Brights News Feed

As part of a new and improved Lent season (”Love Life, Live Lent“), which aims to be less about solemn abstinence in the run-up to Easter, and more about having a fun time, the Church of England is opening a comedy club in the UK’s second city, Birmingham. The Laughing Sole is “A Christian-run comedy club with a cleaner, less offensive ethos”. The BBC discusses the club’s mission of taking the offensiveness out of comedy.

From the nation that brought us the Enlightenment, the French edition of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? features an astonishing display of scientific ignorance en masse. For €1,500 the question is “Qu’est-ce qui gravite autor de la Terre?” — “Which of these is in orbit around the Earth?” Is it A, the Moon; B, the Sun; C, Mars; or D, Venus?

Not only does the contestant not know the answer, he uses his “Ask the audience” lifeline… with astonishing results.

See the YouTube. (Only limited French required to follow it.) (Via Perlocutionary.)

Comedian Stewart Lee discusses the popular interpretation of comic pieces like Borat, Little Britain, and The Office, in today’s Guardian: “Guilt-free pleasures“. He argues that such output is pervasively misrepresented, citing comments such as “Borat raises an index finger to political correctness and all its exponents”. In reality, he says:

There’s a vast difference between the casual, inadvertent offence prevalent in my childhood and the choices made today by performers and writers of my generation, operating in a post-PC world, where they are aware of the power and meaning of the taboos they choose to break. […] I am a great fan of political correctness, even though, as one of the writers of Jerry Springer the Opera, I was routinely praised for apparently attacking it[…]

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The UK’s Independent newspaper reports from the Edinburgh Festival (Independent: “The politics of humour: Religious extremism? What a joke“). Johann Hari is delighted by the anti-religious humour pervading the comedy.

If one sentence summarises the mood of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, it is this earnest pledge, muttered by a Bushalike President as he orders a new terror raid: “I have to keep killing religious fanatics. God told me to.”

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