chav=/=working class. Chavs are at most a subset of the working class, and there's a significant number of middle class kids participating in this behavior as well. This was covered at length in the previous thread.Do you honestly think when AA Gill or Prince Harry calls someone a Chav they make this distinction?
zoetrope: I just finished up Diary of a Chav last night ("Trainers v. Tiaras" in the UK). It's YA fiction about a fifteen year old girl who goes to a school her local paper calls "Superchav Academy" in Essex. It's pretty funny and the slang she uses is incredible. I wasn't really familiar with the whole "chav" concept to begin with, as I'm an American, but I feel like I have a bit more of a handle on the whole thing now.Maybe. Although the book was written by a 37-year-old Guardian journalist with a Lit. degree from Stirling University, not an actual chav, so the degree to which it participates in the othering/shaming culture being described here is a bit debatable. It's a comic novel, after all, not a piece of social documentary.
Frowner: To this USian, the acceptability of "chav" in the UK has been astonishing, shocking and disappointing. It's so clearly about the resentment of any working class person who does not make an attempt to conform to middle class norms - if it's not, why is the absolutely farcical behavior of the British hereditary aristocracy accepted but people get all worked up about a few tacky hats and some drinking?Sure. But in terms of lived experience, it's the social obnoxiousness stigmatized as "chav" that most people will be exposed to most often. It's not like we all live next to the royal family here. I, to my knowledge, have never clapped eyes on one of the Windsors, but all I'd need to do is go out on my balcony to see (or hear) behaviour that could classed as "chav." It's this familiarity that breeds the contempt mentioned in the article. The experience of having to use a certain bus route that will reliably fill up with drunk 15-year-olds heading into town after 5 o'clock on a week-night; being regularly woken up in the wee small hours by pounding dubstep from the council flats across the road; having to share space constantly with people made ugly and loud by 'orrible lives. It's this that drives a certain kind of person to sit hunched over the Daily Mail on their bus commute, mentally attaching the hated epithet to all who crowd around them—Chavs!
When a privileged journalist such as Delingpole uses his newspaper column as a platform to spray abuse on those with no ability to defend themselves, it is difficult to sympathise with his own claims of persecution.Further comment from Richard Seymour:
The meritocratic 'common sense' is one which we, of course, have to work on. It contains certain tensions, and the reality will never live up to its ideal. [...] Yet we mainly have to work against it. For to believe that, even if one is not well off, then with sufficient hard work one can be, is to believe something about the market, about the creation of wealth and about the relative abilities of one's fellow human beings. [...]posted by RogerB at 9:57 AM on June 3, 2011 [1 favorite]
The 'Chavs' phenomenon condenses many of the themes of this savage creed. It charges poor people with getting ideas above their station, with being feckless and irresponsible with money, tasteless, stupid, drunk, thuggish, and barbaric. In the guise of lewd satire, celeb-bashing and tart social commentary, it gives us a hit of class hatred. It references, and caricatures, the outward signs of social problems such as poverty, alcoholism, bad education and so on, but does so in the manner of a taxonomising anthropologist or zoologist, naturalising these very signs as qualities of a particular social sub-species.
koolcat: They should really bring back borstals and try to nip the chav problem before it starts.Er, really? It sounds like what you're really hankering for there is the Royal Navy from the golden age of sail, which might be a bit difficult to "bring back" in this time of deflation and cutbacks. Cool uniforms, though, I'll warrant you.
To me it is synonymous with the Chris Rock stand up but about niggers vs black people.Do you think when AA Gill or Prince Harry uses the word nigger they are making the distinction?
... university-educated comedians reacting against working-class club comedians ... men who went to good schools with degrees from a good university inviting a mass audience to laugh at people largely poorer and with fewer prospects than they have.without a shred of evidence to back it up.
