Laughing at the proles: C/D?

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I entirely agree with this.

Well did you evah

(Do I want the Red Planet one or the Rolando one or what? Are they the same thing?)

I don't know that it is. It grates on me for a white guy to quote Chris Rock's "I wanna join the KKK" stuff. You get the privilege to make fun of your own class/ethnicity/religion, where other people don't.

To answer Jerry's initial question - it's OK because there's often an implied "the poor deserve to be poor, it's of their own doing" angle, that most people wouldn't think of saying about ethnic groups.

This implication really pisses me off.

Yeah, but class is mobile and race isn't, really. At what point can someone no longer pull the 'hey, I'm working class' line?

Wow! Can you not at least say 'tend to'. I don't remotely believe that I'm not privileged.

Could inter-class tensions be on a more level playing field than racial ones? I mean am I betraying the fact I live in a young country by wondering if there are even half as many racial slurs against white people as there are classist slurs against the rich?

I'm not for a second saying this justifies anything, just asking a question really. Just that class seems to be almost an either or sometimes, "you yob" or "you snob" type deal.

It's funny actually, when I think of meeting guys out at clubs who looked like stereotypical "knackers", on e, and they're like "where are you from then?"

"Oh you fucking posh cunt! *big smile*"

"haha, I guess I am *big smile*"

"You probably think I'm a total scumbag? Are you in college you lazy shite? *big smile*"

"Yeah I am! Nah I don't think you're a scumbag!"

etc etc etc

Pretty much, Enrique - Henry's a middle name {see e-mail} and I guess people mostly call me Greg, but whatever. Why?

Anyway, I'm with the "make fun of everyone equally" side, if only that happened.

I'll be honest, I had (have?) this massive chip on my shoulder about class issues for about five years. It just still comes through in the way I speak sometimes, no disrespect intended. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Both of them seem to make their jokes at the expense of audience assumptions (of ethnic stereotyping or class) rather than ethnicity or class itself.

Pashmina OTM about the original charvers. There are people in this world who try to make a virtue of their stupidity while insulting your intelligence and those are the people I have the least time for ever. But when working-class leavers denigrate those who remain, especially in the media, they're just trying to prove to their posher bosses that they're basically not some trained monkey and to get the 'we accept you, one of us' thing. Yucky.

Oi! Reynolds, Morley and Penman disciples and Bracewell wannabes, I can't believe I'm owning you on books - the absolute master texts for townie vs. collegebound 'rivalry' are Simon Frith's Sound Effects and Paul Willis' Learning To Labour, esp the latter, still totally relevant today despite being 30+ years old. There's a lot of merit in payback time for adolescent town v. gown thing and you can't exactly argue that this relationship does not carry on in the media in later life.

Oh and by the way when I hear middle-class kids who haven't quite grown up yet moaning about how they're only in the 90th percentile of the elite going mad about people in the 99.9th percentile (NOT a Wu-Tang ref, guv, honest) because it isn't THEM I say y'all are having a fit of PLEB RAGE. I think it's also behind why posh kids speak like Damon Albarn.

perhaps n or jtn could copy and paste this in italics or something in one of their posts, otherwise the pinefox might not get to read it

perhaps for this to be ok there needs to be still some kind of affinity/connection/affection/identification with your background (which i guess means you havent escaped it as such, you still see yourself as being of that upbringing, but even then i think you would have to actually engage with your past actively, otherwise you have cut all ties, camped to the other side etc)

All I would really like to say is that N. and Ronan have said things which have really made me think. (Is this because they're also middle class, privately educated bastards?)

Class issues become more than just a (potentially mobile) money issue when you have two distinct and often inherently unequal cultures living side by side. In the US, this isn't as much masked by the race issue as exacerbated by it. In the UK, you have two markedly different and distinct cultures who have been living side by side (or rather one on top of another) effectively since the Norman Conquest (operatively since the Tudor era, but hey, what's 500 years between classes?).

A lot of my "classist" jokes are knee-jerk reactions of one sort or another - because I've developed a perverse reactionary "say what people would expect the toff to say becauase they're going to demonise you anyway" twitch. Because even when I say what I actually believe, people don't read what I'm saying, they just read what they would expect Someone Like Me to say. (Ronan's description struck a real chord with a younger me, even though I wasn't on drugs.)

Anyway... I've got to preserve my place in the class structure and get back to work now.

There are, then, cunts whereever you go. I think middle-class cuntishness towards the proles is getting worse though - and at the risk, I see Loaded culutre to blame, where politics got taken out of things, and anything was good for a laugh, and woe-betide the po-faced cunt who raises an objection (porn is cool and rocks, and don't fucking spoil it by reminding us of E. Europe human traffickers, you po-faced cunts). There was a quiet reserve which whilst looking down on the lower orders, wouldn't have laughed at them; it wasn't needed. The middle-class had won. The working class were for manual labour and for being repositories of all that was wrong, but not comic material; comedy is interesting as I think for most of the 20th C, most of British humour has been resolutely working-class in nature. Maybe the alternative comedy broke that back perhaps? Unintended consequence of lefty-gagmerchants being denigration of working class?

(cf debate about middle-clas left and rootedness in politics of reason, rather than empathy; vulnerable to sudden shifts (witness the Hitchens boys))

I think council estate residents, chavs, pramfaces, dole scroungers, whatever the condescending nu-media working class chooses to call them, represent a level of "acceptable poverty" that makes them fair game - I can't imagine a similar level of barbed humour being considered acceptable when talking about, say, the homeless, or pensioners living in squalour, or even asylum seekers (although the latter is becoming regrettably less so).

I could expand on this and say it possibly has something to do with the British welfare state but I am hungover and it would probably be bollocks anyway.

Most of the time I assume its invisibility is benign, then some assholish shit like this starts up.