Tag: Frankie Boyle

Why has Frankie Boyle gone so soft?

Frankie Boyle's New World Order, on which the comic is paid to say the totally and predictably sayable. Image: BBC/ Endemol Shine UK/ Brian J Ritchie
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/04/why-has-frankie-boyle-gone-so-soft/

The Glaswegian faux-thug now makes his living not by pushing boundaries but by enforcing their limits.

‘I spend a lot of time helping teenagers who’ve been sexually abused…’ — beat — ‘…find their way out of my house.’

You’d scarcely imagine, listening to Frankie Boyle now, that this was the kind of joke he was telling on TV as recently as this decade. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t have written evidence of it, in the form of a 2011 TV review of his now-forgotten shocker of a Channel 4 show, Tramadol Nights.

Read the rest in the Spectator.

Frankie Boyle Says Not All Comics Are Lefties. Is This His Best Joke Yet?

Left-wing comedian Frankie Boyle has written an article in the left-wing Guardian explaining to his amen corner of left-wing readers that all his left-wing contemporaries who play left-wing comedy sets at left-wing comedy clubs, perform on left-wing TV panel shows and appear on left-wing comedy programmes on left wing BBC Radio 4 aren’t in fact left-wing at all but hold a broad array of political opinions.

Nice one, Frankie. One of your funniest.

You can tell his heart’s really not in the joke, though, because he keeps undermining it at every turn with sentences like this:

“Comedians, being decent sorts deep down, maybe just don’t take kindly to what they see as their fellows being targeted because of their race or gender.”

To appreciate fully what is so very wrong with this statement, you need to know the context of Boyle’s article. It was written in response to a very brave post on Facebook by comedian Andrew Lawrence having a dig at the “moronic, liberal back-slapping on panel shows like Mock The Week where aging, balding, fat men, ethnic comedians and women-posing-as-comedians, sit congratulating themselves on how enlightened they are about the fact that UKIP are ridiculous and pathetic.”

Boyle, it should be noted, is a middle aged and, though not balding or fat, has been a regular on Mock The Week, a comedy show so gag-destroyingly right on it might have been scripted by Polly Toynbee, Harriet Harman and Yasmin Alibhai Brown.

Understandably, Lawrence’s comments hit a raw nerve.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

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Comedian Frankie Boyle Is a Bully and a Politically Correct Coward. Wish I’d Never Stood up for Him

‘Outspoken comic Frankie Boyle has called on the BBC to sack “cultural tumour” Jeremy Clarkson.’

Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this opening sentence from a recent news report?

Clue: it’s that first word. In order to qualify as ‘outspoken’, surely, you need to be the kind of person who fearlessly, frequently and vociferously sets himself in opposition to the clamour of the times.

Does demanding that a public figure lose his job for some mildly sexist/racist/homophobic/ableist remark fit into that category? Hardly. In the current climate it’s about as heroically contentious as, say, a private school prospectus that promises ‘We believe in educating the whole person’; or a sign at a Co-op declaring its commitment to social justice, diversity and sustainability; or a Conservative Prime Minister declaring that three letters — NHS — are engraved on his heart.

The only mildly interesting aspect of the statement is that Frankie Boyle is not, contrary to all impressions, a junior policy co-ordinator at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, nor the head of diversity at a firm of chartered accountants, nor yet the health inequalities, disability and lesbian affairs officer at Strathclyde council. Amazingly — don’t laugh, because it really ain’t funny — Frankie Boyle is one of Britain’s most successful comedians.

Read the rest at The Spectator

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Television: Weekly Shockers

Did you hear the one about Jordan’s disabled son? Unlikely, since you probably don’t watch Tramadol Nights (Channel 4), nor read the Mirror (‘Katie Price furious after Frankie Boyle joke about her disabled son’), nor the Guardian (‘Frankie Boyle’s Katie Price joke sparks Ofcom investigation’).

Don’t worry, I’m not going to repeat it here. What kind of sicko do you think I am: Rod Liddle? It’s an issue, nonetheless, on which my sympathies are more torn than common decency tells me they ought to be. Sure, it’s absolutely disgraceful that a nasty Scottish comedian should make light of the suffering of an eight-year-old boy with septo-optic dysplasia and autism. On the other hand, any joke that provokes the collective handwringing of the entire libtard media, the world’s dullest celebrity (Price), the world’s most stupid celebrity (her ex Peter Andre), Amanda Holden, Mencap and Ofcom must, almost by definition, be one we should cherish and Re-Tweet as often as we possibly can.

And what on earth were these people expecting of Frankie Boyle anyway? It’s not as though he’s the new Ronnie Corbett, tickling us gently with his relaxed armchair monologues. Frankie Boyle uses comedy like a broken bottle in a rough pub. He’s genuinely scary and hard and unpredictable. That’s why people go to see shows and even to sit in the front row and be hideously abused by him. They want to see just how low Boyle is prepared to go. And the answer, hence his career, is lower than anyone else.

An expert on violence once told me that similar rules apply in street fighting and gangland warfare. It’s not how good you are at martial arts that counts, or even how big you are. The one who wins is the one who turns more brutal, more quickly than the opposition. It’s the theme of the Bob Hoskins classic The Long Good Friday. It’s the theme of real-life gangs in cities around the world: whichever has the heaviest- duty weaponry and most merciless footsoldiers is the one that gets to control the trade.

Not, you understand, that I’m brandishing Boyle as a small-willied man does his Ferrari or his pit bull. Though I admire his fearlessness — such as the way the week after the Jordan furore, he moved on to telling jokes about cancer victims — I don’t find him nearly as funny as I do, say, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, or Armstrong and Miller, or Mitchell and Webb. I never go, ‘Oh good. Mock the Week’s on!’ Still less do I have any urge to watch again his latest sick-fest Tramadol Nights.

(to read more, click here)

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2 thoughts on “Television: Weekly shockers”

  1. Chris P says:11th January 2011 at 4:20 pmAnd yet you yourself call people “libtards”. Are you still stuck with playground vernacular.

    You have zero useful knowledge that could be used to move the planet forward. You are just like all the other scum on the other side of the Atlantic. Getting paid to write garbage that puts fear in the hearts of the gullible.

    Scaremongerer.

    The people I know who come up with new ideas and solve difficult technical problems aren’t gun carrying Tea Partiers at a political rally.

  2. Don Stuart says:12th January 2011 at 5:57 pmThere there Chris, go and soothe yourself with a nice rub down with the Independent. Mummy will be along in a minute to tuck you in with a piece by Polly Toynbee.

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