Friday, September 18, 2015

There's nothing funny about that!

Look, I don't want to interrupt private grief, so I've kept Corbyn coverage to a minimum here (apart from anything else, I simply don't understand what's just happened to the Labour party so have little to add other than a dropped jaw). However, this article about whether it's even possible to make fun of such a saintly, perfect figure does call for some form of response.
Probably this will remain a default Corbyn characterisation – that he’s a joyless socialist calculating machine who’s swallowed a copy of Das Kapital. That’s a lefty caricature bordering on cliche.
"A left caricature bordering on cliche" is about as good a thumbnail description of Jeremy Corbyn as I can think of, offhand. This is a man with a beard who wears vests. A privately educated man whose first wife divorced him because he spent his evenings photocopying pamphlets for the Labour party, and who divorced his second wife because she wanted to send their children to a grammar school. A man who appointed an IRA apologist as Shadow Chancellor and a vegan as Shadow Agriculture Minister.

A man who not only had an affair with Diane Abbott, but went on a socialist motorbiking holiday to East Germany with her (there's a fly-on-the-wall sitcom just begging to be made). A man whose hobbies include signal boxes,


And photographing manhole covers,
“My mother always said there’s history in drain covers,” he said. “I take pictures of them. People think it’s a little odd but there we are.”
It's as though in his formative years he watched I'm All Right Jack and thought, 'you know, that Fred Kite is a real role model'. If satirists really genuinely can't find anything to laugh at here, it's less because he's "too nice" and more because Corbyn already looks like a satirists creation without the need for invention.

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