Such knee-jerk reactions risk clouding out genuine sexism.
Swift should have by all means called out the lazy comedy, but perhaps she should have thought twice before playing the sexism card. Not because the topic is off limits, or because Gervais is ‘punching down’, but because it’s ‘lazy’ to use the same gags over and over again. In a recent interview for Louis Theroux’s Grounded podcast, Frankie Boyle, king of controversy, called out Ricky Gervais’ over-reliance on jokes about trans people. Of course some comedians and scriptwriters rely more on taboos than others, but they still need to show ingenuity, playfulness and intelligence. The whole point of comedy is to subvert, surprise, satirise and shock. It fails because it’s unoriginal, and perhaps we should start judging comedy by its cleverness rather than its controversy. However, the joke doesn’t fall flat because it’s insensitive. And there is still undeniably a double standard between the sexual behaviours of men and women. One of Ginny’s friend’s automatic responses to boy drama is to say “I blame toxic masculinity.” When asked why, she replies, ‘Oh… I don’t know.’ Ginny’s ‘joke’ works much in the same way: she is parroting a trope that she has heard online but doesn’t really understand. Shorty gets lunch at Swifty’s Quick Lunch restaurant. SERVICE WITH A SMILE (6/64) Kneitel/Tafuri. Shorty gets the works when he goes for a haircut at Swifty’s Barber Shop. The show, if anything, pokes fun at the media’s brainwashing of young girls. Swifty is a lazy salesman at a men’s clothing store Shorty comes in and wants to buy a new suit. In one episode, Georgia even tells her daughter, ‘We live in a man’s world, and it’s exhausting to live in a world where you matter less.’
Swifty jokes series#
The series explores a range of important topics – race, class, sexuality, self-harm and disordered eating – and is far from sexist. Her fanbase wields the sort of power that could cancel an entire show on the basis of one line taken dangerously out of context. Swift’s fans (she has 88 million followers on Twitter and 149 million on Instagram) have been quick to rally behind her, and have since been harassing Antonia Gentry, who plays Ginny, over social media. Swift’s decision to tweet about the series is dangerous because it weaponises her fans and her own influence. Leonardo DiCaprio attended the premiere, and by the end, his date was too old for him.’ Gervais also introduced Matt Damon as ‘the only person Ben Affleck hasn’t been unfaithful to.’ Last year Ricky Gervais called out Leonardo Di Caprio’s reputation for dating younger women by saying, ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood nearly three hours long. The resulting fury from the Twittersphere forgets one important thing: that men can be the butt of jokes too. The line might not be clever, but it is not necessarily misogynistic either. There’s no doubt that if you take the joke at face value, then it does seem outdated, repetitive, and – crucially – not true she has been in a relationship with actor Joe Alwyn for over four years now. At sea: can Sunak navigate the migrant crisis?Īfter a decade of mass tabloid coverage of her relationships, it’s understandable that Swift might be tired of her love life being a punchline.
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