What is comedy allowed to do? Following Luke Mockridge’s statements about disabled sports, there is a debate about the ethical boundaries of comedy. This also includes the question of whether the boundaries of what is allowed are becoming increasingly narrow.
The two podcast hosts to whom Mockbridge had made the jokes defended him in an Instagram video and went on the offensive against critics. At the beginning of the video, Shayan Garcia and Nizar Akremi initially pretended that they wanted to end the podcast “Die Deutschen”. “We have hurt too many people, so we have to pull the ripcord,” they announced – but that was just a joke. “Never! Nothing is being ended here!” Akremi clarified. They then settled accounts with the critics who had publicly demanded consequences for Mockridge and the moderators.
Podcast duo: “We didn’t commit murder”
Mockridge has lost everything, but that is apparently still not enough for some, said Akremi. Garcia countered the critics: “We have not committed murder” – and announced: “We will take legal action against anyone who has engaged in slander and incitement.”
The trio had made derogatory comments and gestures about disabled sports in the podcast “Die Deutschen” and had been sharply criticized publicly for this. “There are people without legs and arms who are thrown into a pool – and whoever drowns last wins,” said Mockridge, causing the hosts to laugh.
The broadcaster Sat.1 then canceled the comedian’s new show “What’s in the Box?” Mockridge himself apologized to the athletes and canceled the opening shows of his planned “Funny Times” tour “due to the current situation,” the organizer announced. An appearance by Akremi in Berlin was also canceled.
Cabaret artist Schroeder denounces “left-liberal self-intoxication”
In the meantime, cabaret artist Florian Schroeder has also taken a stand in the debate. In a video podcast with “Stern” he criticized both Mockridge and his critics: “Mockridge’s joke was miserable,” he clarified. But: “The reflexive, pitying defense of disabled people is, in its self-intoxication, almost as discriminatory as Luke’s joke itself. It makes disabled people so small that they never want to be themselves.”
Those who are now getting worked up are “our dear, inclusive left-liberal friends who are always in favor of inclusion, but then immediately get scared when a disabled child joins their own child’s class.” In principle, they think that’s great, of course, but in this case they would prefer the parallel class – “it could be that the giftedness that their own offspring was born with suffers as a result.” A “gesture of vicarious concern” is characteristic of this type of person.
This attitude leads them to lead others to the scaffold for cultural appropriation or to shoot artists off the stage with petitions, says Schroeder. This has fatal consequences for artistic freedom: “The dogged, pathetic seriousness is the death of playfulness, of all the roots of art, of very good art just like that of Luke Mockridge in the podcast – of bad art.”
Cabaret artist Schmidt: Don’t objectify people with disabilities
Rainer Schmidt, a Protestant pastor, cabaret artist and Paralympic table tennis player, also has an opinion on the subject – he was born without forearms. The 59-year-old theologian finds Mockridge’s jokes “subterranean”.
“Of course you can make jokes about people with disabilities,” he stressed in an interview with the German Press Agency. “However, these jokes should not make people with disabilities into mere objects or insult them. The rule of thumb is: “A crude insult made in a funny way is still an insult first and foremost.” But that is precisely the case with Mockridge: “That was a derogatory insult.”
Schmidt himself constantly makes jokes about his disability in his programs. “For example, I tell people that I was invited to an event about inclusion, and afterwards there was a little snack – finger food. So I make fun of it myself, but of course I am always the subject on stage. I never undermine human dignity.”
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