As serious critiques go, comedian Jon Mason’s brief analysis of identity politics last week must rank as one of the weakest pitches for intellectual gravitas in history. The reaction to his remarks – a meagre trickle of mildly discursive tweets between feminists (who managed to gain entrance to his talk at the Garrick Club ‘by very slightly disguising themselves as men’) has, unfortunately for Mason, triggered only minimal debate and garnered just one single ‘misguided’ article on the subject of whether his jokes worked or not.
‘But I was being fucking serious’, he over-strenuously insists, ‘That section that the tweeters picked out, that particular section was an analysis of modern feminism and its relation to humour. And the fact is this: it doesn’t have a sense of humour. That is absolutely, verifiably, fucking scientifically true’.
According to Mason, the feminists who tweeted about this standout section of his talk left out one crucial detail: the fact that immediately prior to his dive into ‘social analysis’ he uttered the phrase ‘now seriously’.
“Ok, I did a lot of the usual ‘men are like, women are like’ yak to start off with but when I got onto the subject of modern feminism I specifically paused and specifically said ‘now seriously’. Not reported. Left out. Why is that?”
“As a comedian I suppose there’s this lingering sense that everything you say has to be funny. Consequently, when you venture into serious matters, even if you wade in anus deep, it gets wildly misinterpreted. But listen: it is a motherfucking peer-reviewed fact: modern feminists have no sense of humour. That’s replicable.”
LFG 