Savage Popcorn

According to Chortle (via), Stuart Lee is saying that he wouldn’t work on anything controversial on the scale of Jerry Springer: The Opera again because ‘idiots’ could too easily close it down.

The musical, which Lee had spent years developing, suffered financially when fundamentalist Christians decided to take offence and began campaigning against the show. Even though the High Court rejected an attempt to prosecute the show for blasphemy, Lee – probably rightly – feels that the furore would stop people investing time in controversial shows.

And this really is the point when faced with cases like this. Whether it’s Jerry Springer: The Opera, the Mo-Toons controversy, Behzti, or the the current Golden Compass silliness, religious groups do try to stifle our freedom of speech every time they decide to be offended and this gives rise to countless acts of self-censorship as as artists decide that they don’t want to be on the receiving end of someone’s irrational outrage.

We will never know what potential artistic delights have been lost because of the fear of offending someone’s primitive superstition.

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