Booing Boors

Posted on August 17, 2004 in Liberty

It’s politics Tuesday!

I have mixed feelings about the legacy of Lenny Bruce. “Poor misunderstood Lenny” goes the refrain. Chased after by cops for his “blue humor”, many hold him up as a testament to the severity of censorship in this country. Yet he opened the door to ill-tempered tastelessness of a variety which stands in direct opposition to his politics.

Lauren had an experience with a Lenny Bruce wannabe last week who cracked rape jokes. I have seen rape treated comically and successfully only once, in Pedro Almodóvar’s Kika, which is the work of a genius who did not lose track of the fact that rape hurts. Almodóvar caught the confusion of the victim, the pathos of the rapist, and the strange alienation that ensues when the police and family get involved. You laugh out of shock at the situation and do not think of the woman as deserving or willing. It is black comedy at its very best.

But many who joke about rape these days don’t purvey that kind of humor. Their jokes suggest that rape is something that the woman invented, a trap that women lay for men, or just a temptation that you can’t fault men for succumbing to. They uphold a strange right: the right to be offensive and to attack the powerless. It’s not unusual to see these types scream about “hate crimes” laws and then wave the flag for the Patriot Act.

The right to be rude. The right to be offensive. The right to be a jerk. I do not believe in censorship which is when the government steps in and decides what the public can or can’t hear. But I do believe in the free speech right of ordinary people to call a boor a boor. Jerks deny that it exists. Fed on the milk of Randenoidism, they believe that freedom of speech means that they can say whatever they want to say and no one can criticize them for it. No one can get up and walk out on their shows. No one can say “Shut up you loser!” They wave the flag, show their blood-swollen fifth limbs, and say “I am a free man! Now sit down and listen to me!”

Freedom of speech does not allow for either governmental interference or one-man or one-woman tyrannies. It’s a threshing out of ideas among people, not a one-way shooting gallery as the petty minions of the “Right” seems to think. It’s telling that the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson do not point to these when they talk about our “moral decline” but to the women they victimize. Crass “comedians” who attack women, the poor, immigrants, gays, and the disabled serve the Fundamentalist’s unsaved and unChristian function of hate as a means of social control. They affirm the Randenoid myth that the working class is vulgar and ugly.

I would not have government deal with the stupid, the cruel, and the rude. I affirm, instead, my citizen’s right to speak up, to say “Stop that”. We can best teach one another what is funny and what is not funny by our applause and our laughter. We, who champion the cause of those attacked by the dictators of the stage, may also speak, crack jokes at their expense, and make it clear to club owners that we do not approve of this kind of routine on their stages. They will survive, they will find isolated venues here and there which the rest of us can avoid. I am not for shutting them down, just narrowing their market so that only the truly demented and sociopaths will seek them out.

They boo pacifists off stages in places. It is time that we boo boors.