Mike Ward, a Montreal comedian, recently told a joke that embodies dark humor, but is not horribly offensive: it’s the kind of stuff you hear all the time.
You can hear the joke below (at 1:28). It’s somewhat tasteless, but where’s the “hate”? And yes, it singles out a person, though I don’t know if the person was mentioned by name in the original joke.
For this he violated Canada’s laws against hate speech, and was called out by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which filed a complaint against him. Ward now faces at least $100,000 in legal fees, and he may have to pay $80,000 to the offended family. As The Rebel notes, Ward’s case will be decided in August, and even if he wins he’s out about $100K given to lawyers.
Canada has many advantages over the U.S. as a liberal society, but fails the comparison when free speech comes up. Canada still has laws against hate crimes, as summarized in this Wikipedia article:
Sections 318, 319, and 320 of the Code forbid hate propaganda. “Hate propaganda” means “any writing, sign or visible representation that advocates or promotes genocide or the communication of which by any person would constitute an offence under section 319.”
Section 318 prescribes imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years for anyone who advocates genocide. The Code defines genocide as the destruction of an “identifiable group.” The Code defines an “identifiable group” as “any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.”
Section 319 prescribes penalties from a fine to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years for anyone who incites hatred against any identifiable group.
Under section 319, an accused is not guilty: (a) if he establishes that the statements communicated were true; (b) if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text; (c) if the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds he believed them to be true; or (d) if, in good faith, he intended to point out, for the purpose of removal, matters producing or tending to produce feelings of hatred toward an identifiable group in Canada.
You can also violate the Human Rights Act:
The Canadian Human Rights Commission administers the Canadian Human Rights Act. Section 3 of the Act prohibits discrimination based on “race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability and conviction for which a pardon has been granted.” Section 13 of the Human Rights Act was repealed on the 26th of June 2013. Section 54 was rendered useless with the action, now referring to Section 53.
What Ward said doesn’t come close to violating either of these, as he singled out no group. And even if it did, those laws shouldn’t be there. Their use in prosecuting those who make anti-Semitic remarks, for example, is unconscionable. Say what you like about the Jews (except urging immediate violence against them); we will fight back with counterspeech, not with lawsuits.
One consequence of this, as The Rebel reports, is that Ward had to cancel a performance at the Gala les Olivier Comedy Awards three days ago:
He was to act in a brief sketch mocking “political correctness and censorship”, but inadvertently found himself being censored.
Ward and his writing partner were told that their original sketch, which was intended to ridicule “overzealous political correctness”, couldn’t be aired, owing to an insurance issue: The company insuring the event’s broadcast refused to provide coverage against litigation unless Ward’s sketch was softened.
After Ward and his partner toned down “the content of his sketch” seven times in a failed attempt to comply with the insurer (including removing material critical of the Quebec Human Rights Commission), they finally decided to boycott the gala altogether.
So it’s come to this: it’s dangerous to even criticize the Human Rights Commission! What is going on up north?
h/t: Barry
From your quote from the HRA:
“identifiable group” as “any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.”
Yet again class isn’t mentioned.
Feel free to insult proles, peasants and chavs as much as you like.
Feel especially free, because they won’t be able to afford the accrued legal fees for insulting you back. Hahaha!
The peasants are revolting.
I think that was from an ancient Wizard of ID cartoon, to which the king replied ‘you can say that again.’
You are correct! Im so surprised (and impressed) that someone knew that. 🙂
Hey, I knew that!
Wizard of Id used to be pretty funny at times. And also notably non-PC.
I recall about the time injury lawsuits were rife:
“That man your coach ran over, sire, he’s screaming ‘whiplash'”
“Well, give him what he wants.
About ten should do the trick.”
cr
I guess that means the Aristocrats joke is nice and legal.
We have no proles in Canada. Like the US, everyone thinks they are “middle class” where the classes described in the old literature referred to Europe where everyone left because of classes.
“The best trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that he doesn’t exist”
– From the film “The Usual Suspects”
Hopefully, this is just propaganda to reduce the northward migration of Americans should dipshit win the election.
No matter which one.
I think this bit, with Ezra Levant being “investigated” for hate speech in 2008 (for publishing Muhammad cartoons) is the best embodiment of Canada’s trouble with free speech.
