Irish comedienne, actress and writer, apparently, and not a character from Carry On Ladies.
Recently, in a discussion about writing comedy, she told Channel 4's Diverse Festival in Bradford: “If you have the same type of writers in terms of race or sexual orientation or gender, then you’re only getting one kind of joke.”
Is she right?
Or is Gareth Roberts - a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who and who happens to by gay - right when he criticised her saying:
"What a limiting view of people and of her fellow writers. Men do man jokes, women do woman jokes, homosexuals do homosexual jokes, black people do black jokes. Nobody has imagination or empathy or fellow feeling. We are apparently parrots loaded with one set of phrases, defined entirely by an arbitrary characteristic...
"...This reflects a modern cultural quirk in the arts: an obsession with process rather than outcome. Think how often you hear theatre or television people proudly describe their adherence to quotas and fashionable nostrums of social change and representation as ‘important’, when the opposite is the case.
"All art, even the desperately silly and trivial, is now regarded as political and with a mystic power to remodel society. The language of HR courses and inclusivity awareness workshops has cemented around the very daftest things. Somebody should write a comedy about that."
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Plz smrs
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I'm sure your post is guilty of some kind of cultural appropriation.
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The real problem with Brona and the like of her is that they are as funny as a funeral on a wet Tuesday afternoon and as rebellious and unorthodox as the Spanish Inquisition.
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This is the plague of modern life generally.
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They have done. It's called W1A.
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There is a point to be made about the lack of diversity in the arts (apart from the gays obv), there aren’t many working class authors or screenwriters knocking about or coming through so those stories don’t really get told, and she is right in that respect, but it should be about getting those voices heard, not limiting what others can say.
There was an article in the gruniad the other week regarding ongoing spats in young adult publishing where white people writing about e.g. slavery are criticised for appropriation, which is clearly bollocks.
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