It’s Not Just Americans That Don’t Get Irony
3 February 2011 2 Comments
Letter to the independent in response to whiny letter moaning about Top Gear having a go at Mexicans:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-perspectives-on-broadcasting-2202515.html
Sirs,
It’s not just Americans who don’t get irony, your correspondents complaining about Top Gear clearly don’t either.
The point being made by the Top Gear presenters was to parody the huge over-reaction by the right-on PC brigade about the removal of the Sky commentators – something mentioned immediately before the Mexico part of the programme.
Those unelected, self-righteous nobodies who would police us all into pale grey avatars of ourselves but who are too dim to know when humour is at their expense really should do what Clarkson et al have done, and get a life. Their whining has cost the Sky people their jobs, but the female assistant referee hasn’t worked since either. Bit of a hollow victory, really.
More power to the Top Gear elbow, I say.
Paul Harper
It got published, if edited without the main point of the letter (that the referee hasn’t worked since). Ah well. It’s never easy being a sage…
About Paul Harper
So, I’ve managed to stay amazingly uninformed about the commentator-firing whatever business because I can’t imagine why I should care about that. Which, if you’re really angry about the phrase you’ve parroted (the “right-on politically correct brigade”? Really? That’s as sharp as anyone can get about this?), you should also be ignoring this kind of pointless drama rather than stooping to “their” level and engaging in it. But I saw this episode, and it wasn’t funny- it just hammered home to me something that has been building up in the last few series of this show: that they’ve gone from wryly commenting on jackasses to just kind of actually being jackasses. If anyone is lacking a sense of irony, it’s those three guys. Though I find it ironic that their mid-life crises seem to be fueling a desperate need within them to be considered interesting and provocative and so they act out, but instead all I’m seeing is them laying their embarrassing mid-life crises out for me and showing me just how uninteresting and sad they are. But not that I’d know, BECAUSE I’M AMERICAN, and we’re all of course incredibly stupid.
See. I told you Americans don’t get irony.
The very title of the blog entry is in itself ironic and a parody of the Top Gear “Mexicans” segment and the mindless PC brigade’s knee-jerk over-reaction to it. Cheap national stereotypes are easy humour. Funny for some, not funny for others, but hardly the sort of thing to get hot under the collar about.
Thanks for making my point.