Whatever the merits of the case, or the law, or the HRC, for that matter, it’s difficult to be unbiased when it’s Ezra winding up in the shit. Always worth celebrating.
I have to say this is really worrying. When similar hate speech laws were proposed in Britain, a campaign led to a specific exemption for comedy to prevent this kind of nonsense.
I understand someone may get upset with a joke and complain. To me the issue is around how their HRC deals with it. I don’t actually know what happens, but $100,000 in legal fees tells me there’s a problem with the system.
There should be an ombudsman type situation where laws like this exist imo, where there is a very high bar that has to be crossed before a complaint is upheld.
These people don’t realize that it’s a joke?
No one is allowed to make a joke that involves them? Why is that?
People do not have a right to be “not offended”.
You’re right of course, and I should have added that to my comment. I don’t think these laws should exist at all – I’m a freedom of speech absolutist except for advocating violence. The US approach is the correct one imo.
I was just saying that if the law is there, it should be handled differently. I’m coming at this from a different place as NZ doesn’t have a formal constitution like the US and relies on human rights laws to manage freedom of speech situations.
New Zealand just blotted its copybook with the Chief Censor ruling that a couple of Wicked Campers’ vans were indecent (because they might be seen by kids). (Wicked Campers are small rental campervans which have crude often-vulgar ‘humour’ written on them). The banned ones involved drugs – e.g. Snow White taking a hit from a bong.
So what? I wouldn’t rent one but I do NOT like the idea that signwriting can be banned.
cr
I really think a lot of parents forget just how much they heard in the school yard, and how much worse it was than a few camper vans.
Oh yes. And I would never have repeated it to my parents because it would have shocked them. (Or so I thought).
cr
The child who was the object of the joke suffers from a genetic condition which produces facial malformation, among other deficits.
It’s disgustingly cruel for a grown man to ridicule a 12-year-old for an affliction that must make his life hard enough to face as it is. And these days, the joke is preserved for the foreseeable future online. It’ll never go away.
It’s a joke.
Ah, the child was named or otherwise identified? That is beyond the pale.
The guy should be allowed to say it, and he should then be inundated with opprobrium. That’s the beauty of free speech.
Instead, the Human Rights Commission has given him a ton of free publicity and a platform. Way to go, HRC.
The kid is actually a child singer. Who happens to have an ugly face. Not hideously deformed, just ugly. He’s got a stage name (le petit Jeremy) and videos on freakin’ Youtube, ffs.
See here:
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/how-jokes-about-child-singer-and-ensuing-rights-complaint-made-quebec-comedian-a-free-speech-hero
I thought the Make-a-Wish Foundation was for kids who were dying. So did Ward, apparently. Hence the basis of his joke.
I think putting up videos of your performance on Youboob makes you fair game.
cr
You missed the point completely.
As Robert Heinlein well noted in Stranger in a Strange Land, all jokes “involve a badness for someone.”
They all do.
Shall we ban humor? Or just humor wherein the person who (in a fiction after all) has the badness meets your personal standards of pitiable?
Maybe the confusion I am having with this is the name of the commission. Is it maybe the Anti-human rights Commission?
Absurd.
My son has a deadly peanut allergy that causes a hell of a lot of worry and strife in our lives. Like many parents of kids with severe allergies, we have to worry about our child dropping dead in mundane situations that wouldn’t turn the head of someone without an allergy.
My wife and I were watching Louis CK’s comedy special and he did his “Of course…but MAYBE…” routine. One of the jokes was that, MAYBE if we just let everyone with peanut allergies eat some peanuts, and sort of close our eyes when it happens…from then on we won’t have a problem. (Obviously, because they all drop dead and don’t procreate).
Did my wife and I recoil in horror and insult? Of course not: it was hilarious.
It was funny because he was mining darkness for humor, and BECAUSE it played on the audience’s understanding we aren’t “supposed” to find humor in such things.
It’s the surprise element that often makes something funny, which is why comedians so often mine dark or troubling subjects for humor.
