I first read The Joke as a schoolboy, when we thought such deranged scenarios were confined to the Warsaw Pact.
I re-read it on the flight to Vancouver, the day before the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal devoted the best part of a day’s court proceedings to hearing testimony from “expert witnesses” on the “tone” of my jokes.
Fresh from that triumph, the BC HRT then convicted and fined Guy Earle, a stand-up comedian who committed the hitherto unknown crime of putting down a lesbian heckler homophobically. (…)
We are not yet a totalitarian society, but the touchiness of America’s wretched academy is certainly providing a fine pilot program.
