Why does he do this? Since it is not, manifestly, to make people laugh, the most convincing explanation is that Mr Gervais needs to act like an obnoxious bully on Twitter in order to make himself look defiantly transgressive and thereby draw attention to the fact that he has a new show starting on BBC2, featuring to transgressive comic effect a dwarf. After an exhaustive search for the perfect title, BBC2 came up with Life’s Too Short.
Whether people got bored with PC, or decided its work was done, or subsided into that passive sogginess that so troubles the prime minister, it is unusual these days to find a loony council accused of rewriting our treasured nursery rhymes or of exchanging Christmas for Winterval.
More than 500 people joined one another Saturday morning to promote the awareness and acceptance of people with Down syndrome. The walk brought together people with downs and their invited buddies.
All credit, then, to Ricky Gervais for outing the zillions of secret thought police who are still, as it turns out, hiding here unremarked in the manner of the Stasi, on the qui vive for any citizen, such as Gervais, with the courage to exercise his freedom of speech. In this case, as widely reported, the comedian simply likes to use the word “mong”, as often as possible, whether as an insult, eg: “Susan Boyle – looks like a mong” or as a meaningless pun, eg: “Good monging.”
Anyway, it took some moments before Gervais’s heavy mong-tweetage, which was accompanied by photographs of the comedian pulling mong faces, provoked enough criticism for the talented gurner to retaliate with the following rebuke: “Just to clarify for uptight people stuck in the past. The word ‘mong’ means Down’s syndrome as much as the word ‘gay’ means happy.”
The money raised goes towards local education research and advocacy programs. It also helps put on social events for local children with downs and information packages for moms and dads, suddenly faced with the reality their child has down syndrome.