By conscientious objector Becky Fury

A lot of comedians and commentators who have adopted the currently trending ‘alternative’ right position have also adopted its mantra of ‘cancel culture is killing comedy’ 

It’s not. The culture war is killing comedy. 

Cancel culture is a reference to the currently  fashionable ‘leftish’ obsession with offence and feeling obligated to call out anything deemed offensive. 

This, as any right-wing commentator will inform you, is an attack on "‘ree speech’. A dubious concept in itself, as it seems to only extend to the freedom to say horrible things  – usually including using outdated  language to describe people of colour; misgendering, especially of those in the trans community; and espousing endlessly on the health benefits of eating smoked meats. 

As a result we have all had to endure a seemingly endless barrage of multinational companies using this ‘conflict’ and the publicity and twatter it generates to sell us more crap. 

Like any war, the culture war is a series of battles and skirmishes,  the 2023 Battle of Bud Light, being a notable example.

Bud Light is an awful beer but beloved by Americans and has somehow has become as all-American as CIA-funded coups and presidential candidates becoming more popular due to serious criminal proceedings. So, when trans TikToker Dylan Mulvany was engaged in a one-off promotion to advertise the beverage, it was a call to arms to the American right, who took it as a direct attack on their way of life. 

Right-wing influencers including Kid Rock and the former NFL player Trae Waynes, took it literally, opening fire on crates of the  offending 4.2 per cent lager, in viral videos made in alleged defiance of the ‘communist infiltration’ by the trans community and other ‘anti-American’ activists. 

Causality figures for the Battle of Bud Light are currently unavailable. 

 It is unknown how many Twitter profiles and followers were lost in the carnage. 

It wasn’t just the right who were upset, those on the left also angered by the brand’s failure to support Mulvaney or the trans community amid the furious backlash.

The point is that Bud Light don’t care about trans people. 

They don’t care about the American right

They don’t care about right-wing trans people. 

They just care about as many people buying their crappy lager. And this gets to the heart of why the culture war is bad for comedy. 

It’s bullshit. 

Comedy functions best when it’s exposing truth, and if you write culture- war comedy, then your comedy will be blunted because it’s not coming from a place of authentic truth. 

Jokes about ‘woke identities’ fall flat because they’re often just cruel, lazy generalisations, self identifying as edgy humour. 

These type of hack gags are at best ugly and at worst function at the same level as most racist jokes. It’s unsophisticated and most of the ‘humour’ just involves laughing at the fact that the butt of the joke is just that. The butt of the joke. Hilarious. 

Equally, humour often comes from being able to laugh at our flaws and eccentricities as humans. If you take yourself too seriously as a performer, how will you create great comedy? Likewise the best comedy comes from the comedian developing their own very personal, idiosyncratic and funny world view. 

Which is something you find inside yourself. 

By doing the hard work of discovering what you really think. 

It’s not something you find by copying what everyone else is apparently thinking on the internet. 

That way lies mediocre material and equally medical audience response. 

So maybe, for the good of humanity and your career, become a conscientious objector to the culture war. 

Wear your white feather with pride and maybe refuse to participate in this internet-induced insanity unless it’s as a stretcher bearer for the fallen and those who have taken stuff they found on the internet way too seriously.

• Becky Fury is performing a preview of her show  Great British C*nts at the Leicester Comedy Festival on February 15.  Tickets

Published: 25 Jan 2024