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August 12, 2000
When is a joke not funny any more
It all depends who's telling it, but some issues simply aren't funny
Excerpt from http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4050737,00.html
[...] But this team-shirt theory of humour is complicated
as the Ali G phenomenon (a Jew sending up whites and Asians
who pretend to be black) recently showed. Clearly, relationship to
the material is relevant. A joke made by a Jewish writer about the
American television series Holocaust -- that it seemed a
fitting revenge for the Jews to turn the Nazis into soap -- would
have been troubling if cracked by an Anglican or Arab television
reviewer. Few of us would sit easily through a David Irving
stand-up routine in which he made the same "Holocaust Schmolocaust"
remarks as Capurro.
Website Note on "Operation Backfire": Guardian Newspapers Ltd are trying to destroy David Irving before his High Court libel action against them reaches the courtroom. The writ was served on them in 1996