Look, I’ve never watched an episode of Fawlty Towers in my life because UKTV as a channel makes me itchy. But there’s a range of implications raised the Major’s racist rants, and I think it’s worth thinking them through. And I don’t think it’s binary.
I do think sometimes racist language has a place in the mouths of characters, there are contexts where it makes sense. It’s dependent on who’s doing the writing, who’s doing the speaking, what’s going on in the narrative and who it is you’re really laughing at.
*BUT*
*BUT*
The context of a work - film, telly, whatever - is bigger than that piece of content on its own. Meaning is what happens when a work is in conversation with it’s audience.
Which is why sometimes, I think some of the “ah, but this is *really* a send up of xyz bigotry” falls down.
Which is why sometimes, I think some of the “ah, but this is *really* a send up of xyz bigotry” falls down.
Part of your audience is made up of people who just really find it funny to hear someone say the N word, or Paki, or whatever slur it is, regardless of whether the intention is to make fun of the person who’s saying it.
Like, I’ll never forget the time (back when I was a teenager) that a white family member was showing me something on their phone, and accidentally showed me a stream of racist jokes sent to them by another member of their extended family. It was just slur after slur after slur.
It made me feel queasy, like somehow I’d been naive for assuming this hadn’t been going on. And I don’t think it’s a rare or uncommon thing at large.
Not one person of colour I can see on the TL thinks that taking down the Fawlty Towers episode is anything other than a distraction from the actual issues raised by this explosion of antiracist consciousness and action.
But the defensiveness and howls of outrage about that, or blackface in Little Britain, or any of these culture war microevents really, makes me think about why it is using racist language or imagery is considered the frontline of autonomy in art and comedy.
I don’t think you can make hard and rigid rules when it comes to art, whether that’s comedy or theatre or whatever. And I don’t think anyone is sincerely suggesting that either - what’s being contested is whether we can let what is culturally valued move with the times.
Anyway, preparing to wake up to a hundred tweets from Staffy Avi Twitter being like “sO yOu WaNt To BaN fAwLtY tOwErS tHeN?”
I love this website!
I love this website!
*wakes up*
*checks tweets*
I fucking told you so.
*checks tweets*
I fucking told you so.
