For some unfathomable reason because most of her opinions are subject to cognitive dissonance, Clementine Ford has been suffering from depression but made it through the festive season without offing herself and has even managed to knock out another couple of hundred words of insanity and/or mendacity.
Trigger warning; You may want to sit down before reading the next sentence.
Clementine Ford doesn’t like the things Louis CK said in a recent comedy routine.
No, really.
She was fully onboard with all of his previous material, such as;
I don’t have a gun, but if I did, I would shoot a baby deer in the mouth and feel nothing.
And she’s fine with his monologue on the N-word;
Take responsibility. They found a way to say nigger—because when you say ’the N-word’ you put the word nigger in the person’s head. You say ’the N-word’ and I go ’Oh, she means nigger.’ That’s just white people getting away with saying nigger. Don’t hide behind the first letter like a faggot.
She really appreciated his joke about pedophile child murderers;
When you fuck a kid, you’ve gotta toss ’em. The guy could just call you, ‘Hey, I fucked your kid. You want me to drop him at soccer?’
And Clementine laughed aloud at his joke about wanking in the time between the two towers falling on 911;
How long after 9/11 until you started masturbating again?
But the material on a recent leaked audio following his #MeToo moment is really beyond the pale for Clementine, resulting in her swooning onto her chez longue in horror;
Leaked audio from a recent show lasting almost an hour laden with racism, ableism, transphobia and the good old-fashioned outrage of a white man who can’t take responsibility for his actions.
Of course, she’s not actually listened to it otherwise she would have written this sentence far more accurately;
There was the commentary on the Parkland shooting victims, who shouldn’t think they’re interesting just because they got shot.
Nope, he doesn’t say that on the leaked audio.
What he does say is that the children who didn’t get shot didn’t magically become imbued with the wisdom of experts on constitutional policy relating to gun crime. That’s a very different and subtle nuance that we wouldn’t expect Clementine to pretend to hear.
And does anybody really believe this statement by La Ford (highlighting mine);
I’m not offended by the idea that any of these topics could be fodder for comedy. But they have to be done well, by the right people, and without the laugh relying on the kind of lazy punch down that all too many comedians reach for because they’re actually far less skilled at their jobs than they think they are.
Pray tell, who gets to decide who the right people are?
But the most telling sentence in Clementine’s first masterpiece of 2019 is the following;
In a recent speech, the genuinely clever and evolving comedian Hannah Gadsby spoke of “the line in the sand” that separates good men from bad men, but that all men reserve the right to be in control of.
If you you are wondering what an “evolving comedian” might be, I suggest you seek out some of Hannah’s work.
Bill’s Opinion
Louis CK has always been a controversial comedian dancing on the edge of good taste. To expect him to suddenly start doing knock knock jokes is to not understand how he’s made people, a lot of people, laugh for several decades.
Hannah Gadsby, on the other hand, is a totally dull scold who plays the room for nods of approval rather than the visceral belly laugh generated by actual comedy. “Evolving comedian” is Clementine’s code for “not fucking funny in the slightest”.
As for Gadsby’s speech on men sexually harassing women, we’ll let you draw your own conclusion on the likelihood of it ever happening to her.
La Ford’s faux outrage at the comedy routine reminds us of this excellent summary;
But perhaps the final word should go to the left wing comedian, Jonathan Pie, who increasingly seems to be travelling the road of enlightenment previously taken by Dave Rubin;