The Scottish Joke

The Scottish are tough, proud and humourous lot. However, due to someunimaginative, ignorant, quasi-racist marketing ploy, the Scottish brogue has been recently used and abused as their sole source of humour.

You know the annoying idiot in the Canadian beer ad (the one that makesme fumble for the mute button on the remote) and that flic with the big dull green ogre (wherein the humour consists making references to current events/things in medieval surrounding, but in a Scottish accent. Which, for those few Canadian readers who watch the CBC, is the exact same thing the dead guy use to do, ad nauseam, on the Royal Canadian Air Farce) the brain dead masses seem to adore. You could just imagine the advertising/Hollywood types, after reading the lacklustre scripts before them, saying would it be awesome if it were done in a funny accent. The geniuses probably made a list of the "funnier races" and then excluding the French for a multitude of reasons.

Even Canada's own Mike Myers (who proved, in So I Married an Axe Murderer, you can be both brilliantly funny and use the brogue) had said the aforementioned ogre wasn't funny until he dropped the Canadian accent for the Scottish one. Remember, Peter Sellers in The Party, it wasn't only funny because he spoke with a "funny" accent.

We, as a society, have for the most part rid ourselves of getting our chuckles from dancing Sambos and the like. We all love to laugh and there is abundant cause to do so, but we needn't scour the list of yet to be ridiculed races for our next target of mockery.

This is not about being politically correct. It is not about racism. Case in point: the joke about the native American daughter complaining to her father about him crushing her smokes whilst they are having carnal relations is - albeit tasteless, racist and vulgar - down right funny and that much funnier when told using the appropriate accent. Racism is serious business and should be left to the racist.

This is about promoting good humour and discouraging non-humour passing as humour. If we continuously sop up their swill they will never feed us the good stuff. It is also in human natures drive for one-upmanship that good humour will beget more good humour. So laugh, laugh vigorously, laugh often but laugh wisely and with conscience. If we all work together, they may one day produce some truly funny sitcoms again.

Have a hoot, have some hooch