Boris Johnson

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Cunt is in Wirral today.

[Anubis]

Hiding in Thornton Lodge.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

1 hour ago, Anubis said:

Hiding in Thornton Lodge.

Trying to blend in with the scarecrow festival. 

[magicrat]

1 hour ago, AngryofTuebrook said:

Trying to blend in with the scarecrow festival. 

Scruffy cunt would stand out like a tramp at a royal wedding

[Carvalho Diablo]

Anyone bounce a pie off his head yet?

[Anubis]

Well, I’m shocked. Are you shocked. Because I’m shocked.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/17/unemployment-figures-should-be-millions-higher-says-research

[Tj hooker]

1 hour ago, Anubis said:

Well, I’m shocked. Are you shocked. Because I’m shocked.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/17/unemployment-figures-should-be-millions-higher-says-research

The BBC doesn't like this 

[Red Shift]

Three words. Black market economy.

[Red Shift]

On 09/10/2012 at 21:52, Pistonbroke said:

Boris is a grade A fucking idiot.

He is many things, but an idiot he is not.

[Bruce Spanner]

4 minutes ago, Red Shift said:

He is many things, but an idiot he is not.

A person educated to the point of stupidity.

[Anubis]

The phrase low cunning was invented for him.

[Bjornebye]

11 minutes ago, Red Shift said:

Three words. Black market economy.

Of all the racist things I've read on this forum..... 

[Guest Pistonbroke]

1 hour ago, Red Shift said:

He is many things, but an idiot he is not.

 

It is possible for highly educated people to be idiots in certain walks of life. They may excel in certain fields yet show little common sense in others. 

[Captain Turdseye]

The sight of him walking around that table engaging in a back-slapping contest with the other European leaders is almost enough for me to want to leave the EU. 

[Jennings]

20 hours ago, Pistonbroke said:

 

It is possible for highly educated people to be idiots in certain walks of life. They may excel in certain fields yet show little common sense in others. 

This.

 

He may be learned, but he lacks acumen and the ability to think on his feet. He doesn't take in data and process an intelligent and timely response. 

 

He can probably speak Latin - which is good - but less useful.

[Guest Pistonbroke]

1 minute ago, Jennings said:

This.

 

He may be learned, but he lacks acumen and the ability to think on his feet. He doesn't take in data and process an intelligent and timely response. 

 

He can probably speak Latin - which is good - but less useful.

 

His people skills are also piss poor, always looks uncomfortable unless it is a nice friendly chat with his mate Cuntenburg from the BBC. He has been literally ripped to bits at the Box on various occasions. On his out and about walks when heckled or faced with a question that paints him or his party in a bad light he looks like a lost puppy dog as he reverts back to Boris the Buffoon.  

[Dougie Do'ins]

His sister is currently on Have I Got News For You.

[Bjornebye]

3 minutes ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

His sister is currently on Have I Got News For You.

How do you know its her? can you even see her face with that possum hanging off her bonce? 

[Creator Supreme]

6 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

How do you know its her? can you even see her face with that possum hanging off her bonce? 

I'm too busy looking at Victoria Coren!

[Mudface]

2 minutes ago, Creator Supreme said:

I'm too busy looking at Victoria Coren!

David Mitchell must be a hollowed out husk. Actually, judging by his Guardian columns, he is.

[Creator Supreme]

15 minutes ago, Mudface said:

David Mitchell must be a hollowed out husk. Actually, judging by his Guardian columns, he is.

Yeah his names not getting mentioned, another Labour 'wet' alongside his mate Webb!

[Mudface]

7 minutes ago, Creator Supreme said:

Yeah his names not getting mentioned, another Labour 'wet' alongside his mate Webb!

Remember when Have I Got News For You seemed genuinely subversive? I haven't seen it for years- getting rid of Deayton was a huge mistake- but I watch the last 15 minutes or so there, and Christ, was it always this smug and reverential towards the establishment? Where's the biting satire about the monumental fuckery that's going on, the casual corruption, spivery and downright incompetence? Never mind Mitchell, the BBC is a neutered husk as well.

[Creator Supreme]

55 minutes ago, Mudface said:

Remember when Have I Got News For You seemed genuinely subversive? I haven't seen it for years- getting rid of Deayton was a huge mistake- but I watch the last 15 minutes or so there, and Christ, was it always this smug and reverential towards the establishment? Where's the biting satire about the monumental fuckery that's going on, the casual corruption, spivery and downright incompetence? Never mind Mitchell, the BBC is a neutered husk as well.

So many bleated on about the BBC being full of left wing subversives, including the late Peter Sissons, that they've spent the last 10 years swinging so far right they've forgotten what unbiased commentary is!

[Mudface]

Spooky, this is what I was thinking, but unable to articulate. 

Quote

 

When it comes to politics, the UK suffers from a chronic disease. It’s called satire
Have I Got News for You and Mock the Week invite audiences to laugh at what they don’t have the gumption to 

 

‘Satire and laughter are not just displacement activities. Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, in fact, unwittingly helped Boris Johnson become prime minister.’ Photograph: BBC

Satire props up what it should destroy. Chris Morris, a satirist himself, understands this as well as anyone. “Satire placates the court,” he told Jon Snow on Channel 4 news recently. “You do a nice dissection of the way things are in the orthodox elite and the orthodox elite slaps you on the back and says, ‘Jolly good. Can we have some more?’”

