These paragraphs are all from the same story.
The Hate Crime Act has rather faded into obscurity after the furore surrounding its introduction, with the police apparently just trying to pretend it doesn’t exist by ignoring thousands and thousands of complaints, and the useless Scottish commentariat duly proclaiming as a result that it was all just a big fuss about nothing.
But as soon as everyone stopped looking at it, there it was.
The story, which has occupied vast numbers of column inches for days (the Daily Mail alone has run FIVE pieces about it, the Jewish Chronicle has also piled in repeatedly, and the whole thing appears to have been mostly whipped up by the Telegraph’s chief theatre critic Dominic Cavendish), is a big fat nothing in which everyone EXCEPT Reginald D Hunter appears to have acted like a tiresome arse.
An Israeli couple in the audience at one of his Fringe shows reacted huffily to a very mild joke about Israel, Hunter fired back an equally mild put-down, and the couple then decided to announce their nationality to the crowd, which was met with predictable hostility from some awful tedious “FREE PALESTINE!” types accusing the couple of being genocidal psychopaths, etc etc.
Nobody got hurt, the couple left after a brief shouting match and in a normal sane world that would have been that. Everybody hates hecklers, and Hunter’s retort is both restrained and factually correct. But now, of course, it’s a nationwide shrieking fit, professional whiners are throwing in their tuppence-worth, Hunter has had to issue an “apology”, he’s had at least one upcoming show cancelled, and the police are involved.
People with no sense of humour – or at least, who have a sense of humour about everything but themselves – shouldn’t go to comedy shows. (Reg D Hunter has been doing comedy for 20 years and nobody has any excuse for not knowing that he might be a bit indelicate, least of all Dominic Cavendish.)
If you go to a comedy show and you don’t like a joke, don’t laugh. If you don’t like ANY of the jokes, get up and leave. What you shouldn’t do is loudly start reviewing the show from your chair, because then everyone else – who paid to see the comedian, not listen to you whinging about them – will want to kick your head in for ruining their expensive evening out.
(Why is it only supposedly acceptable in comedy? You wouldn’t rock up to a play and suddenly loudly declare “Hey! This isn’t ‘a transcendentally profound and moving piece of epoch-making theatre’ like it says on the poster at all! It’s boring!”, would you? Or at least, certainly not without expecting a hefty dose of flak from the stage.)
And they’ll want to do it more the longer you go on, and doubly so if you then start angrily demanding in response that you ought to be entitled to special consideration because of your identity and sensitivity.
(What’s the performer supposed to do? Hand out a questionnaire at the door asking if there are any jokes that are off-limits because you might be offended by them? By the time you’ve ruled out each audience member’s personal trigger issues all you’re going to be left with is the chicken crossing the road, except the vegans would probably bleat about that too.)
Hecklers are wankers, and the people screaming about Palestine at them are wankers (because the problem is that they’re heckling, not that they’re Israeli), but if we called the cops every time someone in Scotland was a wanker we’d be in a fine old pickle.
It’s not Police Scotland’s job to be theatre critics, where a one-star review means a jail sentence. And if anything that happened at Reginald D Hunter’s Fringe show this week is a hate crime, then the Hate Crime Act is the biggest joke of all.
