I’ve always been pretty political. I didn’t know what my politics were, as they self-consciously fluctuated throughout my teens, but I’ve always been interested in the goings on of the world and governments. There was even one brief period when I thought of myself as conservative, when I was about 12-13. I spent a lot of that time complaining about what right-whingers call, “political correctness”, although that was what eventually put me off it (because they complain about it ALL THE TIME. This was back in 2009 by the way, long before the “internet culture wars” started). It was the reason why I could never get into all of the internet atheists suddenly ranting about Anita Sarkeesian. And looking back, I think I have to thank Chris Rock for my intolerance for the intolerant.
When I was 9 (and I know I was 9 because it was at this time, 2004, when Friends was cancelled), my family had a brief holiday at a small coastal town on the south-west of Ireland. It was beautiful, but the weather was never reliable, with a lot of stormy nights spent huddling around the small TV watching Irish broadcasts. One of the channels we stumbled across was a movie channel. Or at least it kept showing movies every night, including every single classic James Bond film. So we watched those. But one night, either because it was later in the evening or because the James Bond marathon had finished, the broadcasters put on a film called Down To Earth, starring Chris Rock.
My understanding of African American culture was limited at that time. Everybody Hates Chris hadn’t started yet, so my only exposure to Black American culture were Eddie Murphy and Will Smith, and occasional jokes in The Simpsons. I’m not sure I even knew about the civil rights movement at that point. I was in that blissful point of existence, as a young white English kid of course, who didn’t know that racism existed and simply thought everyone saw each other equally. Down To Earth didn’t enlighten me to the facts of racism, but it did introduce to me a concept that would transform my understanding of a political discourse that was both neverending but would come to a head fifteen years later in the so-called “internet culture wars”.
Down To Earth is about a young black comedian, Chris Rock, who accidentally dies before his time on Earth was supposed to end. The angels think, okay, we screwed up, so what we’ll do is find you a fresh body to inhabit while we figure out what to do with you. So they put Chris Rock’s soul in the body of an old rich white guy who’d recently died. I understood this as a kid. Hey it’s funny because they’re like, polar opposites. He’s a struggling young black comedian, and now he’s in the body of an old rich white guy. I loved body-swapping comedies like this. Freaky Friday was my jam. But this introduced an interesting concept to me that I’d never considered before, that people are perceived differently depending on how they look, and where they’re from, and how they speak. In this case focussing on the racial element.
So Chris Rock becomes this rich old guy, but only because he realises he can help people as the rich old guy with all the money he has. What he actually wants to do is get back to doing his standup, which suddenly has a new problem. Chris Rock’s character always played to the black comedy clubs. Apart from the Apollo Theatre, which is his big dream, the black clubs are the only places he knows, and the only material he has is geared towards that audience. The scene that stuck out to me, when I was 9 years old, was when he tries to perform his “black” material to a black audience, as an old white guy. The black audience watch him in stunned silence, then presumably try to murder him (the scene cuts away before this happens though).
This was a revelation to me. I’m not embarrassed to say that a meh Chris Rock movie got me thinking about this stuff. It made me understand that comedy has a context, that certain people can’t joke about certain things, because it just doesn’t work. I didn’t know it then, but Chris Rock speaking his lived experience, as a white man, comes across as punching down, while a black man delivering the exact same “black” material, is funny, because he’s speaking truth to a shared experience. It came across as completely obvious to me as a kid. Of course an old white guy can’t say those things to a black audience. It’s not funny, it’s insulting.
Apparently a lot of young white guys like myself didn’t see this movie when they were 9, otherwise they would’ve grown up with this essential truth. There’s this absurd mentality that, as long as you don’t think you’re racist, you can say whatever you want, context be damned. We now have an entire generation of boring white guys telling the same stereotyped jokes over and over, because, aside from the fact that they think this material is new and daring, they honestly can’t see how or why it’s tedious. “My jokes about black guys stealing cars aren’t racist, because I’m not racist. I’m just being ironic, why can’t you tell?” A guy was recently dropped from the show Saturday Night Live because he was making jokes about “ch*nks”, and I imagine he had that same mentality that I just described. “I’m not racist, I’m just saying ‘chinks’ ironically! Can’t you take a joke!?”
This argument is older than the recent “cancel culture” nonsense. I mentioned my conservatism as a 13 year old. That came from my dad being a journalist and bringing several tabloid newspapers home every evening. These would include the Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday. As a kid you don’t understand that newspapers have political opinions, so I originally thought they just “told the news”. I quickly realised that the news stuff was boring, however, and what people were really reading were the columnists. I became very well acquainted with the Daily Mail and Mail On Sunday columnists of the time: Liz Jones with her range rovers, Max Hastings and his historical revisionism, Jan Moir, Janet Street-Porter, Peter McKay, the ever-complaining contrarian Peter Hitchens, and of course, my personal favourite for how terrible he was, Richard Littlejohn.
