As someone who has spent the past week being demonised, vilified and attacked on various blogs after being quoted, repeatedly, out of context, I couldn’t help but nod furiously in agreement as I read comedian Richard Herring’s response to Brian Logan’s attack on him in the Guardian this morning:
“On Monday I was astounded to read an article by Brian Logan in this very paper in which he wrote, and I quote, that “racists have a point”. I never thought I’d live to see such a hateful opinion expressed by a Guardian journalist and was morally outraged.
“Actually, I’m not being entirely fair. The piece read: “This year veteran comic Richard Herring is sporting a Hitler moustache for his show Hitler Moustache, in which he argues that ‘racists have a point’.” So it wasn’t Logan who said it. It was me. I knew that all along, and yet I wilfully took the line out of context in order to be sensationalist. What a cheap and shoddy tactic: you’d expect that in a tabloid perhaps, but the Guardian?
“Imagine if I hadn’t bothered to contextualise that first paragraph. At best, that would be sloppy journalism. Yet that’s exactly what happened to me on Monday. In an attempt to prove the debatable point that there is a “new offensiveness” in comedy, Logan quoted that one off-colour line and nothing else. He then included contentious statements from two more of my routines (about hating Pakistanis and supporting the BNP), providing little indication of how or why they might have been said. Is it possible he interviewed me with an argument already in mind, cherry-picking the lines that supported his hypothesis? Or is it unfair of me to represent him in that way? I think that most reasonable people might assume from the article that I am racist, or at least pathetically confrontational. Indeed, some reasonable people did assume that. One blogger wrote: “Richard Herring is currently putting on a show called Hitler Moustache, where (and I haven’t seen the show) he apparently dishes up straight-faced endorsements of racist ideas.”
Richard, mate, I know how you feel….
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