Unquote Quotes

Said a participant. One woman was heard to say. A bystander opined.

Whenever a quote in an article is preceded by one of these phrases, the journalist has made it up. It is easy for a journalist to justify. They are using a device to sum up a mood that actually existed. It's the kind of thing someone might have said. Probably did say. When you think about it, it's almost not really a lie at all.

Well, it is a lie. Instead of expending the minimal effort it would take to squeeze some entertainment out of genuine passers-by, the journalist sneaks in some pre-packaged gags.

It's never very convincing, but it is good to see it fail openly. Here is the effort of Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail today. He is deploring Bono's appearance at the Tory conference.

From the seats of Tory activists, meanwhile, there wafted an air of widespread indifference, if not bafflement. Who was this scruffy little man? What was his name again? Mr Bonio?

Did someone really say "Mr Bonio"? Nope. Letts is palming off a tired joke, a decades-old ex-zinger that all the italics in the world won't resuscitate. And he enjoys it so much he goes on:

Some of the more ancient ones plainly hadn't a clue as to who he was. And they wondered why he was not wearing a tie.

Ah, that fatal misstep. Deep in character as the harrumphing Tory cliche, Letts has floated free of the world.  Here is one of the pictures that accompanies the article. A helpful editor, obviously no fan of Letts, has placed it as close as possible to the tie reference. For what is that around Bono's neck? Oh yes. It's a tie. Magnified a hundred times on a big shiny screen.

Underneath the screen, lost in giggles, Quentin Letts is knocking the crust off an old joke.

"What a hapless tool," one blogger was heard to say.

Too much bubblewrap, not enough toy

Is Kevin Myers having trouble hitting his word-count? His latest effort is remarkable not for assaults on logic or decency, but for the extraordinary exhaustion of its prose style. Look at the first paragraph. 

Whoa there. Few people who know the RTE HQ at Montrose in Donnybrook would lament plans to bulldoze the lot -- but that doesn't mean that RTE should then be allowed to charge off with fresh plans, once again misusing and abusing its virtual monopoly in the marketplace.

What is the distinction between misusing and abusing here? What does either add to the sense which the other doesn't supply? It's a small point, perhaps, but this is like the thematic anouncement of a laziness that infects the whole article. It is particularly invidious with jokes, which depend on clarity and speed. 

Now, I accept that putting the terms "government" and "decisions" together is like putting "frogspawn" and "nuclear fission" in the same sentence. Only by a strenuous feat of grammar and imagination can the former be construed as being capable of making the latter.

It's not punchy, is it? We have the woozy verbosity of the opening. Worse, it muffs its own punchline. Frogspawn making nuclear fission just doesn't work as an image. He wants something which could conceivably try to split atoms, but inevitably and hilariously fail. And nuclear fission is surely "produced" rather than made.

The whole thing is so clumsy we start to look for a culprit. Did he mean that nuclear fission couldn't make frogspawn? It's marginally funnier that way around. Did he mix up former and latter?

Either way, this reeks of first thoughts.

Despite the €160 licence fee, true public service broadcasting remains as rare on RTE as nude sunbathing on Radio Telefis Saudi Arabia.

Pick one, Kevin. The joke is either the incongruity of nudity in Saudi Arabia, or the incongruity of the Irish language designation of a Saudi broadcaster, or the incongruity of nudity on the radio. Don't just slop them all on and hope something sticks.

But to wait with bated breath for a lucid, well-informed debate on this subject from our elected representatives is probably like expecting a useful forum in Haiti on saving the polar bear.

This is more flab. Drop with bated breath. It's a cliche, and it adds nothing. Choose either lucid or well-informed. Drop probably. And come up with something better than a forum, for the love of God. We should be laughing at your punchline, not listening to the small voice pointing out that there is nothing inherently ridiculous, after all, in an environmental conference which doesn't limit its concerns to the animals outside the window. 

His peroration shows the same clutter of verbal underbrush between the reader and the point.

For RTE is rather like the multi-seat constituency, the Hapsburg chin and Lurgan: almost no one wants it, but equally, no one quite knows how to get rid of it.

This has potential, but he gabbles and wastes it. What might a second draft have looked like? Without altering the materials of the joke, we get this.

RTE is like the multi-seat constituency, the Hapsburg chin and Lurgan: nobody wants it, but nobody knows how to get rid of it.

It's still not Groucho Marx, but it works as a joke because someone has thought about it for longer than it took to ink it onto a beermat. Why won't Myers?

MY SICKENING OUTBURST

I have no strong feelings about Tommy Tiernan, but it's clear that what the papers like to call his "outburst" was not an explosion of deeply-held anti-Semitic feelings. It was an illustration of his proposition that a comedian has the moral licence to say anything he wants.

That proposition is absurd, of course. But that doesn't make his piece an "outburst", or a "rant", and to characterise it as such is a lie.

This lie is tellingly deployed in this Irish Times article by David Adams. It's worth looking at, because it also illustrates some other standard rules of an attack piece. Any professional journalist can knock out 500 words of this between toothbrush and coffee cup.

Rule 1: An "offensive" comedian is always unfunny.

It seems impossible for a commentator to acknowledge that a good joke can be offensive, or that an offensive joke can be good. Discussions of comedians who upset people is inevitably detoured into a discussion of how unfunny they are.

