Our dreary future

'MS: And I put a quote up at the National Review’s website, from the Ayatollah Khomenei, which is I think one of the all-time great quotes, in which the Ayatollah says there are no jokes in Islam, there is no fun in Islam. This is something he wrote, and appears in his big volume of collected writings that was published in the holy city of Qum in 1990. And I love it. It’s a fantastic quote, because it points out one of the big differences between us and the enemy, which is that the enemy is totally humorless. And I think it’s rather disturbing that Andrew Sullivan, who mocks so many of the rest of us on the right as theocrats, is, in fact, turning into a bit of a, you know, theocrat-wise, he’s getting close to the Ayatollah Khomenei in his sense of humor.'

http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/Transcript_Page.aspx?ContentGuid=cdd2ee56-d848-4da4-b3f3-9ebaff30bab9

This is a point that I have made before. I do see a massive change between the state of humor now and when I was a child. The English sense of humour has always been a coruscating, wild, rude and dangerous one. It was historically one of the main creative outlets for ordinary people. Its targets were very often the stupid, the unlucky, the unwise, the ugly and the cuckolded. It was no gentle thing. But it also did not spare the lofty aristocrat and the professional man and the high Churchmen and the 'great and good'. In fact, it was very wide-ranging and egalitarian in its abuse. This rough democracy added a great strength to English culture, because it allowed even the meanest among us to verbalise their distaste, disgust or disenchantment in a completely harmless way, while giving great pleasure to those telling the jokes, and those listening to them.

The refusal of Muslims to allow any mention of the content of Islam, let alone jokes about it comes at the end of a long process of narrowing down of the allowable topics for jokes. When I was a child, there were jokes about black people, Irishmen and/or Catholics, physical disability, mean Scotsmen, daft Welshmen and a thousand other topics that are now completely forbidden to the humorist. Instead of a roughhouse democracy, we now have a situation where the butt of all jokes must be a white, protestant man- the last group of people yet to recieve any kind of special dispensation when it comes to abuse. Soon, though, I believe that will change. And we just won't have humour at all. We will become Ayatollah Khomeneis, and everything will be sober and dull and boring. The superb humour of Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper, Ken Dodd, the Python boys, Billy Connolly, Victoria Wood, Morecambe and Wise and thousands of lesser lights will be replaced by the dreary earnestness of the PC acolytes.

I may well have to go out behind the cowshed with a shotgun....