That said, not many comedians spoke up for Meechan after he was found guilty. There was a discomfort around the whole thing, less perhaps about the joke than about who the teller was. Meechan didn’t help his case by turning to various liberal folk devils, including the British provocateur Katie Hopkins and the former leader of the English Defence League Tommy Robinson. Someone who resolutely refused his support was the
Father Ted writer Graham Linehan, an expert on the darker regions of the internet. He sent me an article, from the alt-right website the
Daily Stormer, which offers a style guide for those wishing to spread neo-Nazi ideas. The key section reads:
Lulz
The tone of the site should be light. Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred. The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor – I am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists, because I don’t take myself super-seriously.
This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.
In other words: if you want to spread the message, do it in a jokey way. Hide in plain sight, or at least behind the veneer of laughter. This gave, and gives, me pause. Both in terms of the case, and, more broadly, in terms of how I think about comedy. It upsets me that an art form, which I love and defend, might be hijacked in this way. The key point, for all comedians, is that context must always be taken into account. And if the true context in any video is to use comedy as a smokescreen for actual hate, I am afraid that free speech can, to put it politely, fuck off. I do not support anyone who says “gas the Jews” and means it.