Richard Littlejohn has been immortalised in the comedy standup of Stewart Lee, who correctly described Littlejohn as a “c*nt”. Why would Lee call Littlejohn that? Probably because Littlejohn made jokes about murdered sex workers and complained that they were called “sex workers” instead of his presumably preferred terms: “prostitutes”, “whores” and “sluts”. It was part of Littlejohn’s routine, which he dolls out again and again and again, without fail every week, complaining about “Yooman Rights” and “‘Elf and Safety” and “Political Correctness Gone Mad”. No this isn’t Ben Shapiro, this is the Mail on Sunday circa 2005 all the way up to 2020. I mentioned at the start how I’ve always been political, and that’s thanks to reading people like Littlejohn at such a young age. I initially agreed with them, then challenged them, and ultimately despised them. I was shocked at how people could be so perpetually enraged, and realised that that was most of the British public.
(People were shocked when Brexit happened. I wasn’t. Because I’d read the Mail on Sunday circa 2008, and knew that the readers of these newspapers had been fed the same anti-immigrant, anti-human rights, anti-bureaucracy, anti-political correctness narrative for decades. And they were fed it willingly, because they wanted to be perpetually outraged).
“Political correctness gone mad” has always been a tedious phrase, no matter who it’s come from. The people who whine about it all day secretly love it. They love political correctness. Why do I say this? Because I figured out, at 13-14, that there were plenty of things that the anti-pc brigade would themselves get offended about. Insulting the military, the British flag, the monarchy, anything related to the First and Second World Wars, the Empire, “white culture”, “British values” and all the rest. If I were to announce the fact that I despise the military on national television, there would be headlines, outcries, complaints, columns, calls for my sacking from whatever network or media outlet I was working for, and death threats. All from the same people who say, “It’s political correctness gone mad!”
The people who love/hate political correctness don’t hate political correctness. They hate the people that political correctness is assumed to protect. Immigrants, non-white people, women, LGBT people, disabled people, and the working class. Richard Littlejohn loves political correctness. He loves calling for people to be sacked because they didn’t bow to the Queen enough. He loves the military, he loves defending “British values” despite living in Florida. He loves perpetuating a narrative that we’re all being collectively silenced by an establishment elite of university students saying that “poofs” shouldn’t be used in public discourse. Politeness is a British value, unless it’s queers you’re talking about. When people are actually censored publicly by the government, for example when debating British arms deals with the Saudi Arabians, these political correctness gone mad types, so invested as they are in defending freedom of speech, go strangely quiet. “Political correctness” is a smokescreen. It’s the people political correctness “protects” that they despise.
American politics are a whole other ball game of course, the racial question being a much more transparent issue there than it is in the UK. What’s hilarious is that a mediocre comedy starring a black man from 2001 has a better understanding of the issue than most white American media twenty years later.
Then again, that should make sense, considering the political material of Chris Rock. It’s actually extraordinary that I grew up in a time when not only was Chris Rock mainstream, but he was allowed an expressive artistic voice. On the one hand, I knew him as the zebra in Madagascar, but on the other hand, he was the origin story of Everybody Hates Chris, a children’s show specifically designed to teach children about African American life. Beneath the brilliant comedy was a real indictment of American society: how Chris was the only black kid at his school, how he lived in a crummy neighbourhood, how his white best friend was treated better than him. All of these things were eye-openers to a little English white kid living it up in a nice part of London.
It’s strange to realise that Chris Rock was the stepping stone for me to learn about such a big part of Western culture, but then again, it’s an experience that speaks to our modern world of sprawling information avenues and cultural inertia. A lot of the time, people just don’t want to talk about these topics, or they talk about them from deliberately dishonest positions (cough British tabloids cough). It takes someone like Chris Rock to be completely open about it, to express themselves in ways that even children understand, helping to educate them about the invisible world that is so regularly avoided or ignored by adults. Some people think children shouldn’t be taught about politics. Those people are cap-doffers.
This is a bit of a bizarre article, for which I apologise. There was no real goal set out beyond saying, “oh hey, a dumb Chris Rock movie is my entire foundation for understanding African American culture and history.” The British tabloid details were just some extra thoughts I had about the way culture can be so powerful on impressionable minds, and presented an important contrast to the good Rock did, whereas their work is designed to stupefy. I should probably thank Chris Rock for helping my brain develop beyond that of a tedious blowhard, otherwise I may well have bene writing about how much I love the current Prime Minister right now. So thank you Mr Rock, your meh movie helped one kid understand.
Brooking The Vault 