What this story is about, really, is going from a place of certainty to one of uncertainty. I was certain I supported Dankula in principle; now I am not. Unfortunately, this is also something that the Daily Stormer actively advocates: remember "the undoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not". All of us who would instinctively vote for comedy and free speech in the face of legal clampdowns and other restrictions need to be aware of the doublethink discourse at work, that the thing we most prize might be being used against us. (I do also wonder whether any Jewish schoolchildren are now hearing "gas the Jews!" shouted laughingly at them, because some other children saw a man say it on the internet to his dog and it was so lulz.)
But in the end, I have to come down on what I think is the side of comedy. Partly because my own currently touring show, which spills my family's secrets across the stage, dances all over the line of what is and isn't acceptable to joke about. There is a story towards the end of the show involving my dementia-ridden father essentially offering up the possibility of a sexually criminal act to a female mourner at my mother's funeral, which, every night, gets a laugh which is not just a laugh: I can hear in it shock and uncertainty and disgust and offence, too. And this is a type of laughter that I believe comedy should aspire to, because it is an art form.
I'll leave you with this. The funniest thing ever made, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's Derek and Clive, includes a sketch in which Cook improvises a bit about watching a documentary about Nazis and being so unconsciously influenced that he got on the bus to Golders Green, and – to quote Clive – "must have slaughtered at least 18,000 before I realized what I was doing". Cook isn't really satirizing Nazis there. He is not being Mel Brooks or Sacha Baron Cohen or Chaplin; he's simply enjoying the thrill of saying something so awful in a throwaway manner. It's hilarious. It's also, in my view, ethically and comically more or less what Count Dankula did in his video. Obviously Cook was a genius while Mark Meechan is not. But we can't put people in prison for not being geniuses. And if there is a comedy genius in Meechan's video, surely it is the pug – even though he was only obeying orders.
