Modified On February 20, 2006
We’ve often said that comedians are important to Western culture, but that, with few exceptions, the MSM tends to downplay our contributions and influence. (It’s the funny factor. It’s the same reason they rarely or never give out Oscars to people who star in a comedy. But standup comics often seem to pop up, if not at the center of important events, just off center.)
We knew there were comics at the heart of the bloody riots that have recently rocked the Muslim world. But comedians?
There’s an op-ed piece making the rounds of newspapers worldwide by Flemming Rose, the culture editors of Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, in which he defends his decision to publish the cartoons. You know, those cartoons. And, don’t ya know, a comedian figures in the whole mess:
The idea wasn’t to provoke gratuitously — and we certainly didn’t intend to trigger violent demonstrations throughout the Muslim world. Our goal was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter.
At the end of September, a Danish standup comedian said in an interview with Jyllands-Posten that he had no problem urinating on the Bible in front of a camera, but he dared not do the same thing with the Koran.
This was the culmination of a series of disturbing instances of self-censorship.[…]
Read the whole thing. If we read it correctly, it seems like the comedian’s self-imposed censorship was the last straw, in Rose’s mind. He lists a handful of incidents, and it seems that the Danish comic’s statement was the last one before the you-know-what hit the oscillating cooling device. (Perhaps the thinking was, “Hell, comedians are crazy! If even the comic won’t provoke Muslims gratuitously, there’s something seriously wrong out there!)