Academics say comedy is still racist

A conference on comedy at Salford University has heard that modern-day depictions of foreigners in programmes such as the animated satire Monkey Dust can be as divisive as Carry On films.

David James, from Manchester Metropolitan University, argued that even though they were hardly known for being politically correct, some ‘childishly innocent’ Carry On jokes involving different cultures can be affectionate.

As an example, he quoted Chief Big Heap, as played by Charles Hawtrey in 1966’s Carry On Cowboy. There the joke was on the white man, when Big Heap reveals he doesn’t speak in the broken English stereotypically attributed to Native Americans.

However, he said the films could also be ‘cruel and racist’, as shown in Up The Jungle four years later, in which Bernard Bresslaw blacked up to play Upsidaisi, pictured, a lazy coward who is obsequious in the presence of his master.

Van Norris, of the University of Portsmouth, criticised the 2003 BBC Three comedy Monkey Dust, created by Shaun Pye and the late Harry Thompson, for its portrayal of race.

He cited the would-be terrorists, Omar, Shafiq and Abdul whose plans for Islamic jihad are perpetually disturbed by the demands of real life in West Bromwich – characters which he said perpetuated the images of Muslims as outsiders to be feared.

He said Omar was ‘a middle class, faux fundamentalist [but] still defined by dress, accent and speech as a modern Muslim… and shown as politically unstable, manipulative, threatening and untrustworthy’.

The academics also discussed Chris Morris’s work, with Benjamin Halligan from Salford University saying his complex satires ‘mimic absurdly’ and ‘plough on into the realms of the ridiculous’ rather than scorning from a distance, which allowed him to take a different approach to race.

He said Morris showed ‘the way in which broadcast media has replaced a knee-jerk racism with a knee-jerk multi-culturism, which suggests that the latter is a more subtle variant of the former’.

Published: 7 Jun 2008