up em. It appears whether viciousness is justified or not depends on its direction of travel, ideally away from you and towards people you personally dislike. In the Wokefinder Generals case, its often downwards, towards transgender people, for example, and the disabled, or mongs as the Wokefinder General once said.

In the Wokefinder Generals mawkish sitcom After Life, the Wokefinder Generals character considers suicide because his wife dies of a terminal illness. But in real life, the Wokefinder General has been praised by Sarah Vine, which is worse than losing a loved one prematurely, and so the Wokefinder General should do the decent thing, not prevaricate like his cowardly sitcom character, and kill himself immediately.

The fact that someone like Vine praises his work should at least make the Wokefinder General wonder if he has any responsibility for the cultural ripples caused by those who appropriate his just jokes. Clarkson, Turds and the Wokefinder General are narcissistic populists, all clever enough to know better, who continue to court the attention of angry impotent people and take no personal responsibilty for the consequences of their words, other mortals merely collateral damage, rabbits churned up in the combine harvester blades of their ongoing ambitions.

I am aware that I am supposed to be a so-called comedian and that this column reads like a blunt polemic. So here is its central thrust represented in the form of a traditional working mens club joke which, remember, is just a joke.

A Ricky Gervais Netflix standup special walks into a pub with a massive pile of stinking dogshit on its shoulder. The barman says: Where did you get that massive pile of dogshit? And the dogshit says: Netflix. Theyve got bloody loads of them!

Extra London dates of Stewart Lees latest live show Snowflake/Tornado have just been announced at the South Bank Centre in June and July, and it tours nationally from January

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Ricky Gervais and Jeremy Clarkson are no laughing matter - The Guardian