“In a piece in the Sunday’s Sunday Times called “It’s A Sick Joke : US Comedians Are Fearless – And Funnier Than Ours”, Jeremy Clarkson selectively quotes a sentence from my 45-minute 2009 about him, in which I said I hoped Richard Hammond was blinded and decapitated in a crash. The routine was a lengthy and cautious exploration of the idea that contrarians like Clarkson, while saying everyone should be free to offend, of course have their own lines in the sand, as Clarkson himself proves here by being offended by me. Which was sort of the point. The reason the small section of the 45 minute routine he has quoted mentions The Hampster being blinded is because Clarkson and The Hampster had previously joked about Gordon Brown being blind in one eye, as I explain earlier in the piece.
At the end of the 45 minute routine, I address the camera directly, and say, ““I don’t really think Richard Hammond should die. What I was doing there, as everyone here in this room now understands, just in case there’s anyone from the Mail on Sunday watching this, I was using an exaggerated form of the rhetoric and the implied values of Top Gear to satirise the rhetoric and the implied values of Top Gear. And it is a shame to have to break character and explain that. But hopefully it will save you a long, tedious exchange of emails.”
Ironically, this didn’t stop The Daily Mail’s Jan Moir writing her identical 2011 generic moan about comedy, back when ‘woke’ was known as ‘right-on’, but the paper at least had the decency to take the piece down when the misrepresentation was explained to them.
https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/…/heard-the-one-about-the…/
The Times has described me as “the world’s greatest living stand-up comedian” and I have a greater recorded body of stand-up than any other comedian ever. Allowing an amateur arts critic like Jeremy Clarkson to just dip into it to try and fill up space makes about as much sense as sending me, a man who has driven second hand minis all his life, to review a performance car.
I would like to close with commiserations to the marvellous Fin Taylor who, having been recommended by Jeremy Clarkson, will hopefully not now find his audience full of moronic Sunday Times cunts.”
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