No, totally the right thing. You rock!
Mangetout - you did great.
Making fun of accents has been a staple of British comedy since Caxton. Scouse accents are inherently funny. Somerset, cockney and Brummie accents are hilarious.
If you round up a bunch of people from across the British Isles, they’ll make fun of each other’s accents. Introduce some Germans or Italians and we’ll mock them too. Mocking Indian or Jamaican accents is a lot less fun these days though and there are, I think, good reasons for that.
Britain welcomed an unprecedented number of immigrants from the Commonwealth in the 50s, 60s and 70s but the welcome was less than fulsome. My fellow countrymen behaved appallingly. Many still do, but much less than they used to. Some things do get better.
It’s painful to go back and watch some of the TV dramas from that period to see how awful things were for immigrants from the Commonwealth. The 70s were an absolute low point for racist comedians and I shudder at some of the things I found funny back then. However, some things are still funny.
I was watching Fawlty Towers with my son last night. Manuel is still funny because the character was written with humanity and the joke is on Basil Fawlty, not on the hapless foreigner. I loved 'Allo 'Allo back in the day and I expect I still would.
It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum has a similar structure of making fun of the racist and homophobic Sergeant-Major but the jokes fall flat now because we’re all aware that even ironic racism is not as funny as it used to be and it’s hard, sometimes, to distinguish satirical racism from the vicious kind.
There’s no doubt in my mind that there is a double standard when we decide which accents we are allowed to make fun of. Given the history, I think that’s appropriate. I look forward to the day when we are comfortable enough with each other that Indian accents and Jamaican accents become funny again.
I brook no truck with the simplistic punching-up/punching-down heuristic. It simultaneously excuses too much and creates too many opportunities for taking offence when none was intended. I believe intention is everything and if that occasionally leads to accidental offence, an explanation of why it’s offensive followed by a sincere apology makes the world a little brighter.