I’ll give you a recipe: if you want to tarnish someone’s reputation, call them “-phobe”. Any “-phobe” will do: xeno-phobe, homo-phobe, islamo–phobe or, the most popular at the moment among woke: trans-phobe. And besides, it doesn’t even have to be true!
My favorite comedian, the hilarious Ricky Gervais, has just been the victim of this and these accusations, wrong and through, are starting to get on my nerves.
OFFENDING THE OFFENDED
Ricky Gervais is this British comedian who has animated several Golden Globes ceremonies with his scathing humor. Political correctness, he doesn’t care!
He is also the brilliant creator of cult series The Office et After Life. But in his last show SuperNaturepresented on Netflix, he dared to say: “Women don’t have penises”.
Because of remarks about “old-fashioned women who had wombs” and “modern women who have beards and dicks”, he gets treated (by a small group of activists who have no sense of humor) of transphobic.
In my opinion, the best way to sum up Gervais’ thought— is this passage from his show: “Transgender people demand to be treated equally. That’s what I do: I include them in my jokes”.
In his show, Gervais makes scathing jokes about: dwarfs, a guy who farts at a baby’s funeral, pedophiles and Adolf Hitler. Among others.
He laughs at religions, races, the obese. But should Gervais close the trap when the time comes to talk about the social phenomenon of the hour?
Recently, it was the American comedian Dave Chapelle who was also the target of the woke, also because of jokes on the transgender phenomenon, also for a show on Netflix. And we know how it went for him. A few weeks after the controversy, a spectator came on stage and punched him. Is that what awaits Ricky Gervais?
What gets on my nerves are the journalists who repeat, each time they speak of Gervais or Chapelle, “considered transphobic”. Judged by whom? By three activists hidden behind their keyboard?
It is enough for a lobby to qualify an individual as “xxxxphobic” for this label to stick to his skin every time his name is spoken?
Fortunately, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos defended the right of the two comedians to “test the limits” in the name of freedom of expression.
Essentially, what Ricky Gervais tells us in
SuperNature, is that if you’re happy that someone is being canceled today for saying something 10 years ago, you risk getting canceled yourself in 10 years. Because you never know what’s going to be offensive from year to year.
In effect. Who would have thought, in 2012, that saying: “A woman does not have a penis” would one day be considered a hate speech, an incitement to violence?
LA « CANCEL CULTURE » ?
I have a question for the progressives who are calling for the recordings of Chapelle and Gervais to be removed from Netflix, and that CEO Sandaros lose his job: since when is the left for censorship?