My user name is ironic.
Consider modifying your username to Just_Asking_“Questions”.
Qadgop_“the”_Mercotan.
;-D
Here’s the Hitler impression in question:
The result was that the Cambridge Union decided not to invite him back again as a speaker.
Whether you agree with them or not, a university student society certainly has the right to invite or not invite anyone they like to speak in their debates.
I think John Cleese and the anti-woke brigade in general are highly over-reacting to a private debating society exercising their right to invite only the guest speakers they want.
Nobody is limiting anybody’s freedom of speech outside of this particular debating society, and nobody is obliged to listen to somebody if they don’t want to.
I’d tell John Cleese not to let the door hit him as he flounces out.
For quite a long time, I’ve wanted to start a thread about how we take ourselves too seriously and can’t laugh at ourselves, how it is now forbidden to make jokes against some groups (but other groups are OK to make fun of), and so on; but I don’t know how to compose it because it’s a sensitive topic and a little bit broad.
You can make any jokes you want and make fun of whoever you want. You aren’t oppressed.
So, is the Union more offended by the Hitler reference or the cultural appropriation of a German accent?
It’s hard to tell.
I wouldn’t describe Cleese as “right wing” in the traditional sense.
There always been a somewhat anarchist anti-authoritarian trend in comedy. So I am not surprised that a lot of comedians who mocked traditional right wing conservatives for trying to censor or ban them have a problem with left wing liberals trying to do the same thing.
I take it you’re attempting to be sarcastic.
The point is that whatever they’re offended by, people have a right to find things offensive. If you disagree about whether they are offensive or not, that’s also fine.
But… you don’t have a right to say that nobody is allowed to be offended by anything you say.
And John Cleese has every right to tweak them for black-listing that professor.
so everyone should be happy now.
Do you remember the ‘Major’ in Fawlty Towers? That’s what Cleese is turning into in his old age.
(Also, by making a big fuss and stirring up controversy, he’s getting plenty of free publicity for his forthcoming movie.)
It’s not all old white comedians…but it sure is a lot of them at this point.
From the clip shared here, I believe the committee was right to not allow further performances, if that is my understanding.
The performer seems to be going for a quasi realistic recreation of Hitler’s speeches, speech, or some amalgamation thereof. The question is why present day audiences need to listen to this, instead of other points of view. I don’t need to empathize with Hitler. I’ll empathize with Hitler after I empathize with the millions of people he was responsible for killing, which is to say never. If you are just presenting Hitler’s speech or performance without more satire or presenting the impact of what he did, then yes, I think your art is bad and offensive.
Let’s consider two statements.
- You can put the word “too” in front of any descriptor and come up with a reasonable example of such a case.
- The idea that if there is an evil person or group A and A believes X, then X is always evil and wrong. ← That idea does not hold water.
Can you disprove either of these statements?
It’s nice to see that the left of center are finally recognizing, however belatedly, the incompatibility of far left illiberal zealots and a free society.
This is bizarre. John Cleese was mocking Hitler back when he did his Monty Python stuff, and his Fawlty Towers stuff.
This professor or whatever wasn’t mocking him, at least from that video. He seemed to be trying to make Hitler a sympathetic character or something.
I don’t understand why Cleese would be offended by the Cambridge Union thinking they had enough of that. What Cleese and that professor did were totally different things, and separated by 50 years.
If someone came in with blackface to make old racists into sympathetic figures, and Cleese had done blackface 50 years ago to make fun of racists, it would be weird as well.
But, whatever. I unfollowed Cleese on Twitter recently anyway – not because of this, but because all he does is complain about British politics.
I find it fairly hard to believe that his intention was to make Hitler a sympathetic character, and his later statement on the matter claims otherwise, so I suspect that given the full context it would be obvious in a way that a ~40 second excerpt was not obvious.
Also I found it interesting that “negro” was censored in the captioning.
Whatever. I agree that Cambridge gets to decide who to invite and Cleese gets to decide where to speak. I’m slightly on Cleese’s side here because my impression is that many of these judgments are made without an appreciation for context or nuance.
The debate was about whether “taste” exists. Whether it’s possible for something to be in good taste or bad taste.
It is obvious in that context that the purpose of the performance was not to make you empathize with Hitler. He did something in very bad taste to demonstrate what bad taste is, and why it can be connected to something significant.
I don’t care what John Cleese has to say about anything but it is a little weird to see people assuming that the most likely thing that was happening here is just that a guy decided he wanted to act like Hitler. Just like a straight up Hitler type vibe, is what he thought would be cool.
I don’t really get this trend either. At some point, people decide that the worst kind of speech is the criticism of other speech, and should be silenced through passive aggressive and asinine tactics like this one.
Even if he had a legitimate gripe about the reaction to this professor’s recreation of nazi speech and mannerisms and attitudes, he is punishing people who had nothing to do with it.
I kind of understand, in that as a public figure, he probably gets criticism from time to time, and that can be hard to stomach. That creates a tendency to ally with and support other public figures who are being criticized, no matter how just that criticism may be, and to attempt to end criticism of public figures altogether.
Blaming the “woke mob” for his decision is just pure showmanship, trying to turn the people who he is unfairly punishing against his personal target. Group punishment for the purpose of getting that group to punish your real target is absolutely nothing new, and it has never been used in good faith for noble ends.
I barely know John Cleese, I laughed at some of his stuff here and there, but as a person I knew nothing. What I know now is enough that any respect I had for his acting or humor is diminished by my loss of respect for him as a person.
Can’t tell if you’re serious, so I’ll assume you are.
Why would I try? Let consider the statement: An ocean gets wet when it rains. Can you disprove that?
I just read something and I wanted to expand on my thought.
I read a user review of No Time To Die on Amazon. Several of the one-star reviewers decried that Bond and “Hollywood” was now “woke” because the new 007 is…gasp…a [spoiler alert] WOMAN!
They also complained about other major plot developments, but I can’t see that Bond doing “that” or him having a “you know” are also examples of “wokeness”, but with the average intelligence of right wingers these days, they may have well meant that, too.
’
I submit they don’t know what the word means, but they know they don’t like it.