[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPwUUfR5L3E]
Oh how I agree with, “Why, oh, why - does it take a comic to put our most serious issues into a realistic framework?”
British comic, Ben Elton, in his 1989 novel, “Stark“, used this same quote, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” By coincidence, I watched the mini series in which he played the role of CD, based on that book again last night and I was just thinking how relevant it all still is, with the sick earth, the food scares, pollution warnings and global corporate raiders.
Elton, to me, is the Dickens of his time, incorporating the most pressing social issues into his act and his fiction. I also think he’s a bloody visionary - after all, the previously committed Labour Party supporter was the first to voice his serious reservations about New Labour’s new “more Britainy sort of Britain” of “all style and no content”. This was in 1997 don’t forget, before Blair was elected and the country suffered a decade of crap.
“The problem really with politics is apathy I think, particularly the Labour Party. I mean I’m a member and I can’t even be arsed to leave!” - Ben Elton 2005
The answer to the question, of course, is that radical comics are the only people who dare say these things. Everyone else is too afraid of the repercussions, even if it’s only the loss of advertising revenue from corporate clients whose business interests include shafting the world or supplying the war machine, to report the truth.
And the biggest problem is that people actually believe what they hear and read in the mainstream news media, yet think this is “just comedy.”
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Sponzurz
