Our online culture is trying to cancel our funny bone
Is the censoring of old programs an overdue response to changing community values, or a gross over-reaction?
In a week that has brought a fresh round of cancellations and reassessment of classic films and television programs, comedian Chas Licciardello – who has worn Arab robes and a long beard to impersonate the terrorist Osama bin Laden – insisted: “There is no comedy Politburo out there’’.
Now the co-host of ABC show Planet America, Licciardello said: “The decisions made in comedy are driven by TV and live audiences – not by 16 angry people on Twitter.’’
However, the former member of The Chaser group of professional pranksters conceded that “humourless scrutiny’’ from the Left and Right had made comedy “harder to create’’.
He revealed this was one of the reasons The Chaser team – famous for their edgy stunt sketches – ended the show. “It was the advent of a) mobile phone camera-wielding crowds … posting our segments online before we could; and b) increasingly strident scrutiny making the show a nightmare to create,’’ he told The Weekend Australian.
“That scrutiny wasn’t just coming from the Left via wokescolds. It was also coming from the Right via perpetually outraged tabloids [and] … from non-political actors via a commentariat that gets off on complaining about things.’’
Licciardello was speaking as the ABC revealed that an internal review of programs that may cause “harm” or “offence’’ has added a trigger warning to the feature film Jedda, the first Australian movie to feature Aboriginal actors in lead roles.
Jedda, by pioneering director Charles Chauvel, was made in 1955 and centred on an orphaned Aboriginal girl raised by a white woman and led astray by an indigenous figure from the wrong skin group.
Indigenous actors Robert Tudawali and Rosalie Kunoth-Monks played the leads. An ABC spokesman said that an advisory note aimed at viewers would state: “Jedda is a film of historical significance, released in 1955. Its depictions and characterisations reflect the attitudes and prejudices of the time. Some elements of the film may cause offence to contemporary audiences.”
Like other broadcasters, the ABC has been reviewing its content in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the brutal killing of African-American George Floyd by a police officer. The public broadcaster’s review of current and past programming is designed to “ensure it meets current community standards and reflects our editorial policies on harm and offence’’.
As a result of the review, the ABC has also removed two episodes of UK comedy The Mighty Boosh from ABC iview. These episodes apparently feature white characters in blackface, and according to the spokesman, the ABC felt those episodes “did not meet current community standards’’.
He confirmed, however, that the Tonightly sketch show – including a controversial 2018 segment in which a candidate for Cory Bernardi’s Conservative Party was called a “c..t’’ – had not been affected by the review. It remains on ABC Comedy YouTube.
The Jedda trigger warning comes as broadcasters and streamers around the world drop or reassess material, from Gone With The Wind to Chris Lilley’s brown and blackface “mockumentaries”, that are now regarded as racially offensive or culturally insensitive. The wave of suppressed and reassessed films and programs raises unsettling questions: Is the censoring of programs – often decades after they were made – an overdue response to changing community values, or a gross over-reaction?
Is fear of giving offence stifling freedom of expression in the arts, film and television industries, especially in comedy? And are genuine concerns about racial injustice and insensitivity highlighted by BLM being drowned out by an increasingly strident cancel culture?
Academics who study satire and television have described the cancel culture movement as a new form of “puritanism’’ borne out of a split between baby boomer progressives who opposed censorship and younger activists. This generational split is especially evident among comedians, although Licciardello said cancel culture was less of a danger to comedians than lack of paid work. “I’d say starvation is killing comedy more than ‘cancel culture’,” he said.
Veteran comics who practised a broader, rougher style of comedy have hit back at cancel culture. Mark Mitchell, best known for his 1980s comic creation Con the Fruiterer, described it as “myopic” and “impotent’’ and Perth comedian Kevin Bloody Wilson claimed political correctness was “taking the guts out of comedy’’.
“A lot of people take umbrage at everything, so I sort of discount those people totally,” the Perth-based comedian told the Weekend Australian. “I don’t think times are shifting at all. You’ll see three generations of the same families coming to see my show, and not necessarily the blokey side of the family.”
Mitchell, whose comic alter ego appeared in the sketch show The Comedy Company, said: “The bleating about the past not corresponding to what we consider good and proper is impotent rage … Once all the statues have been pulled down, and all the comedians of the past have been derided for being products of their time and place or dismissed for their wrong-think or politically incorrect speech, what will have changed? Nothing but the burgeoning sense of self-righteous indignation.”
In the current censorious climate, many comedians are reluctant to publicly share their views. ABC Utopia star Rob Sitch – who used prosthetics and dark makeup to impersonate Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Pakistan cricketer Imran Khan and South African anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu on The Late Show in the 1990s – declined to be interviewed for this article. The ABC spokesman said the broadcaster would not comment on its historical programming.
