You have to hand it to a select group of British comedians: they’re among the few in their industry who’ve had the guts to stand up for free speech.
In Australia, which, as Steve Waterson recently observed, has the wittiest people on earth, yet the world’s worst stand-up comedians, the local “comedy” (so-called) industry has surrendered almost completely to wokeness: the Melbourne Comedy Festival has banned jokes about Islam and erased Barry Humphries’ name for alleged “transphobia”.
America is even worse, with comedians mostly replaced by hectoring left-wing preachers.
But, to their credit, some of the giants of British comedy are standing firm. Ricky Gervais, John Cleese and, most notably, Rowan Atkinson.
Rowan Atkinson has condemned online cancel culture and censorship, describing social media as a place where medieval mobs roam “the streets looking for someone to burn”.
In an extended interview with the UK’s Radio Times, the celebrated British actor and comic criticised social media’s tendency to divide and silence public debate, saying: “It becomes a case of either you’re with us or against us. And if you’re against us, you deserve to be cancelled.”
Like Gervais, Atkinson is championing the genuinely liberal principle of free speech, no matter which “side” it comes from.
In 2005 he opposed the addition of hate speech laws in the British parliament’s Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. And in 2009 he argued against the introduction of homophobic hate speech clauses into UK law.
More recently, in August last year, Atkinson drew heavy criticism from British woke warriors and online trolls after criticising Scotland’s controversial hate crimes bill, arguing it “risked stifling freedom of expression, and the ability to articulate or criticise religious and other beliefs”.
Echoing the great philosopher of liberty, J. S. Mill, Atkinson reminds us of “peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion”.
“The problem we have online is that an algorithm decides what we want to see, which ends up creating a simplistic, binary view of society,” Atkinson said. “It’s important that we’re exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion”[…]
When asked about the impact of social media on public debate and comedy, the comic said it was scary “for anyone who’s a victim of that mob and it fills me with fear about the future.”
We stand on the brink of a New Dark Age. The new inquisitors have replaced the auto-da-fé with the tweet.
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