A recently resurfaced clip from the Big Fat Quiz Of The Year 2008 has the Spectator’s Gareth Roberts eye-rolling at the speed with which mainstream comedians can switch sides on political issues to remain aligned with fashionable orthodoxy. Here’s an excerpt:
Personally I find TV panel shows pretty unbearable. They’re like being at a student party full of lairy smartarses you don’t know, and probably wouldn’t want to. But now a clip from one has, in the journalistic parlance of our time, ‘resurfaced on social media’. It is never a good thing for the people involved when a clip resurfaces on social media. It’s the kind of resurfacing that Jaws did in his heyday.
This particular eruption from the deep comes from the Big Fat Quiz Of The Year 2008, the fourth edition of the annual Channel Four institution. (Its twentieth anniversary edition is due this December. It’s still going because of course it is – long running TV brands used to be like hens’ teeth, but now they linger on and on. The Big Fat Quiz will always be with us, like the poor or herpes or Ken Barlow.) Jimmy Carr is the host, and the three teams consist of a variety of comedians and presenters: Michael McIntyre and Claudia Winkleman, Sean Lock and James Corden, and Dara Ó Briain and Davina McCall. …
The question is about a man who “announced he was going to have a baby – but what was unusual about the whole affair?” Ó Briain is first up, saying that he and McCall’s answer is that this person “was a pregnant male transsexual, it was him having the baby”. You might almost think Ó Briain would get away from this clip unscathed, but stay tuned.
Next is Lock and Corden, and up the balloon goes. “We wrote: It was an abomination” Lock deadpans, to an outburst of laughter from all sides and the studio audience. Ó Briain adds, “Our team will accept that answer as being the same as ours, that’s fine.” Corden, giggling, next, “You said what was different about it, and we’ve decided it was an abomination, and we’re sticking by it.” Finally, over to McIntyre and Winkleman, pulling amused, confused faces; “He is a woman / she is a man… he had a baby, but he is a bloke, with a womb?” “A womb-man” ventures Carr, before cracking jokes about portmanteau words for transsexual genitalia that I can’t repeat here. …
What’s astonishing about this clip is that it’s proof that these people knew exactly what a woman was about five cultural minutes ago, and found the idea of pretending not to know hilarious. …
At times in the last 10 years, I have felt like I am going mad. People I knew or worked with in this milieu, who were far more un-PC than me, suddenly changed lanes, leaving me where I’d always been but somehow a pariah. Ironically, I was mocked in the noughties by colleagues for being a bit humourless about identity-based banter that I considered ‘nasty’ and bad form.
Now some might point out that times have changed. Oh indeed they have, and don’t we know it. But there are still two sexes, and no man can get pregnant. It is ludicrous to pretend otherwise, and ludicrous ideas are funny.
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