Back in April, the Free Speech Union put together a spoof April Fools’ Day news article about how the Daily Sceptic was looking to recruit a team of sensitivity readers to, as we put it, help the editorial team create a “safe online space from which those with distasteful views can be excluded”, and be responsible for “developing untapped issues in the field of sensitivity (e.g., ‘Are verbs racist?’, ‘Is proper grammar fascism by other means?’, ‘Do linear narratives perpetuate colonial thought structures?’, etc) and bringing these to the attention of the editors”.
Even at the time, we were getting perilously close to the point at which satire might plausibly cross over into plain reportage. According to Steerpike in the Spectator, however, a particularly earnest group of progressive undergraduates at the University of Cambridge have now contrived to blur that distinction altogether.
This is the news that the legendary Cambridge Footlights, one of Britain’s oldest student comedy troupes, whose alumni include Germaine Greer, Sue Perkins, Stephen Fry, Richard Ayoade, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Clive James and David Mitchell, is now recruiting for a new ‘sensitivity reading’ service to ensure “all student comedy” is as “inclusive as possible” and “to check for potential oversights regarding racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism, or any other kind of sensitive or upsetting material”.
The new “optional request for any student-written comedy” will involve a member of the Footlights Committee offering to vet submissions and conferring with the other members of their panel as to any necessary changes.
A briefing document for members seen by the Spectator stresses that this is “an opt-in service and is not at all compulsory” and promises that “this is not a joke deletion service… we would seek to maintain all the humour and hopefully we’re qualified to do this”.
It also asserts in bold that “this is not censorship”, and that “we are not trying to stop students pushing the boundaries on what is acceptable… we are only offering a second, uninvolved opinion on your work, specifically to check whether it comes across as punching up rather than down”.
Despite these nods to the importance of artistic creativity and freedom of expression, the invocation of the metaphor ‘punching’ up or down does rather suggest the document’s authors may well have other, more progressive priorities.
In the new woke lexicon, to ‘punch down’ is to make fun of any person or group who is in some way deemed to be less ‘privileged’ than the comedian. This, apparently, is the greatest crime a modern comedian can commit.
Of course, many comedians might well argue that what they’re swinging away at during their routines isn’t people, but abstract sets of ideas; not trans folk or Black Lives Matter protesters, for instance, but trans activist ideology and critical race theory.
It’s therefore interesting to consider the extent to which the metaphor of ‘punching’ up or down serves to reframe reality, forcing us to personify humour’s intended targets, and thus render the comedian either as an abuser (i.e., ‘punching down’) or a progressive campaigner (i.e., ‘punching up’).
In that sense, the Footlights Committee’s new sensitivity reading initiative won’t need to involve, as they put it, “joke deletion”, “censorship”, or any direct attempt to “stop students from pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable”, to end up having a chilling effect.
Because what budding young comic among Cambridge’s student body will want to be whispered about among friends and peers as a psychologically abusive, hate-fuelled, minority-victimising bully?
Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Communications Officer of the Free Speech Union.
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Apart from the wokeness, the impression of Footlights as a corporate employer advertising for staff is almost as ridiculous. I once helped move a decrepit piano from their HQ (the only time I went there) and was most struck by the impression of it as a run-down village hall with a blocked loo.
Like much in Cambridge now, the focus seems to have shifted from gifted intellectualism to big money.
Life itself is less funny than ever , I have got Edward Snowdons 2019 Book “Permanent Record” on Audio for driving to & from jobs . His back story of how he got to the position he did & how his conscience got to him as he saw how the new tech age has swamped governmental states with 1984 type blue prints .He explains clearly how we are where we are .
I also read ‘Permanent Record’ and stopped as soon as he said that chemtrails were not real. Either he didn’t know or he was lying however the impression was that he did know. That for me ended my fascination with Edward Snowdon especially as we know they are real and have been real for decades. They are not ‘persistent’ contrails made of ice particles…ice just doesn’t hang about in the sky. Anyway, a look at geoengineeringwatch.org and a listen to Dane Wigington provides context and info….I’ll get off my high horse now!
Interesting, as an antipodeant, to contemplate the Australian alumni (Clive James and Germaine Greer), who with the recently deceased Barry Humphries, have all, to varying degrees, been disowned by the cultural left.
All were giants in their respective fields.
I wonder how many of the current Footlights cohort will have any standing outside their own bathrooms, let alone be internationally recognised in 50 years as exceptional talents.
I actually offended myself this morning when I looked in the mirror.. WTF.. can someone point me to the appropriate channel where I can further my disgust and lodge a complaint.. and I don’t want any smartarse’s suggesting the English Channel..
Blimey, HP, you get downtickers for smiling! They must be a miserable bunch of saddos…
Too many people go to university to study nonsense degrees. They’ve got to keep themselves occupied somehow, so they invent problems to fix so they can feel relevant.
Just like 99% of politicians.
Show me a problem any politician from the Oxbridge clan has ever fixed
Oh I don’t know – Mr Cromwell of Sydney Sussex managed to sort out the Divine Right of Kings pretty finally.
“…a new ‘sensitivity reading’ service to ensure “all student comedy” is as “inclusive as possible” and “to check for potential oversights regarding…sensitive or upsetting material”.
Who is going to ensure that the sensitivity reading service will ensure that no sensitive or upsetting material gets past their beady eyes? Who is going to ensure that the sensitivity readers don’t overlook some sensitive or potentially upsetting material?
And, on the other hand, who is going to ensure that the sensitivity readers are not unnecessarily over-zealous in finding what they dubiously consider to be ‘sensitive or upsetting material’?
They need to have a ‘sensitivity reading service’ monitoring service to ensure that the sensitivity reading service does its job properly.
But what if the sensitivity readers (and/or their monitors) are upset by some of the material they are required to read? Has anyone thought about that? Do they have a counselling service set up which damaged and upset sensitivity readers can avail of without delay, to mitigate the damage that has been done to them in the line of duty?
And what if any of the counsellors are upset by what they hear from the upset sensitivity readers? It’s a never-ending chain of services needed. It would be best to just cancel comedy altogether, it would ensure that nobody gets upset, and in these stringent times would save the money which wouldn’t need to be spent on these otherwise very necessary services.
I think the business model you are describing is what Twitter was before 80% of them were sacked, made redundant or left when Musk took over
It is not dead at all it is simply that so many people have succumbed to money-worship that it is difficult to find a way out of it and part of the deal is that you don’t mention it.
Are we sure this isn’t a joke in itself? And that the vetters will simply rubber stamp submissions? I would like to think so, because otherwise there will be no jokes left. All my favourite Jewish jokes were told to me by Jewish people. And if you want ethnic group disparagement compare Irish, Polak and Van der Merwe jokes, not to mention Parsi versus Gujerati stories…
It’s bizarre isn’t it that the times requiring the greatest amount of satire are seemingly empty of that particular outlet for humour and ridicule. There are rich pickings for the brave out there. I suggest, if you are a student at Cambridge or elsewhere, with a still functioning noodlum, that you write a script pronto and pedal down to the footlights and get stuck in. B*gg*r the sensitivity reader bull’s rear excretions…just get something down and use all that intelligence you were gifted with to do something useful for humanity like a satirical torpedoing of all the bull’s dangly round things!
All and everything woke is a cancer on society.