'reacting against the working class'You are either deliberately telling lies about what I said, or you are sincerely unable to hold words in your mind. What I said, and I'm amazed I have to repeat it, is:
Alternative comedy was never quite as working-class as the accents suggested - a lot of it was university-educated comedians reacting against working-class club comedians rather than rebelling against the Oxbridge establishment.Now, do you understand or have any knowledge of the working men's clubs of 1970s Britain? Do you know who Bernard Manning is? Are you familiar with the TV show The Comedians? Much of the impetus of British alternative comedy came from a reaction against the gag-based television comedy of the 70s, which often relied on racial or sexual stereotypes. London's Comedy Store was specifically an alternative to that kind of live comedy experience. From the Comedy Store's website:
In the new more politically-aware environment of the early eighties, comics with racist, sexist and outdated jokes were often gonged or booed off quickly, making room for performers of the new "alternative" genre, whose material was considered fresher and more innovative. These performers were to become the first alternative comedians; Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmonson, Alexei Sayle, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Keith Allen, Peter Richardson, Nigel Planer and Arnold Brown all graced The Comedy Store stage in the early days.That's a grand narrative, of course, and it's more complicated than that - there was more going on with those club comedians than a man in a blue tuxedo telling racist jokes - but certainly the atmosphere of the Comedy Store, which became the model for many other alternative comedy clubs and nights in urban centres across the country, was very different from the atmosphere in the working men's clubs where comics like Manning, Roy Walker, Stan Boardman and Jim Bowen learned their trade.
So are we now saying that some sections of society are now exempt from having the piss taken out of them? Please let me have a list so I'll know when not to laugh.It's political correctness gone maaaaaad.
Alternative comedy was never quite as working-class as the accents suggested - a lot of it was university-educated comedians reacting against working-class club comedians rather than rebelling against the Oxbridge establishment.Alternative comedy in the clubs was an aesthetic and stylistic reaction to the style and the topics of working-men's club comedy. So, you got character comedy instead of one-liners, drainpipe jeans and T-shirts instead of flared trousers and dinner suits, political and absurdist themes rather than jokes about mothers-in-law and immigrants. When TV started harvesting some of these alternative comics, their TV shows - such as The Young Ones and Girls on Top - often mirrored and parodied the structures of traditional middle-class comedies such as The Good Life. In both cases, this was a reaction against a dominant culture.
Very different era. Comedy, and the BBC, in the 1960s was much more upper-class/Oxbridge dominated. Since then we've had alternative comedy's rise, meaning kids who didn't go through Footlights were getting their own BBC shows, and people who have had more experience of the working class than the public school-Oxbridge Pythons (having been around a lot of old boy type people, dressing up as women is seen as the most hil-ar-ious thing ever) and so use them as tropes.I was simply noting in response to this that the rise of alternative comedy was not solely, or primarily, a working-class phenomenon, and that in fact much early alternative comedy was produced by products either of Oxbridge drama/footlights, drama or art school or well-established universities, and that this section of the alternative comedy community tended to provide most of the initial crossover into TV series. I was also noting that alternative comedy was not initially a reaction against Monty Python, but rather a reaction against much of the prevailing comedy at the time, both on TV and in clubs.
I was actually asking a question. Is it NEVER OK for a privately-educated comedian to use 'working class' (scare quoted because of a lack of a definition) characters in his/her comedy? Isn't the content and tone of the actual comedy itself more important than the bare facts of someone's upbringing?No, I think that's clearly not the case. To be more precise: I'm not sure what "never OK" means, but I'd say it is evident that by no sensible application of the term could it be said to be the case.. There's certainly no law prohibiting it, and Walliams and Lucas haven't found that doing so has damaged their careers. So, no. I don't think that's the case in any absolute sense, and I don't think anybody has suggested that any such prohibition should be placed on comedians.
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Delingpole is a handy indicator of the not-truth. If that's who's arguing the case for, then that's automatically a win for the case against.
posted by liquidindian at 6:01 AM on June 3, 2011 [4 favorites]