Last week, in my capacity as a north London pseudo-intellectual, I was at Dalston’s Cafe Oto watching a life-affirming free jazz quintet led by Darius Jones, a saxophonist who is also assistant professor of music at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University. Jones opened the last number of the first set with a lengthy dedication to the late Cambridge sociology professor Jason Arday, who took his own life this month after a sustained campaign against him by the rightwing press, or “the press” as it is also known.
The campaign was entirely disproportionate to Arday’s supposed offences, and was demonstrably far more determined that it would have been against a white academic accused of similar failings; or against, for example, a Spectator contributor like Toby Young, whose dad made some phone calls to get him into Oxford, despite him having failed the entrance qualifications. Perhaps Young took a place meant for someone like George Abaraonye. Remember him? I’ll remind you.
Two weeks ago, the usually timid broadcasting regulator Ofcom girded its gutter-dangling gonads and upheld a complaint brought against a joke I made in a BBC radio satire show about a former Tory adviser who is also a former campaign manager for the opaquely funded Tufton Street Tax Payers’ Alliance thinktank. And it was correct to do so because I was wrong. And I was genuinely pleased to see Ofcom acting so decisively for once, like a dying dog that suddenly stirs in the presence of a squirrel. It is to be hoped the organisation can soon bring the same speed and precision to bear on its huge backlog of complaints about the disinformation sluice GB News, and the AI child pornography distribution platform Twitter (currently X).
Ofcom’s judgment related to a joke I had made last October, about a campaign led by a hard-to-clarify group called “Concerned Alumni of the Oxford Union” against a man called George Abaraonye, the then president of the Oxford Union debating society. The Oxford Union is not officially affiliated with Oxford University, but nonetheless seems to cause it ongoing reputational damage due to its membership being the worst people on Earth, and its tendency towards sensationalist crass guest speaker programming. Do we really need to hear Tommy Robinson debate with old Etonian Tory students about where to find the best coke and hookers? The union moulds the most vile students of today into the blase wreckers of civilisation of tomorrow. Yes, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Gyles Brandreth, I mean you.
Abaraonye was being condemned by the untraceable “Concerned Alumni of the Oxford Union” for celebrating the shooting of his former debating opponent, the alt-right teenager-baiter Charlie Kirk, in a tweet he quickly withdrew when he realised Kirk’s wound was fatal. Black, with baggy trousers and dreadlocks, and occupying an Oxbridge place that rightfully belonged to someone white from north London, George Abaraonye was such a perfect Far-Right Folk Devil Of Black People In Academia that if he didn’t exist, Richard Littlejohn would have had to sit in his swimming trunks in a sunlounger in Florida wanking him into existence.
Black people and academia are a toxic mix for the rightwing press, their lobbying-group friends, and self-avowed white-supremacist academics like Cambridge University’s Nathan Cofnas, who led the campaign against the late Jason Arday and has received support from Toby Young’s free speech union, the Free Speech Union. When the black poet Benjamin Zephaniah was awarded an honorary Cambridge fellowship in 1987, the Sun captioned his picture with the words “Would you let this man near your daughter?” When I received an honorary university fellowship a decade or so ago, no one ran a photo of my white face asking if I was a danger to your daughters. And yet, ironically, having signed up to an expensive internet pimp academy course run by the incarcerated influencer Andrew Tate (“an important voice for men” – Nigel Farage), I am currently raking in millions a year by exploiting vulnerable women and girls online.
Imagine being the Telegraph’s favourite comedian? It’s like being Fred West’s favourite spade
I speculated groundlessly on Radio 4 about whether Concerned Alumni of the Oxford Union was a real organisation, and about who backed the Tufton Street TaxPayers’ Alliance organisation, whose ex-campaign manager had appeared on LBC to clarify the unclarifiable Concerned Alumni’s aims. The man had explained on LBC that it was not possible to properly speculate about what the backers of the TaxPayers’ Alliance would want him to do in regard to promoting or not promoting Concerned Alumni of the Oxford Union, because their identities must be kept secret, “because these people, when they are discovered, face threats of violence and abuse from leftwing mobs”. It’s a pity this same courtesy of anonymity isn’t extended to actual real victims of mob violence and media harassment, like asylum seekers billeted in beat-up hotels. Or black professors.
