Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1259447
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 14 JUNE 2020 OPINION Raphael Vassallo What can't be laughed at, can never be defeated I suppose it says something about the sheer absurdity of the situation we have sudden- ly found ourselves in: but this week, I ended up performing an act of self-censorship… when my intention was actually to criticise the wave of increasing- ly irritating puritanism that has already cost us such classic cul- tural icons as 'Gone With The Wind'… 'Little Britain'… 'The League of Gentlemen'… and even (choke, splutter) 'Fawlty Towers'. It's a little hard to explain, so I'm afraid you'll have to bear with me for a while. Remem- ber a 1970s American sitcom called 'All in The Family'? Oh, wait... maybe, like me, you orig- inally watched it in dubbed into Italian: in which case, you'll re- member it as 'Archibald'. No matter, it's still the same general concept (even if some of the show's more poignant social commentary got a little lost in translation: 'Meathead', for instance, remains a far more satisfying insult for Rob Reiner than… 'Testone'). But for the benefit of those who haven't the foggiest idea what I'm on about: I'm referring to the classic comedy series fea- turing a character named 'Ar- chie Bunker'… whose name is still used, to this day, as a cul- tural reference-point for an en- tire demographic of blue-collar, Republican-voting American men (in a nutshell, the type who would vote for Donald Trump). Even if you've never watched the show itself, you will surely still get the general idea. Archie Bunker is best remembered to- day for his "gruff, overbearing demeanour, largely defined by his bigotry towards a diverse group of individuals: blacks, Hispanics, Commies, gays, hippies, Jews, Asians, Catho- lics, 'women's libbers', Polish– Americans, etc., etc…" And I need hardly add that – in an age which cannot toler- ate even comparatively 'minor' television bigots, such as Basil Fawlty – the same Archie Bun- ker would stand little chance of surviving the ongoing wave of censorship/historical revision- ism that is now gripping the planet: rapidly despoiling our archives of anything that might even remotely be interpreted as 'offensive'… and in the process, robbing us of an entire lan- guage called 'satire': which was (and still is) the most effective weapon against precisely the same qualities – bigotry, rac- ism, intolerance, etc. – that the same puritans want to eradicate from the face of the earth. Which brings me to my own act of self-censorship. At one point this week, I thought it would be a good idea to post a YouTube clip of one particular episode of 'All In The Family': if nothing else, for posterity's sake - for something tells me those clips will not be around for too much longer - but also to il- lustrate just how much of our recent, collective memory we are also throwing away, in this retroactive (and, it must be said, retrograde) drive to whitewash popular culture of all that might conceivably cause offence. But then, I had second thoughts. For let's face it: if peo- ple are suddenly so eager to pull down anything – anything at all - that even remotely reminds them of the less savoury aspects of human nature… why on earth remind them that there's something they might have left out? Why draw attention to Ar- chie Bunker today: when the rest of the world has apparently forgotten he ever existed at all? And above all: why run the risk of depriving future generations of a cultural influence that – for better or worse – helped to shape the very same awareness that informs so much of today's preoccupation with race? Let me try and put that anoth- er way. Speaking only for my- self: it was Archie Bunker – and not, say, Martin Luther King – who originally made me aware of the sheer absurdity of things such as racism, misogyny and homophobia in the first place. And he did this, not by stand- ing on a pedestal and loudly denouncing the intrinsic evil of all those prejudices… still less by trying to blot out their exist- ence altogether. No, he did it by acting those prejudices out on the screen: inflating them; enlarging them; making them the centre-piece of a cutting, intelligent slice of televised comic satire… so that we could all see, and learn to recognise them for the gro- tesque aberrations they truly are… and laugh. So, who knows? If today's cul- tural backlash had occurred in the 1970s, instead of 2020… I might never have gone through that necessary process of chal- lenging my own internal prej- udices through the medium of satire. I might never have laughed my way to the conclu- sion that 'bigotry' and 'intoler- ance' are, in reality, every bit as ridiculous as Archie Bunker had made them all out to be, all those years ago. To a lesser extent, much the same could be said about 'Fawl- ty Towers': another classic ex- ample of a formative, intelligent Why run the risk of depriving future generations of a cultural influence that – for better or worse – helped to shape the very same awareness that informs so much of today's preoccupation with race? Problematic favourites: Archie Bunker, the American blue-collar grump of the 1970s, and from the same era of politically incorrect laughs, the widely popular Fawlty Towers, with John Cleese in the role of an unstable Basil Fawlty going full Jerry on his hotel's tourists...