Surely you’ve all heard about the recent controversy with Comedy Central censoring a recent episode of South Park featuring Muhammad, by bleeping out all references to the holy figure.
As a number of people have pointed out, the whole thing is rather absurd. For starters, South Park is constantly offensive to religions. It’s one thing if as a network you decide you don’t want to air offensive shows – fine. But to only censor shows when the offended parties threaten violence or law suits is nothing more than unprincipled cowardice.
And then of course, there’s the further point that a number of other episodes (any episodes featuring God or Jesus) are also blasphemous according to the teachings of Islam. But for whatever reason, everyone selectively focuses on the drawings of Muhammad.
Luckily, nobody can censor me – because nobody pays me to do this. Yay!
Hooray! Webcomic artists have full freedom of speech well except for strawberry shortcake… http://www.flickr.com/photos/wraithtdk/2235613796/
“nobody pays me to do this. Yay!”
Wait, what? 😉
@Matt – ah Hallmark, those bastards!
@Emil – It’s sad but true. Feel free to start paying me though if you like. 😉
Oh gee. I really did not know that, interesting stuff.
I like annoying people, so if I ever want to annoy the Ayatollah I’ll mail him an anonymous piece of printer paper with a bunch of badly drawn stick figures each with labels like: Jesus, God (or Allah, whichever works) and Muhammad. The worst (best?) part? They’ll all be doing the can can (or however you spell that, you know, that funny dance).
Of course I’ll send it from a city different than mine, preferably in a different country. Like Antarctica or something.
As for the logic in the subtext… if that were the case then South Park wouldn’t have had a problem. So I’m sure that someone somewhere would find this blasphemous. Whether it is or not in objective terms however… well good luck with that!
Just had a second thought.
Can can or disco.
Unfortunately, when the censors can’t get to you directly, they go after your hosting and any other infrastructure and support. ISPs get a lot of pressure for this.
Did you see the news recently about the abducted Israeli soldier that Hamas has been releasing animated shorts about? I get the feeling that this is some sort of “See! Cartoons can be offensive to morality!” reciprocation.
God, as the source/sum of all things to include humor (and internet porn), is omnipotent enough to get all the jokes, recognize the blasphemy as it happens, and shrug it off with a divine “Meh”.
Since you provide me brilliant comics for free, the least I should do is a provide a link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100425/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_hamas
Nestor c’est pouvoir!
Canuovea: I vote disco?
Mike: If this comic had a larger following maybe something like that would be a worry, but as it is I don’t think many people are going to be pressuring my host to do anything.
Thanks for the link, I hadn’t heard about that. What an awful tactic, targeting the father of a soldier you’ve been holding captive for four years…
You can’t fool me! That’s not Muhammed, it’s Ben Kingsley in a false beard.
Curses Adam, you’ve ruined everything!
What you say about no one censoring you reminds me of a Mitch Hedberg:
“I did a radio interview with XM radio… they said “you can swear on XM radio.” No shit, cause nobody can hear it. You can swear in the woods, too!”
Yay for not getting paid and having audiences that are far too small to worry about offending!
I saw an interview with Matt Stone & Trey Parker right when all of this was going down a couple weeks ago. They said that after the censorship that Comedy Central had imposed on this particular episode, it was the first South Park in over ten years that they did not stand behind. Some terrible choices being made in the corporate offices over at Comedy Central!
Mitch Hedberg is the best. One my favorite Hedberg lines (paraphrased):
“I saw this wino eating grapes. I was like ‘Dude, you have to wait'”.
But anyway yeah, being unappreciated has its perks. 😉