Don’t Menshn Charlie Hebdo

Comedy revivals have been popular of late. The latest has been inadvertent, but hilarious with it. What is being revived? The spirit of the late Tony Hancock, that’s what, that manifested itself in lines like “Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain? That brave Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and close the boozers at half past ten”.

(c) Doc Hackenbush 2014

That line, of course, required some application from writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, something not available to the former Tory MP reviving the genre. Yes, thankfully out of the Commons, but shooting her mouth off at every piece of news, Louise Mensch has brought Hancock right up to date for a new audience. But, while everyone else laughs at her opening mouth and inserting foot, she just keeps on digging.

“The response to Charlie Hebdo should be to reprint his work and spread it wider than his killers could have thought possible” she trilled, getting the Hancock style spot on, while clearly totally unaware that there was no such person as Charlie Hebdo, nor that “Hebdo” meant “weekly”. Remember, this is someone who was allowed to stand for Parliament, and served a constituency, albeit briefly.

In any case, Ms Mensch was not finished: “to those critiquing my ‘his’ in Charlie Hebdo, I am referring to the cartoonist, as well as magazine. Cartoons seem v similar to me”. Yeah, right. There were several cartoonists at the magazine, and if she had bothered to pay attention to news of the shootings, she would have known that four of them were deliberately murdered yesterday.

But still she dug herself deeper: “I assume one man drew cartoons and others worked on the mag to print them. I support all of their free expression and have RTd *his* work”. The messages are not getting through, are they? The ridicule carried on ramping up, yet she was not for just holding up her hands and admitting that she’d got it wrong. Once a minor Tory politician, still a minor Tory politician.

Then she got something right, although that may have been a “stopped clock” moment. Ms Mensch correctly deduced that the cartoonists were men. Given their photos were by now all over the broadcast media, this, though, was not hugely demanding. Even so, by saying “and yes I do assume the cartoonist was a man”, she managed to miss at least three of them. And there was another of those “mis-step” moments to come.

There was, at the end of the day, a straw to be grasped: “BTW, seems I was right about the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist in question being one man judging by his signature … so yes, HIS work”. Ten journalists, including four cartoonists, lay dead, and still she ignored Healey’s Dictum and dug herself in deeper. And don’t forget, not only was she allowed to become an MP, she’d previously got into Oxford University.

Be afraid of authority figures and their credibility, people. Be very afraid.