he impulse on the part of any creative person to say something you’ve been told not to say is tremendously powerful. It may indeed be the fundamental energy that drives any performer, this urge to go against the grain — even to stand on a stage in the first place thinking you’re funny has this defiant quality.
What happened to Tommy at Vicar Street, I suspect, is that he was hearing too many voices. He was hearing his daughter’s voice telling him not to go there and his comedian’s voice telling him to go wherever it takes him, even at the risk of revealing a bad side of his personality.
And there’s this other voice, a global cacophony of rabble-rousers who are forever whining about “cancel culture” and “self-censorship”.
It can be very hard to resist that voice, because it is so loud and so relentless — mainly because the ‘conservative’ hacks who keep putting it out there have so little else to say — and because it has a trick in it, as it takes a good impulse, and twists it into something ugly. The good impulse is that urge to say what you’re not supposed to say, to push it to the edge. Larry David manages to do this somehow, and it works for him because he is a genius.
The rabble-rousers in their endless cynicism will claim these healthy human instincts are being crushed by “cancel culture and self-censorship”.
They will usually claim this in newspaper columns and TV programmes that are being viewed by multitudes.
But that’s the nature and the scale of the con, and it can lure otherwise fair-minded people into its maw. “Self-censorship” sounds like an obviously bad thing. You wouldn’t find that tragic victim of “cancel culture” Jeremy Clarkson engaging in self-censorship, as he abuses Meghan Markle in his column in terms you would reserve for the most irredeemable war criminals.
But if you think about it for maybe five seconds — which is four seconds longer than the Jeremys and the Piers Morgans can spare in their busy schedules — you realise almost all forms of professional writing or broadcasting or film-making or stand-up comedy are, in fact, extended exercises in self-censorship.
Perhaps the oldest line of advice for any kind of public statement, goes like this: What you leave out is as important as what you put in.
Writing is rewriting. If this article appeared in front of you in a more primitive state, it might go something like this: “Jeremy Clarkson is a complete c**t, and so is Piers Morgan and all those others with their hideous shit about cancel culture. Tommy Tiernan screwed up massively here, but it doesn’t necessarily make him a c**t. Here’s why.”
I know some of you are thinking you’ll take that version all day long, but it is problematic in a few areas.
First, my articles for the most part would just look like a collection of asterisks splattered across the page; and while there are certain individuals for whom the C-word is the absolutely perfect description, I am prepared to forgo some of that exactitude. Although I have seen and heard it used as a derogatory term by both men and women, I realise it still has ugly connotations for some — so, with a heavy heart, it’s probably better to take what you might call the Seinfeld route.
They had a rule in Seinfeld that they would not use profanity — not because Larry David didn’t want to, or because it wouldn’t be funny and true, but because it would be a bit too easy, and if they kept doing it they might ultimately be missing out on better and funnier constructions.
That was self-censorship of the highest order, and there’s a lot to be said for it. We keep hearing that “you can’t say anything these days”, but it never seems to occur to these hacks that maybe they could think of something else to say. Or even that they could say it using different words or better words.
It’s really not a huge ask, although it seems too hard for these characters to question some of their own cliches. Unlike Tommy, their lapses into
stereotype are a feature, not a bug.
I’m reminded of the immortal line in the Anita Loos novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, where the heroine Lorelei Lee meets ‘Dr Froyd’ and describes the effect of her outspokenness on the great man: “Dr Froyd said that all I needed was to cultivate a few inhibitions and get some sleep.”
Cultivate a few inhibitions. Tommy Tiernan needs to consider this from time to time, and I’m sure he’ll take that advice.
Boris and Trump are back to wreak havoc
Some day the world will be done with Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, but for now they are certainly not done with us.
We saw them last week featuring in several stories, and the really strange thing was it seemed so normal. Usually when a man is kicked out of Downing Street or the White House, we hardly ever see them again.
Yet here they were, Johnson bounding towards Zelensky for another photo opp in Kyiv and Trump being allowed back on Facebook.
As always when Johnson is bounding towards Zelensky, he was staging a distraction from something disgraceful — in this case, stories including a £1m (€1.14m) donation from a Brexiteer billionaire and an £800,000 loan enabled by a man later installed by Johnson as chairman of the BBC.
The idea of a prime minister so
sleazy and vulnerable to blackmail begging for £800,000 would normally send a shiver down the spine of the western world, if we didn’t know already that Johnson had sabotaged his own country and harmed a few other countries too because that was the best result for him.
Trump did that too, and like Johnson he will come back for another crack at it — if he is allowed. They might even have the international delinquent Steve Bannon working on their speeches, as he did in the past.
One man who will not be standing in the way is Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the UK, now a £2.7m-a-year flak-catcher for Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. After a two-year suspension from the site because of his attempt to overthrow the government, Trump is now being reinstated, mainly due to his determination to do it again. He’s a candidate for 2024 and has given no indication that if he loses next time, he will accept the result.
But because Clegg and Zuckerberg have no souls, they’re waving him through, though they must know Facebook was not just a convenient tool for Trump’s fascism, but an accelerant.
In passing, last week also saw the magnificent headline: “FBI Official Who Investigated Trump Russia Collusion Arrested For Colluding With Russia.”
The truth is out there — it’s just that there are too many people whose £2.7m-a-year salaries depend on ignoring it.
Twitter setting scene for new way to watch films
I see there’s a growing number of Twitter accounts dedicated to excerpts from movies, basically the best bits in segments roughly two minutes long. There’s even some internecine warfare among curators, accusing rivals of plagiarism.
It’s a powerful idea, whoever thought of it first, but I can see where this is going.
Spotify diverted people from the ancient custom of listening to albums in their entirety, in favour of a greatest-hits vibe. Likewise, will we want to waste a precious two hours watching whole films when we can get a classic scene in two minutes? Calling it.