You think people over reacting to dark humour’s bad, I was told not to talk about having cancer at work because that could be an HR issue as it could make someone uncomfortable. Keep in mind, I rarely talk about it, but I let people know so they know when I am absent it’s for a good reason. I’ve found if you aren’t transparent with people, they tend to think the worst and I’ve learned this the hard way.
This was my response to that “advice”, “Please, bring that on. I’d love to talk to HR about how having cancer is so much easier than being uncomfortable that someone you know has cancer.”
Believe me, my coworkers are not uncomfortable, even with my dark humour and my worry right now as more tests were run.
That’s what HR is there for – they certainly don’t do anything useful. As a large employer (by NZ standards, 1000+) said to me “if you hire HR people you get HR problems.”
I certainly don’t find such things offensive either, I find it unscientific though.
Allergy is not a completely genetic disease. Even if it was, allergics are often born to people without allergies themselves. Even if food allergy followed typical Mendelian genetics with an AD inheritance, you would still have stuff like variable penetrance and new mutations to deal with. Even those diseases that are considered completely genetic and heritable wouldn’t disappear if we killed all those with the disease.
Most diseases also appear after someone has already had offspring. My mom has gotten pollen allergy just now and she’s past 60.
Anyway, allergies are multifactorial diseases and you and your wife were clearly healthy enough to reproduce. To prevent anyone with allergies being born, we would have to eradicate every single human on the planet.
So, the comedian in your example should be forced into a classroom with the door locked behind him, unable to get out until he learns the basics of genetics and disease.
And yes, I’m just being a pedant now. 😉
Don’t take me too seriously. I’m a neurotic with ocd, can’t help correcting stuff and the whole “kill people with disease to eradicate disease” is a pet peeve of mine.
Science. Such a killjoy.
😀
Ezra Levant and The Rebel are not the most reliable sources for news. The site is deliberately incendiary, regularly distorts or makes up events, and prioritizes a political agenda over objective reporting.
This may not apply to the particulars of this case, but until the details are corroborated by other sources, I would advise taking a skeptical approach to the claims made in the report and the video.
I’d never heard of the guy but I’m sufficiently sceptical about talking head shows like this to Google the context if I’m interested.
Everyone on earth has a political bias, the difference is only one of degree. A statement like “they’re ISIS”(in reference to the Canadian ‘human rights group’ in question) is another warning sign too – these prissy, censorious fuckwits irritate me(and there’s an argument that they’re the thin end of a very ugly wedge) but they’re not ISIS and people who talk like that lose my attention quite quickly.
But he seems to have his role in society.
“Canada’s Jewish population… have seen brazen violence against them go unpunished and unaddressed. Likewise, the response of Naheed Nenshi, Calgary’s colorful liberal Muslim Mayor, has been anything but forceful. So what is a vulnerable community to do when those whose job it is to uphold the safety of a society’s individuals fail to do the task entrusted to them? Enter Ezra Levant; lawyer, author and conservative media personality. I seriously do not like the guy… But Levant has stepped in where Calgary’s authorities and politicians are too timid to go… When society fails to uphold its values, it is the Ezra Levants of this world who step in.”
http://adandachi.com/istanbul/isis-mentality-in-calgary/
Thanks for that link. Depressing stuff – I thought the pro-Palestine activists in the UK had a tendency to go nuts but this is on another level. I think one contributing factor is important… The left’s romanticising of the Palestinian struggle; its fuelling of Palestinian grievances; this soft-headed approach has helped create a political atmosphere in which Palestinian feelings of self-righteousness are only ever reinforced. The left’s uncritical cheerleading has led to a complete moral certainty amongst some Palestinians that their side is on the right side in a fight between good and evil. That kind of thinking rarely leads anywhere positive.
I heard a report this morning on the local NPR station (Minneapolis). It was about a local Somali family that was in the courthouse attending the trial of one of their children (the “ISIS” trial currently in the news (at on NPR)).
They encountered a man in the courthouse (a random citizen who was a stranger to them). He said to them something like, “You have a false religion, you should study the Bible.”
They described it as, “he was discriminating against us.”
Which is simple nonsense. He was expressing an opinion, which they happen to disagree with. He was not a court official. He had no control over them, didn’t threaten them.
Do I think he’s a bit of a shit to say that to them? Yes. But he’s perfectly within his rights to express his opinion.