Asked to comment on cancel culture, Rob Shehadie, who created Here Come The Habibs and starred in the 2003 comic film Fat Pizza, declared through a spokesman that the topic was a no-go area for him. His spokesman said: “Rob’s trying to stay clear of this topic as it’s too sensitive … He doesn’t feel comfortable discussing this topic publicly. It’s one of those topics that can divide a nation.“
In the aftermath of mass protests against police brutality, programs depicting the police have also been cancelled. SBS and Network 9 have both pulled Live PD, an American show that follows police on patrol. Production of the reality show was recently shut down in the US amid allegations an American crew member had filmed the death of an African-American man in custody.
SBS has also pulled from its streaming platform the 2018 feature film Dragging Through Concrete, which stars Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn as wayward cops. A spokeswoman said the movie had been pulled “because of a potentially triggering scene … featuring one of the main police officer characters in a physical position similar to the position George Floyd was in’’.
Earlier this month, the 1939 Hollywood film Gone With The Wind, an episode of 1970s TV sitcom Fawlty Towers and the BBC comedy Little Britain were temporarily or permanently dropped from streaming services including HBO Max and Netflix because they were deemed racially insensitive. Lilley’s shows Summer Heights High, Angry Boys, We Can be Heroes, and Jonah from Tonga – each featuring Lilley in black or brownface – have all been dropped from Netflix’s Australian and New Zealand platforms.
This week the BBC said it would reinstate the dropped Fawlty Towers episode on its streaming service UKTV, accompanied by a warning about “offensive content and language’’.
Mitchell said it was “bitterly ironic’’ that Hattie McDaniel’s role as Mammy, the enslaved housekeeper in Gone With The Wind, was now seen as “worthy of derision”, pointing out that as the first black actor to win an Oscar, McDaniel had “made a huge inroad for black Americans”.
(HBO Max plans to reinstate the film, long criticised for its positive portrayal of slavery, with contextual information and a warning about its content.)
Academic and author Susan Lever, whose new book Creating Australian Television Drama explores our screenwriting history, said the drive to cancel films and programs deemed culturally offensive was “a sort of puritanism”.
“I do understand they (broadcasters) want to show willing on Black Lives Matter and don’t want to be racist in any form,’’ Lever said. But she added there was a “weird mismatch’’ between younger activists seeking to cancel comic shows they found offensive, yet remaining silent about “horrible’’ and extreme forms of online pornography or violence-saturated video games.
She said: “I think creativity is something you can’t control. If we do, that’s dangerous … Once someone puts something into the public world, it’s open slather for people to argue about it. Stopping it getting into the public world – that’s another question.’’
She defended Lilley’s now-banned comic creation, Tongan schoolboy Jonah Takalua, as a complex character who exuded “pathos. He’s not a figure of fun in the end. He’s a pathetic figure that you care about.’’ Asked whether it was appropriate for Lilley to have portrayed Jonah in brownface in Summer Heights High and Jonah From Tonga, she said he “could have played Jonah as a white’’.
The answer to the current controversy, she said, wasn’t censorship but more programs featuring under-represented minority communities. “If the ABC, Netflix and SBS really care about this issue, they should be looking for the writers and creators who can represent these minority groups in the way they ought to be represented,’’ she said.
University of NSW academic Mark Rolfe said the heated debate about comedy had spilled over into the culture wars, with “the murder of nuance’’ by both right-wing and left-wing players through “rhetorical inflation’’ and “digital outrage’’.
“One of the problems with satire is the way it can be diversely read,’’ he said. “That’s always a danger for comedians.’’ Studies showed some audiences ended up liking sitcom characters – such as Alf Garnett in Til Death Us Do Part or Archie Bunker from All in the Family – who were meant to be “objects of ridicule’’. Rolfe said: “That’s always the danger but I don’t think it’s necessarily one that leads you to removing this stuff.”
Jessica Milner Davis, scholar and author of the book Judges, Judging and Humour, said social media had “fragmented’’ audiences into “in-groups’’ who reinforced each other’s views, while streaming, YouTube and other platforms meant that comedies once performed for a limited audience were now screened internationally, so the scope for causing cause offence had grown exponentially.
As a student at the University of NSW in the 1960s, Milner Davis joined Richard Neville in fighting an obscenity charge related to an erotic Papua New Guinean statue. As students, she said her generation’s aim had been “to offend’’ and “get up the noses of authority’’. Now, agitators who supported cancel culture “were not about offending authority, they’re about avoiding being offended themselves”.