Funniness
I'm pretty sure this odious piece in yesterday's Independent was intended as a bit of light-hearted humor-- it's often hard to tell with the English, but their unintentional humor is usually much funnier than this. What is clear is that the author (Mark Steel) is fairly "chuffed," as they say, about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn. But isn't rejoicing in the political murder of a democratically-elected gay libertarian a bit unseemly for a self-respecting member of Britain's leftist elite? Aren't such things frowned upon? No indeed, because Fortuyn was a racist and a fascist (sins which cancel out his otherwise virtuous membership in an oppressed group) according to Steel's unequivocal verdict. No substantive basis for this characterization is provided, no policies are discussed or analyzed, or even mentioned. The precise nature of the populist appeal of LPF's stance on immigration is an interesting and complex problem, but Steel offers only idiotic rhetorical fluff like "it's true that Le Pen didn't like Fortuyn, but then Mussolini didn't like Hitler." Well, that settles it then.
The bulk of the article consists of feeble attempts to be amusing, like:
Dutch people "no longer hear their own language." When did the Dutch start complaining about this? The whole point of being Dutch is to speak 40 languages.
When I moved from Kent to south London, which is more "full" than Holland, no one demanded that I moved back, yelling, "There´s no room, anyway we don´t want your funny ways, watching cricket and growing hops all over the place. We drink lager here, not bitter, because multi-culturalism doesn´t work."
Or there's this hand-tooled gem:
If Hitler had been gay, the only difference to history would have been the uniforms, when he'd thrown a strop and yelled, "Brown shirts and jackboots? Have you no sense of colour co-ordination".
They try and try, but the Guardipendent crowd will never be able to beat Mark Steyn at this game. When Left-wing journalists try to be funny, it almost always falls embarrassingly flat. Why is this? Is it because the serious points tend to be funnier than the jokes? Why is Mark Steel so crashingly boring and unfunny, no matter how hard he tries? There is no real answer: he just is.
Anyway, I think Steel is also trying to be funny here, but I wouldn't dismiss this idea out of hand:
to be consistent, America´s "axis of evil" should now include Iraq, Iran, North Korea and the Vegan Wholefood Fruit and Bean Collective, commencing with a series of Vulcan bomber raids over this year´s Glastonbury Festival.
For all I know, Steel may well think his columns are funnier than Steyn's, but then Stalin probably thought he was funnier than Churchill, too.
Posted by Dr. Frank at May 11, 2002 08:51 AM | TrackBack