Woke up!

You know comedians, right? If somebody mentions, say, Billy Connolly or Jasper Carrott, or Micky Flanagan, or Ken Dodd, or Lee Mack, or Jimmy Carr – and the list goes on – you smile, you recall their catchphrases; you may even recite some of their material. “Don’t mention the war! Going ‘out’ out. Ooh, you are awful…” But say the name Robert James Blair Simpson, aka Rufus Hound, and what is your immediate reaction?

Oh, come on, you know the fella – he sometimes wears a wacky moustache. It makes you want to like him – if the moustache has that much personality the wearer should surely radiate charisma? Nope, you say; who is he, what has he done? Anybody? I suspect that among the more assertive respondents he is more renowned for being an insta-blocker on social media than for any oeuvre of note. Give me one joke, one monologue, one catchy phrase… just one. 

Nobody?

He seems to be one of those people who are ready at a moment’s notice to fill a gap on a panel show, following a late cancellation by somebody funny or famous. The kind of guy who is always skulking about at oxymoronic events such as Comedy Relief. An also-ran, forever willing the phone to ring so he can say yes to yet another opportunity to pocket a fee on false pretences. Comedian? The joke is on us.

But he is also, in his own small way,  a champion for social justice – aren’t they all, the fame hungry with little else to offer? And now he is squaring up to Andrew Neil, pitting his excruciatingly and mundanely imitable wit against the real thing. What is his objection? That Mr Neil has dared – dared, I say – to misappropriate a word. Actually, I am too generous in calling it ‘his’ objection because in order to express it he had to use an idea already voiced by many others. Let’s catch you up.

On Good Morning Britain, Neil explained that, contrary to the ridiculous claims of the group ‘Stop Funding Hate’ (Oh the irony!) there ‘will be no hate’ on his channel. He went on to say that it is the ‘woke group’ which is enforcing a cancel culture in opposing the launch of GB News. Woke listeners reacted furiously – of course they did, it’s what they do – taking to Twitter to hatefully tell him how hateful he was, in hatey words… of hate.

Andrew responded “The original definition of woke is out of date. As a "concern for social justice", nobody could object. But it has morphed into a cancel culture that seeks not just to disagree but to close down ideas and people with which it disagrees. Insidious.” Cue the entrance of our freedom fighter, the ferocious Rufus who responded with what he thought was a clever redefinition of AF Neil’s tweet: “People who have a concern for social justice coined the term woke, so we - the people who can't face being confronted by what social justice looks like and hate being ignored - have redefined it as a pejorative.”

This is neither original nor particularly clever, and coming from a ‘comedian’, working in a genre where credit is demanded and plagiarism derided, utterly lacks the edge that somebody like Ricky Gervais or John Cleese would have given it. You see, comedy is so much more than repeating other people’s words; it is investing words with real significance… and, ideally, actually making people laugh.

Over the last 48 hours there has sprung up a debate. Where did the use of ‘woke’ come from? What does it really mean? And why does the left think it should have a monopoly on the approved use of words? Ultimately, words are just a codified way in which thoughts get out of our heads and into other people’s. Language changes as words are claimed and reclaimed, warped and bent out of shape and the pejorative use of ‘woke’ is as valid as any other. It is actually an immediately recognisable shorthand for what might otherwise take volumes to express.

Add a funny caption... Rufus couldn't think of one.

It’s a debate worth having but concluding that the other side has no right to mangle or ridicule your slogans has no merit whatsoever. Rufus has continued banging on about this issue but everybody has already tuned him out, much as one would do had you the misfortune to attend one of his gigs (Comedian? Seriously?) If it isn’t already a famous stolen quote I would advise him, “If you have nothing to say you had better keep it to yourself”. Rufus Hound? More like Rufus Who. 

GB Views

It is not unheard of for the nominal right to engage in a touch of hyperbole. Having lived through the closest we actually came to British Communism in Harold Wilson’s union-dominated government and seen the lust for power in Michael Foot’s rheumy revolutionary eyes, we have occasionally been a tad over the top in our accusations of red flagism. The more honest of us know that a little bit of thoughtful socialism can only be a good thing. But those who repeatedly claim that they alone possess the moral purity to rule society make our exaggerations look unambitiously modest.

I say ‘the nominal right’ because unlike the battalions of card-carrying, hard left warriors for the cause, righties tend to be more taciturn and far less likely to bother with pointless things like membership, or constantly redefining what we are for or against. This is largely because we know what we stand for and that is family values, tradition, and giving a man a fair go. We are, in fact, the majority and the fat cats the left always point at are nothing to do with us any more than Sir Keir Starmer can be said to be typical of Labour voters.

One of the defining traits of the organised left appears, irrefutably, to be a level of hypocrisy that would astonish the most ‘agile’ mind. The holding of two contrary views is said to induce the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, which can only be resolved by an effort of ideological subversion of logic. So the claims that trying to ban an alternative view news channel in the interests of ‘free speech’ comes as no surprise at all. Let’s face it, if they can champion women’s rights while simultaneously insisting they admit women with cocks and beards into their exclusive spaces, pretty much anything is possible.

This is, of course, the story of Andrew Neil’s nascent GB News channel, which has yet to air a single broadcast and whose fairness and balance has yet to be tested, and the extremity of the opposition. The usual voices are raised in banshee wails of woe and the most ridiculous claims of bias. Woke slebs across the land – and especially on Twitter – are demanding that their acolytes boycott advertisers who dare to try and find a market via a channel which will likely appeal to people with more spending power than, say, Novara Media… or Owen Jones’s hobby echo chamber.

So finely tuned to offence and ‘hate speech’ and ‘far right’ themes are the usual lefty suspects that they can actually see future offence. Somewhere in the bowels of Labour HQ, you can imagine a trio of precogs channelling their predictions into the left’s own Minority Report, all the better to prosecute the crime before it has even been thought of. That they cannot see the sheer nonsense of all this is a mirror of how they will not condemn the violence directly caused by BLM yet froth excitedly over supposed ‘terrorism’ at the US Capitol on January 6^th.

Labour's new Policy Unit

How much further can the left fall before they finally see their reflections staring soullessly back up at them from the void they are creating? How many times can you excuse an action on your side while condemning a much less intense version from the other side? How can they rally support for physical intimidation of Conservative figures, yet be enraged, offended and wounded by merely hearing their voices? Hypocrisy used to be a criticism... I think they now take it as a badge of honour.

The left dominate media, the world of entertainment and, increasingly, the world of sport. But not at the grass roots level they imagine. People who would once have unquestioningly voted for left-wing parties must now be embarrassed to be associated with them and their ridiculous crusades and feel uneasy at the clamorous readiness to cancel voices yet to be heard. So we await GB News with anticipation, and if Andrew Neil can cause the explosion of a few lefty heads, then all the better.