Laughing at the proles: C/D?

(haha xpost jel I man-kiss you)

(xpost HAHA NED I ALMOST MADE THAT EXACT SAME POST)

I am you
And you are me
XYZ to ABC
You
Me
Us
We are one

You get the same thing in nice middle-class schools throughout the UK, the kids who think they are "cool-arty-alternative" spitting venom and the kids who are "trendy-chav-townie". Maybe this is the Brit equivalent of the whole nerd-jock thing along different lines.

To what extent the impulse behind chavscum and jokes/sites like it is motivated by a logical extension of that side of things as opposed to plain snobbery is the grey-area that makes this whole debate interesting.

"Hey, they're jokes, laugh at everyone and its not offensive" is a bit of a copout.

I think it's definitely dud when done by the rich or middle classes. It's a bit of a thornier issue when it comes from upwardly-mobile working class people slagging off uncouth neighbours. I'm reading Energy Flash at the mo, and the stuff in there about the Detroit techno scene is v.interesting (the well-off children of the new black middle/upper-working class on thew West Side distancing themselves from the hoi polloi, putting up 'no jits' signs on the doors of the clubs).

It kind of comes down to whether you how you define class, and what's worth sticking up for in a class's culture.

A cursory glance at the site in question reveals that these are exactly the sort of people your university-educated middle-class types fear are waiting around bus stops and street corners in order to beat them up. Ergo sites established in order to laugh at them from a safe distance.

If this were really done, in equal measure, then maybe we'd have world peace, yes. But it doesn't work like that.

I don't think this is just about laughing / joking, either, it's about using class to belittle and humiliate.

I blame Norman Ph4y.

1. The responses to JtN are [fill in blank and win a prize]

2. I have never heard of a 'Chav'.

3. When I was growing up, it was all miners from Nottingham and council estate kids. No-one would have dared laugh at working-class people. They would never have got away with it. Whether they do now, I don't know.

4. I don't think I would like Energy Flash.

I think I find it impossible to imagine how the stuff in there about the Detroit techno scene is v. interesting.

The prize still stands. Or perhaps it has fallen.

"Is Dan Perry gon' hafta choke a bitch?"

As for the proles, well...um...okay, right now I got nothing.

Today he, or she, has not offended me, perhaps because he, or she, has been surrounded by other interesting posts from people I know.

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.