What's the point of comic relief? | thearticle

Comic Relief’s decision not to send so many predominantly white celebrities to Africa is both comical and a relief, in that it will save us all the tedium of having to watch them

pontificate, and make them less money. It all started when David Lammy, a man so perpetually outraged he can only be days away from an aneurysm, criticised the presenter Stacey Dooley for

having a ‘white saviour’ complex. I would have understood the anger had the African children she was tending to been offended at the low calibre of ‘sleb they’d been forced to go on TV with

— who wouldn’t? — but whenever Lammy opens his mouth, it seems only ever to take issue with something. One can only imagine how brow-beaten his family must be; his wife’s cooking? ‘A

travesty!’ The state of his parents’ house? ‘Outrageous!’ His children’s school reports? ‘Fascism!’ Lammy, though very talented at identifying problems, isn’t a great solutionist. It’s hard

to say who he’d want to rock up to refugee camps in Darfur in place of the white man — presumably ethnic minorities — though what message does that send to the people there, beyond ‘I’d

up-sticks if I were you pal, my parents did and now I’m on Comic Relief!’ To which, the locals might well respond, ‘perhaps it isn’t so bad here after all.’ A normal response would be to

tell Mr Lammy to go throw battery acid over himself, but you can’t do that any more in case you upset Nigel Farage, which is a strange turn of events. So instead, Comic Relief caved into his

demands, and will send fewer whites to raise money for the destitute. I’m not sure what the logic of this is.The ‘slebs are only there in order to bore the public into giving money to the

cause, and once they’re gone, a lucrative avenue of fundraising will be closed. This will be made all the more painful given that Comic Relief rather preemptively gave up on comedy some time

ago — no doubt sensing the fall of Jo Brand in advance. If they agree with Lammy that people in Africa don’t need white saviours, presumably they don’t need saviours of other colours,

either; when you’re struggling that badly, you don’t turn your nose up at help whoever offers it. In which case, Comic Relief is essentially pointless. I mean, we knew already that was the

joke all along, getting people to sit through the worst television of their lives and pay for the privilege. Worse, if you’re a pensioner, you’ll now have to pay the license fee on top of

that. Yes, it’s a kick in the teeth after all your years of working and contributing into the system. But Gary Lineker’s teeth need a whitening saviour of their own. For as little as £12.50

per month, you can undo years of crisp damage to Gary, and give his mouth a fresh start, so he can use it to call you idiots for voting for Brexit. What’s not to love? Love Island is back on

our screens, and with it, the chance to waste away our summer in a darkened room binge eating Walker’s and watching remarkably toned, hench men and women cavorting around a swimming pool,

sipping champagne, and inexplicably not having sex on national TV. Quite how anybody thinks this is acceptable is a joke — we work hard to pay for our TV subscription packages and laptops,

and the elderly are now paying their license fees. The least you idiots could do is give us, and especially them, some gratification in the twilight of our days. It’s a liberty that after an

hour of watching exactly nothing, we are forced to seek out illicit content on the internet instead. The New York Times, meanwhile, has shorn itself of illicit content, though it is keeping

Bari Weiss’s column. Instead, it has decided to bin its political cartoons, after it published one a few weeks ago depicting President Donald Trump, blind and wearing a Kippah, being led by

a Dachshund with a Star of David on its collar, and the head of Bibi Netanyahu. Perhaps it’s for the best the NYT has decided to do away with cartoons — it clearly doesn’t understand how to

use them, or what jokes are. They don’t mix with progressivism, after all, and as the world’s foremost progressive newspaper, the Times is a big enough joke without the sketches. On the

other side of the pond, the UK continued the ‘banter era’ it seems to be in the middle of, when the free speech champions of the right lost their sense of humour over a joke on Radio 4,

which was fun given that it isn’t a particularly amusing progressive entity either. Quite what all those people were doing listening to Jo Brand in the first place, I don’t know. I can only

assume that they are all masochists (in which case they should be all up for a bit of battery acid) or have very poor taste, in which case, we shouldn’t listen to their complaints anyway.

Some who surprisingly aren’t up for a bit of acid are the Tory leadership contenders, though most of them have had a bit of a red nose in the past. Soon, the field will have been whittled

down to one, and that one is almost certainly going to be Boris Johnson. This fact requires no gag to end on; you’re already gagging at the thought.