Delingpole: Woke BBC Comic Boyle Berates Ricky Gervais for ‘Transphobia’

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James Delingpole

A woke BBC comedian has called out Ricky Gervais for telling insensitive jokes about ‘trans’ people.

Here’s the funny part. The woke BBC comedian — whose name is Frankie Boyle — built his career and his multi-million pound fortune telling jokes about disabled children trying to rape their own mothers and mocking the very ‘trans’ community he now considers sacrosanct.

In a recent interview, Boyle — formerly a Glaswegian hard-man known for his edgy humour — criticised Gervais (probably Britain’s most successful and best paid comedian) for his stance on trans issues.

Boyle told interviewer Louis Theroux:

“I would like [Gervais] to have the same respect for trans people as he seems to have for animals. I don’t think that’s a lot to ask.”

Perhaps not. But in order to take this virtue-signalling seriously, you’d have to ignore Boyle’s own track record on ‘trans’ issues. Here are a few examples, helpfully screen-shot from Boyle’s deleted Twitter history.

Then there’s Boyle’s tennis joke:

“Venus Williams has brought something different to the women’s game – male genitalia.”

And let’s not forget the jokes that, in his edgier youth, Boyle made about the TV celebrity Jordan, her then boyfriend Peter Andre, and her disabled son Harvey:

‘Jordan and Peter Andre are still fighting each other over custody of Harvey – eventually one of them will lose and have to keep him.’

Later, Jordan married a cage fighter, inspiring Boyle to make this joke:

‘I have a theory about the reason Jordan married a cage fighter – she needed a man strong enough to stop Harvey from f****** her…’

Whether or not you find these jokes funny or tasteless or neither is immaterial. The point, surely, is that Frankie Boyle’s attack on the much funnier, more successful and talented Ricky Gervais is hypocrisy of the first water.

Truly, Boyle’s level of delusion is breath-taking.

Everyone knows — because it happened in public — that Boyle represents one of the biggest sell-outs in British comedy history. Sometime between 2012, when he tweeted out all those offensive jokes, and 2020, Boyle appears to have decided that there was more money to be earned being a BBC-approved comedian with a column in the Guardian than there was being a depraved, foul-mouthed bad boy with a niche, late-night show (Tramadol Nights) on Channel 4. So he ditched the questionable humour, embraced feminism and trans rights, and reinvented himself as the kind of comedian who could safely do a set at an LBGTQ fundraising evening for disabled, ethnic minority animal rights activists. In the process, he stopped being funny.

Lots of people with no personal integrity make similar decisions in their life. I’m sure it made some sort of sense financially for Boyle and I’m sure his bank manager, accountant and financial advisor are more than happy with the arrangement.

But surely, if he had the slightest bit of self-respect or self-knowledge, the very last thing Boyle would be doing would be to draw attention to his devil’s pact?

Boyle used to make a habit of mocking the mentally disabled. What, though, could be more terminally stupid than attacking another comic for making trans jokes when you yourself have spent a significant chunk of your career making even more tasteless trans jokes?

Perhaps Boyle is so buoyed by the self-righteousness that comes with being a BBC-approved house comic spouting woke pieties that he imagines himself to be beyond criticism.

It’s a measure of the madness of our age that he is almost right. Thanks to the nature of the BBC licence fee and the organisation’s quasi-monopolistic broadcasting reach, Boyle is unlikely to face any financial consequences either for his hypocrisy or for his dire unfunniness. When you’re a lefty comic, the BBC offers you life long job security – regardless of whether or not anyone watches your crappy shows.

Meanwhile, real comedians – the ones who actually make you laugh – have got Boyle’s measure.

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