Team No-one, Ever
Yesterday Frankie Boyle criticized Ricky Gervais for his jokes about trans people. I suppose my first reaction was:
But it goes deeper than that. I’m the child of someone with a disability, I have a few disabilities of my own, and it was primarily the comedy of Boyle and Gervais that taught me how the world views people with disabilities. That’s not even getting started on the racism, the anti-semitism, and of course the transphobia that Boyle used to do and Gervais still does. I’m glad that Boyle has done the bare minimum, I want people to change, no matter how loathesome they are I want to believe there’s good in everyone. But he stood on stage and specifically abused a Black child (child!) with a disability, and he made fun of people with Downs Syndrome in front of their parents, and he went on Twitter and talked about how he wanted to rape a Black sportwoman. I don’t feel like his words come from a place of actual empathy and I’m also fairly sure he’ll go back on them as soon as it’s convenient.
One thing I’ve found interesting about this, in an incredibly depressing way, is that until this point Boyle appeared to have a fanbase of, well, exactly who you’d expect. I went through Twitter and it’s all, “I assumed based on Boyle’s Nazi-like attitude to disabled people that he was far-right just like me! What do you mean there’s a tiny spark of decency in there?” And I really hope he knows that those were the kind of attitudes, and the kind of people, he cultivated with his cruelty.
And also, obviously, fuck the both of them.