Adams' version has Tiernan say these things specifically for the media attention. It is a "pitiful attempt to prop up a shaky career".

Of course, no evidence is supplied that Tiernan's career is shaky. Why not? A quick check on sales figures of his DVDs, a head-count of his last five Christmas gigs: theses aren't hard to organise.

Why not do it? Because it's not true. Tiernan's career is healthy. He certainly didn't set out to improve it by insulting Jews. Adams claims this, but he doesn't really believe it. Just as he doesn't believe that Tiernan is a "z-list celebrity." It's a handy insult, that's all. Truth doesn't matter.

Rule 2: Targets are either soft or unworthy. 

"Well, he pokes fun at Catholic priests, but then who doesn’t nowadays."

You see, Catholicism is the cow's arse to comedy's banjo. It's just too easy. Tiernan should focus on smaller, less obvious targets. Like protestants? Or Jews?

Ah, "but how courageous is it to snipe at easy-target, minuscule religious minorities?"

That narrows the field nicely. No jokes about religion at all, please.

Rule 3: Free speech must be validated by physical danger.

This usually appears in the form of the Mahommed analogy. (It is somehow cowardly to mock Jesus. If you had real guts, you would mock Mahommed and someone would kill you.) In fairness to Adams, he finds a more unusual version. But it is no less strange.

If he really wanted to be edgy and courageous, he’d be airing his thoughts on Jews and the Holocaust in, say, Tel Aviv or Haifa. If he didn’t want to travel so far, he could always do a couple of turns on the Falls Road in Belfast, and make disparaging comments about Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers. To give balance to his Northern tour, maybe a gig or two on the Shankill Road as well, and lay into the people who were killed in the Shankill bomb.

Unless you are willing to be killed, that is, you are not allowed to a joke.

The oddest thing about this, apart perhaps from its tangible frisson of sadism, is that it leads Adams into prompting precisely what he has so inccurately deplored.

To be truly edgy, he says, you must make your jokes where they are most offensive. It's not enough to make a Maddy McCann joke. You must make it to her parents.

Even Tommy Tiernan doesn't go that far.

Rule 4: Every editorial is a Sun editorial.

Deep breath. And from the top: 

Rant. Pitiful. Look-at-me antic. Obnoxious rant. Sickening outburst. Z-list celebrities. Vile attack. Outburst. Rant.

This is the Irish Times, remember. Wasn't it supposed to be above these things?


Rule 5: You're allowed to make it up.

It’s all about being reckless and irresponsible and joyful. It’s not about being careful ... and mannered. It’s trusting your own soul and allowing whatever lunacy is inside you to come out in a special protected environment where people know that nothing is being taken seriously.

That's Tiernan on comedy, but it might just as easily be Adams on journalism. The astounding lack of research is not his only assault on the tyranny of fact. How about this:

Soon after he got wind of the Tribune article, you can be certain Tiernan was reading and re-reading it to check that his every utterance was included...

Well, no, I can't. And neither can you. And calling your fantasy "certain" doesnt make it journalism.

Adams has another little stroll in the fictional underbrush when he imagines Tiernan claiming dyslexia, or child abuse, or drug dependence, as a ploy to capture our sympathy. He may already have done it, we are told. Or he may not.

Perhaps he is saving the “poor me” tactic for the future, or has used it in the past. It hardly matters.

But it does matter, you great clumping galah. There is a world of difference between having done something and not having done it, or between doing something in the real world an doing it in the imagination of a journalist who can't be bothered to flick through the back issues.

These cows are small, David. Those cows are far away.


Rule 6: Rage trumps thought.

Niall Stokes, the editor of Hot Press, gets this right: “But, while you have to read the full interview to understand what was going on and to see it in context, only an idiot could think that he was expressing his own feelings.”

This could not be clearer. Tommy Tiernan was not expressing hatred of Jews or support for the holocaust.

Adams acknowledges this (when he's not calling the piece "sniping" or "a vile attack on Jews", that is). But he has other concerns.

Regardless of what he really thinks about Jews, his words can only be of encouragement to countless actual anti-Semites.

Anti-Semites are nasty people. Who cares what comforts them? Tiernan's piece is not anti-Semitic in intent, and it will not create anti-Semitism. Will a real anti-Semitebe pleased with it? Perhaps. But here in the adult world of the non-lunatic, we need to tailor our discourse to a higher cause than depriving the bug-nuggets of their jollies.

Now, acknowledging that Tommy Tiernan is not anti-semitic is a poor springboard for encouraging a global boycott and an arrest. But that is exactly what Adams suggests. He also comes too close to suggesting something worse. Because after the journalist has explicitly gloried in the prospect of audience violence against the comic, he says this.

Thanks to the Tribune article, as well, those who in the future may be tempted to employ Tiernan, or to go to any of his shows, can make their decision in full knowledge of his hateful anti-Jewish rant. Hopefully, via the internet, his Jewish fellow citizens and others will ensure that this includes prospective employers and audience members in the US.

If this is not a call to violence in itself, the context makes it queasily close to one. It throws a pall of terrible ambiguity over his closing threat:

We should give Tommy Tiernan all the media and public attention he so clearly craves. He may learn that too much of what you want can be a bad thing.

Well, yes, we could do that. Or we could attempt to write in a clear and measured way about the facts of a given incident, and go on to make reasoned moral points about them. Isn't that what the Irish Times is supposed to be for?