The return of Have I Got News for You last week, for its 58th series, only confirms Morris’s point. Poetry, wrote WH Auden, changes nothing. Satire is worse than poetry: it has made us a nation of giggling couch potatoes, laughing at what we don’t have the gumption to change.

 

 The laughter Johnson attracts serves as a force field to stop us thinking too hard about the hash he is making of the UK

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote, “In the false society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society’s worthless totality.” I thought of the Frankfurt School’s diagnosis of the sickness of laughter when I read the blurb to a new book called The Shitshow. Like HIGNFY, the book’s authors, Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur, have created a successful satirical franchise that leaves what it satirises untouched. It started in 2005 with the book Is it Just Me or is Everything Shit? and continued through sequels and audio books, before now being disinterred in time to capitalise on Christmas 2019’s lucrative stocking-filler market. “So it turns out things can get even shitter. Who knew? Er, we did, sadly. Still have to laugh. You, like, have to. So let’s.”

Let’s not. Satire and laughter are not just displacement activities of supine Britons. Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, in fact, unwittingly helped Boris Johnson become prime minister. In a superb essay in the London Review of Books, the novelist Jonathan Coe recalled a moment 21 years ago when Johnson went on HIGNFY. Hislop had Johnson on the ropes over his notorious phone call with his friend Darius Guppy, when the pair discussed the possibility of beating up an unfriendly journalist. Eventually, Merton interjected with a gag – ending the inquisition and letting Johnson off the hook. Instead of a possible thug plotting something criminal, Johnson became merely laughable. For the rest of the episode, he could revert to the role in which he was most comfortable – posh-boy boob channelling Hugh Grant, Billy Bunter and Toad of Toad Hall.

 

In subsequent performances as guest and host on the show, Johnson finessed this persona. “Boris Johnson has become his own satirist,” wrote Coe, “safe, above all, in the knowledge that the best way to make sure the satire aimed at you is gentle and unchallenging is to create it yourself.” In our cynical age, all politicians come in for derision, but Johnson managed to turn that to his advantage: he made his buffoonish persona charming – to some demographics, at least.

 

It worked. Six years after Coe’s article, Johnson is the prime minister we deserve. Today, Johnson is stronger for being laughable, and the laughter he attracts serves as a force field to stop us thinking too hard about the hash he is making of the UK’s gravest crisis since Suez. Better to giggle over Jon Culshaw’s send-up of Johnson on Radio 4’s Dead Ringers than do the hard work of comprehending the self-satirising disaster of Johnson’s plan for multiple checkpoints in post-Brexit Ireland.

 

This is what author Malcolm Gladwell calls the “satire paradox”: the funnier someone finds it, the less likely they are to be changed by it. And it’s hardly a new problem. During the UK’s “satire boom”, in the early 1960s, Michael Frayn worried that its purported targets were left unscathed. “Certain kinds of satirical writing (political satire is a good example) are not normally intended to convert one’s opponents, but to gratify and fortify one’s friends,” he wrote. That’s why we should have few hopes that the return of Spitting Image will have much effect: after all, it achieved nothing first time around apart from making us laugh. Or consider Yes, Minister, another 1980s satire. Margaret Thatcher liked it because it showed her what she wanted, namely a civil service that needed to be cut down to size.

Satire then, as now, doesn’t so much tell truth to power as give a pretext for power to extend its remit while we aren’t paying proper attention. Jürgen Habermas described this in his book Legitimation Crisis as “civic privatism”: we citizens had abandoned our duty of scrutinising politics in favour of “career, leisure and consumption”. Laughter, as produced by satire, facilitates that civic privatism.

 

Meanwhile, another satirical TV news quiz is due to return shortly. Mock the Week effectively mocks the weak, namely its demographic of couch potatoes, by inviting its powerless audience to laugh instead of changing what they are laughing at. Satire has become a vice rather than a corrective to vice, and laughter not the best medicine but the UK’s chronic disease.

Can it do better? “These times should bring on something with more clout,” Morris told Snow. Morris’s new film, The Day Shall Come, dramatises the absurd true story of how the FBI became the biggest recruiters of terrorists in the US. It would make up a terrorist plot, find people to try to carry it out and then arrest them. The aim? To make it look like the feds were on top of terrorism. Certainly no one in the Trump administration or the FBI is going to be patting Morris on the back. Yet like all satire in today’s era of fake news, the film risks angrily preaching to the choir and bolstering its cynicism, while the satirised carry on regardless.

 

“These are the headlines,” Chris Morris’s deadpan newsreader said on The Day Today, his mid-1990s news spoof. “God, I wish they weren’t.” Today the headlines are even worse but satire’s chance of changing them is just as remote.

 

 

[cloggypop]

Haven't watched Mock the Week for years. Still shite?