People are under no obligation to agree with you or to remain silent about disagreeing with you. Period.
(If they wanted to rent from him, or if he were a judge or city council member, and refused to service them because they were Muslim or African, then that would be discrimination.)
Someone needs to die over this. 😝
Here’s a story about it here with some more detail:
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/how-jokes-about-child-singer-and-ensuing-rights-complaint-made-quebec-comedian-a-free-speech-hero
It was a pretty cruel joke, and definitely punching down. It’s hard to support a guy that would say something like this, but it should still be protected speech.
So which law does this actually violate?
Thanks for the link.
It seems ‘le petit Jeremy’ was born deaf, and is now a teenage singer who has done public performances as, among other things, the Imperial Patient Ambassador for the Shriners.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaWvxo7cHf0
So it’s not quite like Mike Ward was attacking a dying child.
But here’s Mike Ward’s joke (for anyone whose French is good enough, mine isn’t!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYrsECWQuM8
(In fact most of the shitfight on Youboob seems to be taking place in French).
cr
I love babies, but I couldn’t eat a whole one.
Frankie Boyle would have to be kept in one of those Hannibal Lecter-style hockey-mask straight-jackets if he lived in Canada.
…And sue me, I thought the joke was funny.
Sweden (and Germany) has these “hate speech” laws too, but I don’t know if they have been used against comedians.
But then again, we didn’t have the “PC” crowd until recently…
Humor is going to die. Humor has always scooted around the edge of offensiveness.
Jim Jefferies, Sarah Silverman, Mel Brooks et el.
It will die. The precious literalists will win.
Don’t try it as an amateur if you want to keep your career.
See Tim Hunt, crushed because people couldn’t and, especially, wouldn’t, see the joke.
That is the other part, dogma driven, humorless ideologues have the tools to mold the world into the utopia they imagine. (Hell)
The Canadian courts are not as keen as the tribunals to enforce these laws. But it costs money to fight and win in court.
What it will take is a Supreme Court case.
Might be already regarded as done – we’ve had a few SC challenges by outright Nazis, who lost, IIRC.
The real horrifying part about this is that it won’t be adjudicated in a court of law. Rather, it’s up to human rights commissions, which are a national embarrassment. These commissions basically overthrow hundreds of years of jurisprudence. There is no concept of innocent till proven guilty; no right to confront your accuser; no public defendant; the judges are not real judges, and often not even trained in the law. They are activist run kangaroo courts. It really sucks that it’s conservatives like Ezra Levant who are actually battling the commission. If it was a more moderate person there would be more public outcry.
I don’t like “Hate speech” laws. If thoughts produce speech, then what you have are “Thought crimes”. There is a famous book about that.
Notice the complete lack of courage by other Canadians. Just like the German anti-Erdoğan joke and the Mohammad cartoons, almost nobody would repeat them. As a result, the anti-speech crowd wins. The right result is for every comedian, commentator, YouTuber, etc. to publicly repeat the joke. They can’t prosecute everybody and it would emphasize how silly the prosecution is.
Comparing something hateful and personal said about an individual, a young man with a family who is disabled…to the Mohammad cartoons is ridiculous. Even America has verbal abuse laws on the books…don’t pretend that you are a bastion of free speech and the rest of the world is some big ball of oppression. He’s been doing jokes about this kid, from what I understand, off and on for the last five years. This is not just one incident.
Now that being said, do I think Jeremy was within his rights to file the complaint with the Human Rights Commission? Absolutely. Do I think it should have gone to court? Probably not. However I also can’t disagree totally with a comment by Linda Gauthier on the topic, “His liberty stops where Jeremy’s starts. He crossed the line.”
Who decides what is “just a joke” and what is “verbal abuse”? There are two rights at odds here – freedom of expression and the right to equality, anti-discrimination measures. Free speech doesn’t necessarily mean free of consequences.
Then he can sue. He’s a singer, he can sue like any other performer could. Like, for example, all the tone-deaf wannabes whose performances on X-Factor end up as comedy clips on Youtube (theoretically) could.
It might not get him far but that’s life.
It is NOT legitimate to try and get the Human Rights Commission to act for him on his personal grievances.
cr