IT’S my bad luck to be completing the last Frankie Boyle novel just when the Hate Crime Act is about to come into force in Scotland.
Given the sheer mental relief that Boyle’s pitiless wit has given me over the last fortnight, I am particularly resistant to any legal regime that might threaten to stop his fabulously downbeat flow.
Tomkins also notes that “race enjoys the fullest protection … religion enjoys the least protection”. Boyle has already won a libel case against the Daily Mirror calling him a “racist” in 2012. Boyle was successful in claiming that any racist language he deployed was attributable to the characters he was critiquing, in the course of his act.
I’m old enough to remember watching TV shows like The Comedians in the 70s. Ranks of white male comics would begin routines with “take my wife” or “see my friend Chalky” or “I hate them Germans”. Then alternative comedy took these sexist and racist traditions and turned them upside down. The targets became capitalism or patriarchy or racism itself.
The award-winning, gay-identifying comedian Scott Capurro tested out some jokes about Hamas in The Telegraph the other day, anticipating the act. “There’s so much there …” Some of Capurro’s Hamas jokes: “They’re really angry because thewon’t recognise them as a terrorist organisation. I also joke that I’d like to play Gaza but I don’t want to bomb ... If we don’t have the freedom to ridicule, we’re fucked.
There’s been much derision of Police Scotland’s “Hate Monster” cartoon , where a working-class male voice describes the dynamics and conditions that might lead him to an act of “hate crime.” From one character, Amy: “Civility is made out to be this really great thing by all the people who benefit. Of course they want everyone to stick to the rules of civility, because those rules stop people from asking them why they have all the fucking stuff.”
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