Today we may have reached an Event Horizon.
The world of free speech and more importantly, humour, may be about to disappear into a Black Hole to form a singularity of the 'professionally offended'.
After the arrest of Oscar Pistorius, John Cleese posted on Twitter that, Pistorius will claim "being legless as his defence". A pretty harmless, albeit obvious, joke. Some people, as is now the norm, took great offence (for various reasons) to his joke & sent message after message telling him so. A day later, Cleese posted an apology for his "naughty" tweet. More messages from the offended and another day later, Cleese posts the following:
" Explanation required: Someone made the comment. I said yeah we should tweet that – sarcastically. Misunderstood "
I've always admired Cleese and the rest of the Pythons because they pushed the boundaries of Comedy. They continually fought against the 'establishment' to get their material out without being censored or dumbed down incase 'people were upset or offended'.
The scene below from The Life of Brian is one of my favourites. The whole subject of the scene is so relevant today and Cleese is brilliant as the increasingly frustrated voice of reason.......
I hoped that Cleese would show some of the balls that the Python's had back in the 60s & 70s and told these offended twats to fuck the fuck off...... But, he's been beaten into an apology (of sorts).
Is this the 'Star' collapsing and therefore the start of the Black Hole.........