Ofcom ruled that the subjects of satirical comedy should now be allowed a right of reply before any show mentioning them is broadcast. This is problematic and unworkable, obviously, as even the Telegraph journalist covering the story noted. At the very least, this system would slow down the speed of the pseudo-spontaneous scripted off-the-cuff banter on Have I Got News For You? And this morning, in Clerkenwell, I saw an angry motorcyclist call a bike messenger who had cut him up “gay”. Does Ofcom’s ruling now mean he is legally entitled to broadcast a right of reply before the motorcyclist can ride away, as long as he has the resources to encourage Ofcom to pursue his case?
Who will benefit most from this judgment? When Sarah Vine misquotes my act in the Daily Mail, or Quentin Letts lies about what I have written for the stage in the Daily Mail, I personally don’t have the inclination to pursue them through official channels. But organisations like the Tufton Street thinktanks do, so ultimately the usual well-upholstered suspects will be protected from criticism. Well done Ofcom. Now, about those incitements to violence and AI child-pornography generating programs of Twitter.
Usually, Tufton Street-sympathetic news outlets would have opened their accommodating communication backdoors to make sure that a story vindicating a Tufton Street spokesperson against a Corbynista comedian like me was well disseminated, but the story of the judgment was only reported in the Sunday Telegraph, and with a balance uncharacteristic of the paper. In the same edition, a Telegraph critics’ poll declared me, with hilarious comic timing, the greatest standup comedian of the 21st century.
But Netflix say I do not fit their brand and Universal say I am “too uncommercial”, so this galling accolade is no use in raising any money to film my new show, which is all that matters in real terms. And imagine being the Telegraph’s favourite comedian? It’s like being Fred West’s favourite spade. Don’t complain. You’d love it if dead Rod Liddle had said something like that in the Spectator.
Black people and academia are a toxic mix for the rightwing press, their lobbying-group friends, and self-avowed white-supremacist academics
Perhaps the powers that be, hastily deleting editorials and think-pieces about that Cambridge professor, realised it was probably a bad week to seek extra column inches for an Ofcom judgment story that was entangled with another campaign against another black dreadlocked man in academia. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
Meanwhile, the Darius Jones jazz quintet’s second set of the night seemed energised by the seriousness of what Jones had said before the break about Jason Arday, perhaps reminding us that one of the historic roles of this fire music was to articulate rage at injustice in the form of beautiful abstract sonic art. I hope someone recorded it, but perhaps it should live on only in the memory. I also wondered if the words spoken about Jason Arday by Darius Jones, himself a black academic, though heartfelt and powerful, lacked the nuanced acknowledgement that white academia had put a black academic, whose qualifications weren’t bulletproof, into a position where bad-faith actors were, as usual, inevitably going to take aim at him. But we attempt to police posthumous perception at our peril.
The whole Ofcom process against me started because one George Abaraonye had made a joke about the rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk, a grown man who travelled university campuses wrestling with teenagers’ half-formed brains for clicks and lying about things. Americans who made fun of Kirk following his death, or even questioned his sudden secular sainthood, were vilified and lost their jobs, and appearing even remotely critical of Kirk became a huge personal risk. But The Internet abhors a vacuum. And, posthumously, the face and name of Charlie Kirk have taken on absurd meanings utterly disassociated from the man himself, and joyous in their adolescent crudity.
It was my teenagers who alerted me to the insane looking-glass landscape of Charlie Kirk’s radioactive cultural half-life. But any search engine will take you into the world of distorted funfair mirrors that today’s kids are calling “Kirkification”. Kirk’s name, due to the nature of his injuries, has become an online euphemism for oral sex, and also for failure somehow, and for quirky behaviour generally. And his disembodied face has been grafted onto so many random images that he is now robbed of all meaning, his hateful rhetoric neutralised and forgotten, supplanted by surreal memes that will outlive his brief time at the top of Trump’s tree of twats.
My favourites are one that depicts the late alt-right agitator as the jazz bassist Charlie Mingus on the cover of his classic 1960 album Blues & Roots; and another where Kirk has become a kind of anthropomorphised funfair tower which children can ascend, creating joy where once there was only aggrandising misery. Perhaps, in his benign online omnipresence, a God of small things stripped of all significance, bringing joy and delight to people who probably don’t even know who he was, the clearly tormented Charlie Kirk has found a kind of peace. And maybe, despite the attempts of authoritarians to stifle it, comedy will always find a way. I hope so.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run.
Stewart’s new book, Pea Green Boat, is available to pre-order now, as is a DVD of his last live show, Basic Lee , ahead of their release next week.
And he appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around Pea Green Boat at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October, and at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, on the same project but with the dream-pop prodigy Stone Anthem, on 11 October