Political and sentimental hegemony: an incentive to jokers

In some respects the jokes under socialism were similar to the Diana jokes in Britain. No-one ever got shot or imprisoned or even proceeded against for telling Diana jokes in Britain. Yet the Diana episode revealed the experience of a cultural hegemony in Britain that has the atmosphere if not the institutions of the old Eastern Europe, a case of sentimental centralism. When in the following year one of Britain's most distinguished philosophers, Professor Anthony O'Hear, pointed out the hollowness of this fake consensus it provoked an angry response from the British Prime Minister. Mr Blair was at that time in the Middle East on serious government business. Such a response was bizarre and disproportionate. Yet, as in Eastern Europe, it was such public condemnation that produced as well as suppressed the jokes. In Eastern Europe there was an attempt to police thinking by the state, in Britain to police sentiment, not by the state as such but by a controlling elite. The broadcasters in particular not merely told the story of the unfortunate accident over and over again but in effect instructed viewers and listeners how they should feel about it. In consequence those who had no strong feelings about this particular accident and saw it as no different from the mass of anonymous events that make up the French traffic mortality statistics invented jokes about it. The jokes were an escape from a compulsory discourse, a way of breaking free from and having time off from the incessant blare of sentiment from the mass media. On British television you could tell jokes about death at Easter but not about Diana, about sacred things but not about a routine automobile fatality. Yet ironically it was the very attempt to claim that this one was not routine that provoked the jokes. 

The persecution of jokers in a democracy

In democratic capitalist societies people do not get locked up for propagating jokes. Already, however, there are pressures, not least from the EU, to censor the Internet, the last refuge of politically incorrect jokes. Red Hot Dutch is OK by Europe but the Australian website of 'poofter jokes' will be eliminated as xenophobic and homophobic and contrary to a 'disadvantaged' group's inalienable right not to be joked about. The internet is for many people their main lifeline to freedom of expression in jokes and their main form of escape from the centrally controlled broadcasting media but it is only kept free because of the American commitment to the First amendment to the American Constitution that guarantees freedom of speech.