On Wednesday, a Scottish court convicted YouTuber Mark Meechan (@CountDankulatv) of making a joke that was deemed “grossly offensive” – namely, teaching his dog to make a Hitler salute every time he said “gas the Jews”.
Many of the YouTuber’s defenders were decidedly unsavoury, including far-right types like Tommy Robinson, Stefan Molyneux and Paul Joseph Watson, each of whom share Meechan’s oft-professed suspicion of Muslims, political correctness and “social justice warriors”. But he also received support among more mainstream voices, including Ricky Gervais, who highlighted the case to his 13 million followers. “If you don’t believe in a person’s right to say things that you find ‘grossly offensive’,” Ricky solemnly intoned, “then you don’t believe in free speech.”
Gervais’s advocacy was prompted by criticism for the 15 minutes of mirth-free transphobia with which he opened his week-old Netflix special. The Dankula verdict provided a handy “worst case” scenario he could hold up as his own work was criticised, allowing him to conflate people expressing their offence at his work with him being literally criminally prosecuted for it.
Weird development
Nevertheless, Gervais is right: the conviction is a regressive and weird development, a fact lost to some merely because Meechan himself appears entirely innocent of even accidental wit.
Dankula’s work is redolent of much of the current comic landscape of YouTube, reddit and 4chan edgelords: mostly stupid, often cruel, sometimes hateful but always everlastingly, compulsorily tedious.
In reality, the problem with such work is not that it offends, but that it’s so boring. Humour requires empathy and self-awareness, not so people’s feelings don’t get hurt, but because, without those qualities, you cannot create the necessary starting position from which to relate to other human beings.
So, like Bear Grylls decanting water from a giant, floppy slab of camel shite, the edgelords’ lack of empathy leaves them to subsist on the decaying effluent left in comedy’s wake: shock, offence, disgust. Deprived of actual humour, ever-increasing units of shocking matter are then required to do the comedic work, like a thin-fisted cartoon boxer sewing a horseshoe into his glove.
Chilling prospect
But, while edgelord grifting is a drab and tiresome phenomenon, its criminalisation should be a chilling prospect for us all. It is unnerving in and of itself that crap, racist jokes can lead to criminal convictions. Moreover, such illiberal treatment merely recasts such practitioners as trailblazing warriors of free speech, brave enough to say the things others are too scared to say.
As @ImMichaelBrown tweeted this week about Gervais, the reality is much more mundane: the internet’s hateful infants are actually just “saying the things other comedians are too funny to say”.
