Ian-Watson.com

Rob Ince wants us to know he was 'bullied' by the man responsible for the fact he has a platform on which to make the announcement in the first place, but he wants it known that he was also against Ricky Gervais' trans material too.. so, you know... just saying. Frank Skinner hates his former material. Lenny Henry considers his old self a racist. Comedians, like so many terrified actors, are now crawling all over social media, the news, podcasts and any outlet that will look their way to apologise for their former selves like newly-cleansed wretches at the feet of Torquemada.

Hindsight must be even more 'wonderful' than the saying goes. I remember watching the extras on a Ricky Gervais DVD where Rob Ince was ‘bullied’. At the time I thought it was just one famous comic getting an unknown friend some much-needed attention. He seemed to revel in the playful harassment and the constant poking. There was a lot of talking to the camera that Ricky was pointing at him for the millions of viewers to see, most of whom then knew who Rob Ince was for the first time. I don’t recall any ‘walking away from this torment’ or ‘I’m not doing that’. His entire opening set was also on that multi-million-selling DVD and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a Netflix bod, in those days, kicking his door down to get him that kind of exposure on merit alone. Having seen his stand-up live now and listened to his podcast (both of which also seem to rely to a more famous association), I can see why. I’m not sanctioning, or condoning actual bullying, but if I felt I was being genuinely bullied I wouldn’t want millions of people to watch it happen and laugh.

How many comedians are now looking back on their own stuff, or the stuff they thought was good, acceptable if a little ‘edgy’, that they made money out of, laughed at with the rest of us, even copied and aspired to create... and are suddenly 'appalled' by it, by themselves? They look back at stuff and say 'that was bad'... weird they didn't see how bad it was then? Were they just poorly-educated fascists, ignorant of social norms? Were they all goose-stepping about on stage with a swastika on one arm and a pillowcase over their heads, chucking the 'N' word about like confetti while they shoved wheelchair users off stage into the mosh pit for big laughs? Are we to believe there's been a mass awakening? (ever wonder where 'woke' comes from?) That seemingly intelligent, socially responsible people just 'didn't know' they were supporting 'offensive stuff' and, for some mad reason, they do now?

Who told them? Which benevolent angel educated them on the errors of their ways? Probably the same voices of conscience who claim there is no ‘woke’ society, no ’cancel culture’, ‘no witch hunt’ (‘they were actually just strong- minded, educated women who were persecuted by the patriarchy!’… yeah, I know) and no ‘retrospective judgement’. That it’s just the pathetic paranoid persecution complex of insecure ‘baddies’ getting triggered by the light of righteousness shining into their lives.

Did they have to attend the comedic equivalent of a 'speed awareness' course after getting pulled by the gag police for doing five 'retard' jokes over the limit? [funny how I'm brave enough to drop the 'R' word in here but not the 'N' word? We all draw our lines of hypocrisy in the sand I guess.]

It's never the ones who were genuinely offensive. The actual racist, bigoted, down-punching dinosaurs who relied on an audience willing to put someone down so they could ‘stand up’. It does seem to be the ones who nobody really minded all that much. That were never seen as offensive until they decided to point it out to us thirty years later. The ones who made the odd ‘cheeky’ wink or cultural observation. Maybe allowed themselves to see the humour in a name sounding like something else, or use an accepted harmless difference between sections of us, to make an observation sound funny... you know... ‘comedy’?  Maybe they even thought that one or two might not enjoy it but, hey, you can’t please everyone, right? It seems to be these who are looking to reinvent themselves as pillars of society, that have this shared epiphany. Maybe there's a banner on the back pages of their agent's website that reads 'you are a bad person- you must change!' But their headshot needs to have sagged back there for their morality check to kick in.

They're all now full of regret at their 'insensitivity' and they really, really need us all to know just how much they now fully embrace the 'new world order' like errant Buddhists getting a long-overdue toe back on the 'middle way'. They scramble to tell the world how they are distancing themselves from their past, their former sense of humour, their friends who still haven't 'got their minds right boss' and anything else they can hurl under the newly-painted morality bus like a sinking iron-monger, plummeting to the inky depths, emptying their clanging pockets, or like Jacob Marley in a hot tub, jettisoning everything connected to them for one more breath at the surface.

If that stock was so horrible, so ‘bad’ then why didn’t they see it at the time? Why now? Where was that backbone when its apparent absence was paying the bills? Their moral compass can’t have been dictated by ticket sales, can it? Nobody just goes out there and says stuff they hate for the sake of an encore, and the internet has shown us that there is always an audience for even the darkest, sickest things the most depraved minds can invent, so it can’t have been sheer demand that kept them from being the decent person they now claim to be.

We all change and grow, I get that. We all know stuff now that we didn’t ten years ago- I get that too. But suddenly claiming that you don’t find something funny that had you rolling about years ago is like saying you should have hated the taste of Big Macs as a kid because you discovered cholesterol in your thirties. This new knowledge doesn’t change the flavour of the food, or how much you enjoyed it. Maybe don’t eat them again if you don’t want to clog your arteries, but let’s not kid ourselves that it left a bad taste in our mouths that we were just too stupid and evil to notice. Those comedians now returning their collection of Happy Meal toys as a form of protest should think of the many people who paid their wages, bought tickets and took the time to attend and laugh at their work, because calling it all ‘poor taste’ now, saying it was all hurtful and wrong, and apologising for performing it, is calling them all bigots and idiots for enjoying it too.