Evidently having paid some attention to his critics, it appears that Ben Elton has decided to put the sell-out that was We Will Rock You behind him and start working properly in the world of comedy.  Admittedly Teenage Kicks is probably not his best work (more on that later in the week), but he’s also raised some valid points about the treatment of a certain religious group in the comedy arena.

Elton believes the BBC is too scared to broadcast jokes about Muslims.

Looking at the evidence, you can quite easily see why he might think this.  He was speaking to Christian magazine “The Third Way” and describing an incident in which he was part of a writing team:

“I wanted to use the phrase ‘Muhammad came to the mountain’ and everybody said, ‘Oh, don’t! Just don’t! Don’t go there!’

“It was nothing to do with Islam, I was merely referring to the old proverb, ‘If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain.’ And people said, ‘Let’s just not!’”

“I’m quite certain that the average Muslim does not want everybody going around thinking,’We can’t mention you. We’ve just got to pretend you don’t exist because we’re scared that somebody who claims to represent you will threaten to kill us.’”

He is of course absolutely right to raise this as an issue, and it is a pity that more has not been made of this, it is a debate that needs to be engaged in.

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Tags: ben elton, Comedy Ethics, muslims, teenage kicks

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 4:39 am and is filed under Comedy Ethics, Standup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.