Have we taken leave of our multi-cultural senses?

The actor, Sir David Jason, has been forced to apologise and some radio station reduced to wetting its knickers in abject distress because the recently knighted actor cracked a 'joke' which involved a play on an Indian sub-continent name. He said 'What do you call a Pakistani cloak room attendant?' Answer: 'Mahatma Coat'



The 'joke' is something from the 1930s, I think I first heard it at primary school back in the 1940s/50s (though it probably said an Indian then as Pakistan was hardly conceived and Mahatma Gandhi had been the Indian Premier) The point is it's a silly play on words like 'Lunchtime o' Booze' the 'Irish' journalist much beloved by Private Eye or the female stone thrower 'Eva Brick'. It is NOT an attack on Pakistani people.

Have we become so frightened of causing offence in this multi-cultural paradise that every single silly joke like this has to provoke a feast of bed wetting? It's not particularly funny..it's too old and corny...but unfunny has never been a reason for apologising for humour. And when you hear some of the really nasty, vicious stuff that goes out on air these days you do wonder what the fuss was about.

Of course Del Boy was misguided in telling the joke -not because it IS offensive but because, in the current climate, there was bound to be somebody claiming it was. That's just the way of the world. Maybe had he said an Indian cloakroom attendant he would have got away with it because I suspect half the panic and walking on egg shells is because Pakistan is Muslim.

I don't like racist jokes..and I mean those which seek to demean and undermine another person's race and culture in the way Bernard Manning used to do, for example. But for heaven's sake, to make such a fuss about this type of pun hardly shows a society at ease with itself. And I don't believe most of our asian citizens would have found this offensive - only people with an agenda who deliberately look for something offensive in order to make some political point.