That Reginald D Hunter show at the Edinburgh Fringe has now been cancelled, after the hounding out of an Israeli couple at what the Telegraph's Dominic Cavendish called "the ugliest Fringe moment I’ve ever witnessed".
The brave clown who speaks the truth and shames the devil is a showbiz tradition, from Charlie Chaplin to Lenny Bruce. The comedian more than any other creative is best-placed to play the role of the cheeky urchin who points out that the Emperor has no clothes. But in recent years, drolls have ceased to be outlaws – and have become lapdogs of the liberal establishment at best and boot-boy bullies of Jews at their very worst.
The apparent antipathy towards the Jewish people on the comedy circuit is noticeably greater than that in, say, music or acting. Does it stem – as so much anti-Semitism does – from envy, as ‘Jewish humour’ is such a thing, and Jews have been so historically successful in the comedy racket? […]
It’s fair to say that the most craven and conformist people in entertainment are now comedians – they make actors look like flaming anarchists – as they glide bovinely on that conveyor belt from uni to the Fringe to the BBC, state-sanctioned battery hens laying eggs loudly on hand-outs extorted from the forced licence fee. The women are no better; a bunch of tame Transmaids who never dare comment on the funniest phenomenon of the 21st century – men pretending to be women. I love Radio 4 Extra but when their Comedy Club section starts at 10 p.m., the heart-breaking humourlessness of the modern comics who introduce it makes me think ‘Is this a joke?’ That’s about the only time I do think it.
So it’s a choice the blandness of the panel-show herd or the beastliness of the bully-boys when it comes to comedy these days. It’s telling that Reginald Hunter, like [Frankie] Boyle, isn’t averse to making jokes about women. Hunter has joked, ‘Apparently rape is the worst thing to do to a woman. I disagree. The worst thing to do to a woman is rape her, then call her fat.’ Jews and women are the two groups comedians can vilify with impunity these days, with no fear that they’ll be the subject of death-threats or backdoor blasphemy laws.
Both groups are ceaselessly gaslighted; the Israeli couple at Hunter’s Edinburgh show represented their country perfectly that night, surrounded by hostile enemies attacking them from all sides whilst claiming that they, the Israelis, were the aggressors. The award-winning comic writer Caroline Gold says, ‘This time the hate is just for the Jews, so all of the spite, all of the disgust, is distilled into that. The old Jewish jokes never had the hate; they were stereotypical but not savage. This new breed – it’s bierkeller stuff, not Northern working-men’s club.’
Comedy has become the most smug and authoritarian milieu of all the entertainments; while waving the woke flag, it zeros in on the most perennially persecuted people in history with added relish. I can’t help but think of the terrific, terrifying play by Trevor Griffiths, Comedians, written in 1975, in which a comedian who is ostensibly a decent man turns out to have had a very unpredictable reaction to visiting the site of an extermination camp.
It’s a fact that anti-Semitism some time ago – during the Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn – shook off its dowdy old right-wing duds and became one of the coolest non-binary clubs in town. This, added to the specific envy of the success of Jews in comedy, makes me reflect yet again that a future full of fun and laughter is not coming anytime soon – onstage or off.
Mick Hartley 
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