19/10/2020
Nesrine Malik writing in the Guardian is disappointed with the return to our television screens of the legendary latex puppet satire series Spitting Image. Whilst the puppets themselves are immaculately designed and amusing in the traditions of the series started in the eighties, the gags are a pale imitation, Malik feels. Whereas back then, the church, state and government were mercilessly lampooned, the focus of the new bile is on people on the margins of society and the establishment gets off with light ribbing. Malik explains “Some comedians seem to have confused the thrill of the taboo with a childish impulse to offend, and mistaken bullying for bravery. “Just because you’re offended, doesn’t mean you’re right,” is one of Ricky Gervais’s most popular quotes. This apparent elevation of lazy comedy into the so-called anti-establishment movement has given us “woke”-slayers Jonathan Pie and Titania McGrath, and Gervais’s own popular set comparing gender transition to identifying as a chimp. “ Malik concludes: “This sort of comedy is in keeping with the current trend of rounding on soft targets and pretending that they are the most influential forces in society. It feels cheap and majoritarian, and seems to have benefited from the cynical leveraging of free speech to prop up an entire complex of normalised prejudice against minorities in the press and politics”.
