Politically incorrect?

(I thought this deserved its own post.)

In the course of today's net foraging I uncovered this particular truffle on Musings From Middle England: a post about the Ricky Gervais stand-up show 'Politics' screened last week on C4.

Willie's thoughts on Gervais's remarks about the gay age of consent have provoked a strong and heated debate in the comments box. Personal insults aside, it makes for fascinating reading - do peruse it, if you've got time.

Not wanting to weigh in seriously on an issue which I haven't given a great deal of thought, I won't address the age of consent. I do, however, feel inclined to step in, at least in part, in Gervais's defence.

I find him, by and large, very funny, though he's always treads a fine line between being funnily offensive and being downright offensive. In 'Politics' - which I didn't enjoy as much as 'Animals' or 'The Office' - he did perhaps overstep the mark. But I didn't feel it was with the material on homosexuality that he did this.

When quoting from a 1980s leaflet recommending sexual practices which don't involve intercourse to gay men, the object of his scorn, as far as I could make out, was the media-inflated hysteria surrounding HIV and AIDS - after all, it can only have been the level of hysteria that prompted people into thinking that recommending mutual masturbation out of windows was a reasonable alternative course of action...

Perhaps I'm being incredibly naive here - and feel free to say so - but for me it was the material on disability that was harder to stomach, as well as being pretty lazy comedy.