Sun Lamabasts Mong Faced Ricky Gervais But Employs Down’s Syndrome Hating Frankie Boyle
WHEN Ricky Gervais pulled his mong face and launched a one-man mission to change the use of a word that causes offence, the Sun was deeply upset. In “My View“. Sam Carlisle told Sun readers:
MY daughter’s friend Jamie, eight, is a “mong”. Jamie’s Down’s makes him so destructive his family have replaced their TV eight times in three years. Jamie, eight, gets up before his exhausted parents, removes his nappy and poos on the floor. His mum recently heard someone whisper “mong” in a shop. She broke down… It’s not the harmless put-down Gervais claims.
A smart comedian choosing to use the word puts attitudes back decades. Does Ricky remember Fiona Pilkington, who set fire to herself and her disabled daughter, Francecca Hardwick, after years of abuse from a gang? So Ricky, try using the word ‘mong’ in Jamie’s mum’s company. Hilarious.
Might this be the same Sun which employs Frankie Boyle to write a weekly column? Boyle is the TV comic who makes jokes about children with Down’s Syndrome?
Sharon and Keiron Smith were at one of his shows. She told him: “My daughter has Down’s syndrome and I’m very upset.”
To which he replied:
“This is my last tour. I don’t give a **** what people think.”
They wrote about it in a blog post:
Frankie Boyle spent a good few minutes making joke after joke about people with DS. And they weren’t even clever or funny jokes either… I expected dry, nasty, crude humour, yes, but unimaginative humour poking fun at the stereotype of people with Down syndrome was not something that I expected. The more jokes he made, the harder I found it to stay unemotional and detached. My husband noticed and asked if I was OK. At which point Frankie noticed him talking to me and came over (oh how I wish I had not booked front row seats).
He asked why we were talking during his show. I wanted the ground to swallow me up. I have never felt so small, so stupid, so emotional and to be honest so pathetic. How can a stranger make me feel like that? So I told him that my five-year-old daughter has Down syndrome and that I was simply upset at some of his jokes. He tried to laugh it off, “Ahh, but its all true isn’t it?” to which I replied no, it wasn’t.
He then went on to say that it was the most excruciating moment of his career but then tried to claw the humour (?) back by saying we had paid to come and see him and what should we expect.To which I replied that I understood that and that it was my personal problem/upset. He then said it was the last tour ever and that he didn’t give a f***.He was obviously unsettled by the episode, but nothing like the way I felt. I truly have never felt so small.. I don’t feel that I did my daughter any justice at all. I wish that I had managed to explain to them all why I was upset, to tell them how wrong the stereotypes about Down syndrome are. I wanted to show them how proud I am of my daughter, to tell them about how well she is doing at mainstream school. To show them the hundreds of pictures I have of her, so that they can see how pretty she is, that she wears pretty clothes and that she does not have bad hair (well apart from when she has put toothpaste or Marmite in it anyway).
I wanted to break through their prejudices and to show how wrong the stereotypes are. But instead all I did was make people think I was someone who couldn’t appreciate live stand-up comedy. Which isn’t the case at all.
Throughout his show he made fun of disabled people. But when given an opening he launched into a puerile, childish and ignorant attack on Down’s syndrome sufferers. It wasn’t funny. It was playground humour. My eight-year-old son could have been more astute.
Sam Carlisle makes no mention of Boyle in her words on Gervais. Wonder why?
Posted: 26th, October 2011 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
