Whenever I hear the word culture I release the safety-catch of my Canceltron revolver

‘Disgusting yellowface’ ... comedian Kate Hanley Corley. Picture: Josh Robenstone

The Sydney Morning Herald, Monday:

Cancel culture, the online phenomenon of boycotting public figures who say or do the wrong thing, is the Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year …

The dictionary’s entry for cancel culture describes it as “the attitudes within a community which call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from a public figure”. “In a way it’s an attempt to wipe them out, as a punishment,” said Victoria Morgan, senior editor of Macquarie Dictionary.

Richard Guilliatt, The Weekend Australian Magazine, November 22:

Kate Hanley Corley (was) inspired to write her first show by a newspaper article about an Australian woman who trained to become a geisha in Japan. The comic potential of that story struck a chord with Corley, who had visited Japan many times and loved the country, but whose 1.8m frame made her feel like an oversized heifer whenever she took to the streets. Thus did she come to write Memoirs of an Aisha, a musical comedy about a Gippsland dairy farmer named Aisha Ronan who flies to Japan to become a geisha and win back her boyfriend Craig, who has fallen for a Tokyo girl while on tour in Japan with the Nar Nar Goon footy club.

More TWAM:

… the ­editors of Liminal — an online magazine of “Asian-Australian excellence” — denounced Corley and the Fringe Festival on Twitter, describing Aisha The Aussie Geisha as racist and disgusting “yellowface”. No one from the magazine had ­actually seen the show, but Liminal surmised that it “actively taps into racial hate”.

Kate Hanley Corley. Picture: Melbourne Fringe

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun, November 24:

Our sick new cancel culture works only because victims lack the guts to call it out — particularly those of the Left, now being eaten by their own revolution. Take Jonathan Biggins and Drew Forsythe … Last year they wanted to mock US President Donald Trump, showing him taking tips from the dictators of North Korea and China. Oops! … they and their two white co-stars were banned from playing the Asian characters themselves for fear of causing racial offence. So they replaced the Asian dictators with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, which makes no sense. Why is it racist for a white actor to play an Asian but not an Arab?

Jonathan Stea, Psychology Today, October 30:

… the impact of actions matter, and racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and other socially and morally unacceptable behaviours will rightfully carry with them some sort of social and moral punishments. But do we really want to indefinitely judge, mob, and define a person merely by pointing to a frozen subset of their views or actions? One layer deeper, who among us should be casting these stones?

Nick Cave on cancel culture, The Red Hand Files, April:

Contemporary rock music no longer seems to have the fortitude to contend with these enemies of the imagination … and in this present form perhaps rock music isn’t worth saving. The permafrost of puritanism could be the antidote for the weariness and nostalgia that grips it … Transgression is fundamental to the artistic imagination, because the imagination deals with the forbidden. Go to your record collection and mind-erase those who have led questionable lives and see how much of it remains. It is the artist who steps beyond the accepted social boundaries who will bring back ideas that shed new light on what it means to be alive.