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Titania McGrath takes to the stage Whilst the British ‘comedy’ circuit has long been the preserve of the Left, events have taken a dramatic turn as Titania McGrath, radical socialist, feminist, intersectionalist, Twitter SJW par excellence and all-round good egg has escaped from Twitter into real life and has brought her insight to the stage.
The Culture War rages on.
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It’s somewhat disturbing how similar the real Titania McGrath is to Rebecca Long-Bailey. Have they ever been seen in the same room together?
Ricky Gervais proved recently that comedy does not have to be left wing, or left wing adjacent…….
How much running to safe spaces did he cause?
I still miss Godfrey Elfwick, though.
I saw the Titania show at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, it was excellent. And it was refreshing that the audience responded extremely positively. Refreshing because Fringe-goers are generally very woke, much of the comedy on offer at that festival being little more than riffs on #OrangeManBad, #StopBrexit and masculinity = toxic; the usual intersectional horseshit. A couple of years earlier I’d seen Titania’s creator – Andrew Doyle – doing his stand up show and the tension in the room became palpable when he mentioned that 52% is greater than 48%…
Yes Mr Turnbull – perhaps there is a “gender” thing going on, for an attractive lady (such as the lady playing “Titania McGrath”) to mock the left is one thing – for a man to do it….. but then Ricky Gervais gets away with it (although he is actually a man of the moderate left).
Perhaps more importantly there is a difference of approach – for Andrew Doyle to take on the left head-on is different from a lady pretending to be one of the left (acting a part).
The character of “Tiania McGrath” is accurate – these insane doctrines are what the schools and universities teach, and well off people (who stay in the education system for a long time) are likely to pick up these opinions and attitudes – especially if they are rather vain (note all the hair flicking and so on) and are not really thinking about what the teachers and university lecturers are saying. A lot of the students in the universities are not really dedicated scholars – they do not critically examine what they are being taught (partly because they would be PUNISHED with poor grades if they did that), they just “go with the flow” accept what they are taught and then go to jobs in the government bureaucracy and the big corporations.
It is not really a matter of intelligence – someone can be very intelligent (for example the founder of Facebook) and still accept the doctrines taught – indeed an intelligent person is MORE likely to take these doctrines to their logical conclusion (total insanity) rather than just nod and accept the limited madness taught – Ludwig Von Mises noted (more than a century ago) that it was the MORE intelligent students who tended to become Marxists, because it was taking the limited Collectivism they were taught in school and university to its logical conclusion – TOTAL Collectivism.
What is needed is people who are critical of the basic assumptions of what they are taught – people who do not take things on trust (even things that do not seem to be important at the time).
But that sort of person (the sort of person who resists conditioning) is not common. They also tend to live deeply unhappy lives – as someone who does not accept the basic assumptions of the society they find themselves in tends to find it hard to interact with other people (the people who do accept the attitudes that are pushed by the education system and the media).
Still let us be positive – the reaction of the audience (even, as Mr Turnbull points out, at the Edinburgh Fridge) is a reason for hope.
Ed Turnbull (January 15, 2020 at 7:46 am). I grew up in Edinburgh. Half of the festival is always about the cause-du-jour – and is always (or as near always as makes little difference) very bad (I speak artistically, not politically). Back in the 80s, even the woker reviewers of the time were apt to joke that a play’s characters were “living in the post-nuclear-holocaust environment – like everyone else at this year’s fringe”. (Cowboy-president-bad was the mantra then)
The trick is to attend the other half (what little of it the finiteness of time allows), in which there is often much good stuff, artistically, though only very rarely explicit counter-PC-cultural stuff. There is so much stuff that you can spend from 10:30 in the morning to 01:00 the next morning at shows and never see a single one from the PC half (or at least you could in past decades – if that has changed, it would be a change).
“or at least you could in past decades – if that has changed, it would be a change”
It’s changed. You would have to look very hard indeed to find the counter-cultural stuff because it would need to fly under the radar.
I don’t go to the comedy stuff at all now.
I attended the Hay-on-Wye book festival about six years ago and had dreaded that some of this SJW stuff would be a thing but it was pretty good. So sometimes you get pleasantly surprised.
Thanks for the link, Mr Ed.
Maybe with Gervais, Frisby and this lady, and in the US the likes of Dave Chapelle, we are seeing a turn in the culture. I live in hope.