Il saluto nazista di David Walliams su ti mentirei inaccettabile, dice la BBC

Sounds like the joke wasn’t very funny, but it’s interesting that the BBC will happily air the “Are we the baddies?” sketch but say this is unacceptable. Wasn’t there a salute in Fawlty Towers as well?

> “It was immediately acknowledged during the recording that this segment would not be broadcast under any circumstances and we apologise to those who were at the recording for any offence caused.”

That’ll show him, trying to make a joke… who does he think he is?

>One part of the show saw Call The Midwife actress Helen George, who took part in Strictly Come Dancing in 2015, being given a prompt to suggest she had sprained her wrist “from waving too much during the Strictly tour”.

>She then had to try to convince the opposing team that her anecdote was true.

>After demonstrating the wave, which purportedly left her with an injury, she was told that it was “too little” and was encouraged to make a bigger gesture.

>”Some other panellist was talking when David Walliams started doing the Nazi salute,” Topan told the BBC. “I was shocked at what I had seen.”

>There were “patches of quietened gasps and awkward half-laughs and broken clapping” in the audience, they said.

>The show’s host, Gavin & Stacey star Rob Brydon, then told Walliams the show would be broadcast before the 9pm watershed, effectively suggesting his behaviour was not suitable for a family TV audience.

>However, as the discussion about George’s experience continued, Walliams made the gesture again, adding a sexual gesture with his other hand.

Bit hard to tell from a written description, but it certainly sounds like this was just an attempt at a joke that didn’t land?

I’m all for cancelling anyone that is an actual Nazi; but trying (and apparently failing) to take the piss out of them doesn’t make someone Nazi, and it’s a bit absurd to react as if he is?

The best thing to do would be to just cut the segment, which sounds like what they’re going to do anyway.

Carry on this route and comedy will wind up being some underground thing that people do in secret, so as not to be at risk.

As a reminder, somebody literally went to jail for making (very poor taste) jokes on Facebook

I don’t find him funny myself, but I can see that it’s a joke he’s not some kind of Nazi supporting whopper.

In good news the BBC will now be unable to ever show *Allo Allo* again.

Yes, yes, he’s clearly a Nazi. 🙄

People seriously need to pull their heads out of their arses. Not *everything* has to be offensive.

This guy is an idiot, and it sounds like it’s not worth broadcasting this incident because it wasn’t funny. But it’s absurd to say you can’t use a Nazi salute in comedy – there are other BBC shows that do, Fawlty Towers comes straight to mind. Why do these people feel a need to lie?

What’s the problem? Doing the salute as a mock gesture has been standard fare in British comedy for donkey’s years. Are we worried about offending Nazis now?

>There were “patches of quietened gasps and awkward half-laughs and broken clapping” in the audience, they said.

> “The atmosphere was uncomfortable and weird,” Topan said.

>”I think Rob Brydon wanted to get past it as quickly as he could. David Walliams’ team-mates looked unsure what to do and were not laughing… It was like an elephant in the room after that as the incident was early on in the recording and so the remainder of the show felt weird.”

I always struggle to believe these accounts. People who take issue in this way seem to love making the reaction as a whole sound much worse than it actually was. I really doubt it lingered that much.

The stupidest thing about this is how tame and obviously non-topical the joke sounds like it was. Russell T Davies was bang on the money when he said that the BBC are too meek and ought to stand up for themselves more. In trying to head off a scandal that I don’t believe would have ever actually been a scandal, they’ve perfectly engineered a situation whereby everyone will now kick off at them for censoring humour, completely able to point at the beloved Fawlty Towers and say “you couldn’t do that anymore on the bloody woke BBC!”

The person who made his career out of being edgy was caught being edgy?

Why is making a joke about Nazis considered worse than a serious dramatisation of them?

Or doing a Trump impression doesn’t endorse him.

Plenty of comedians will do jokes about racists, it doesn’t mean they support them, just seems like people are trying to find reasons to be offended

We can’t take the piss out of nazis now? Not a hill I would choose to die on but each to their own.

Of all the things to finally get rid of that absolute creep and it’s him actually just telling a joke, insane

“…even that Little Britain guy did one on the BBC and that was ok, so what’s wrong with me doing this, I ain’t racist”

Some EDL type probably.

I am always reminded of the Sartre quote:

>>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

We have to always keep in mind that there is a large and growing anti establishment, anti multicultural, anti (((globalist))) movement out there and their spokespeople are not interested in fair discourse. They are looking for weaknesses to exploit.

That’s the issue I think, we’re caught at a difficult point in time where everybody expects to be treated with parity. If we allow someone to seig heil on the BBC, regardless of whether it has been done “in good humour”, we open the door for people who would use comedy as a vehicle to truly seig heil and signal to an audience.

There are probably plenty of reasons to cancel this guy but this isn’t it. Comedy is often about exaggeration and subverting expectations for comic effect . Shocking that the BBC has apologised tbh.

When I was growing up, men who had fought nazis for real instead of at a keyboard would use nazi salutes to mock trumped up idiots. Walliams is a person I dislike intensely, but criticism of this is idiotic.

Jesus, what a bunch of clowns. Someone should get these idiots to listen to a Fin Vs History podcast. They’d literally die from clutching pearls too hard.