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BillyBitzer
offlineMember
http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2010/06/30/asda-to-sterilise-all-customers-to-protect-gene-pool/
Perhaps John O'Farrell's point that it time to stop taking the piss out of the working classes and replace it with proper satire hasn't reached his own website.
The All New Jeni B
offlineMember
Would someone far more erudite, eloquent and educated than this particular working class contributor (ie me) perhaps care to respond?
Altar Ego
offlineMember
Billy is right.
It says ASDA is bowing to 'long standing demands' to castrate the working class. Who makes these long standing demands? Doesn't say. Just implies that our society has some collective wish to purge the working class, and assumes we are all complicit in this. This is really quite maliferous.
If it was more specific about who has been calling for the purging of an underclass, who actually wishes this and why they would want to do it, then it could be a powerful piece, about class tensions or whatever. As is, it just reads like the writer's fantasy.
The ethnography of the group being targeted is basically irrelevant, in the same way that eugenics, or indeed any subject, is open to derision or humour as long as it is in a solid context. This article however doesn't provide anything close, and seems pretty flippant about it. You can make jokes about whatever subject you want, offend whoever you want, it's all cool - but if someone calls you out on it, you have to be able to defend it.
But I think Billy's point is how did this make News in Brief. It's a fair question. Plus I wonder what ASDA makes of this. It is bizarre.
shitsu_tonka
offlineMember
It made News in Brief because The Ed and his goblin army or whoever else makes the decisions thought it was good enough, same as with anything else.
"...even if you take this sub on it's own sloppy terms it's still got no jokes."
I'm all for con-crit but that's as harsh as stating "that is not funny" at the start of your comment was unwise. Not funny to you maybe, but to other people it was, including the ones we all want to impress with our subs so that they get used.
And personally I think eugenics is a hilarious topic from which much humour can be mined, and I absolutely despise the poor, the fat, and the poor and fat.
Altar Ego
offlineMember
Ok, fair point, my tastes are irrelevant, edited post.
Anyway, I'm not personally offended by the article.
My point is that you have to be very precise with the focus of satire. Because people do get offended, and you have to be able to defend your work to those people. Not apologise, defend. And Billy seems agitated by the article.
shitsu_tonka
offlineMember
Why do you have to defend your work?
What I love about writing and even more so about performing is that once it's out there then people can make of it what they will. If I offend someone then I'm under no obligation to defend or explain my material.
If people don't like it then fuck 'em they can easily find someone else to make them laugh.
sauce
offlineMember
It's a controversial topic for humour. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be tackled. As Shitsu says, though, once it's out there, people will bring their own interpretations. There's a lot of bollocks about that kind of think in modern literary theory: how the reader becomes an aspect of the text. We all read things coloured by our own personalities - intelligence, education, social background, experience.
Brenda SugarTits69
offlineMember
I think you can defend it if you believe that it was a satirical attack on the hidden attitudes/snobbery of Waitrose & Sainsbury's shoppers, but if it's a direct attack on the Asda shoppers then it's not really a joke, as such. Just snobbery.
Given that JO'F had just that minute submitted an article to the BBC on-line magazine about satirising the working class, I guess it's a valid question for Billy to raise. Rather than contributing to a Nazi agenda, though, the piece's gravest crime is being a bit "meh".
Not like the sparkling crystals of meme-free comedy that I'm gonna put out one day.
Oxbridge
offlineMember
Arse gravy. It IS satire, just not against a target Billy would like to target. You can't, to paraphrase every football analyst, legislate for things that make people laugh or why they laugh. And, whilst I wouldn't have used it if I had been on NiB duty that week (because I don't think it's that good), it should at least be obvious that this is not about eugenics.
BillyBitzer and Altar Ego - sorry, but without wishing to sound like a newbie basher, how long have you been Newsbiscuit members?
While I respect your right to criticise other people's material and question the NiB goblin's editorial taste, perhaps you'd like to write some subs and get your feet under the table first.
Oh, and if you saw some of the mutants that shop in my local Asda...
Scroat
offlineMember
To anyone who devotes far more time whining about this site than actually contributing anything remotely positive to it:WHY THE FUCK COME HERE YOU UNUTTERABLE MORONIC TURDS!!!
If you think we're all out to get you, all out to keep you out, we're too topical, not topical enough, deliberately scoring you down, ignoring your subs, putting sub-standard FPs out just to piss you off, don't like the removal of posts that the man WHO ACTUALLY PAYS for this lot believes to be inappropriate, racist, sexist, Northernist, fattist, shagging your wife, eating your children or in any other way pissing you off then WHY DON'T YOU JUST COCK OFF SOMEWHERE ELSE AND DO US ALL A SODDING FAVOUR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I, like the vast majority of sane people here just come here for a laugh, to try to make other people laugh and am delighted to have made several actual 3D friends during my time here. So please, if you have just a few minutes to spare, DO SOMETHING WITH THEM OTHER THAN COMING ON HERE AND WHINING, YOU STUPID BASTARDS.
The All New Jeni B
offlineMember
Jeezo!! I shop in Asda and Somerfield, I'd love to have the kind of disposable income that would allow me to shop in Sainsburys or M&S Foodhall, but I don't.
I think the point of the NiB was that thereare some customers who look like evolution forgot them.
This is less a class thing for me, and more of being an evolutionary snob.
In the city where I live, there are areas where they consider it to be a career move to claim benefits. This is not because there are no jobs available, but because they have realised that they are far, far better off claiming/scamming than they would ever be working.
What is wrong with satirising this?
They wouldn't understand it anyway...
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