No More Clowning Around

Unsurprisingly, my left-leaning friend Xerxes enthusiastically supports the firing of Don Cherry. “About time,” he writes.

I think Cherry was fired for doing his job.

Can anyone think Cherry was there just as a hockey commentator? Such a popular figure, voted one of the greatest Canadians, making so much money for his employers and sponsors, because of the quality of his hockey insights? People with the expertise for sports commentary are thick on the ground. There is really rarely much to say in that regard. It ain’t rocket science. Most after-game shows are deadly boring.

Don Cherry is an entertainer. People watched for his flamboyant act, his outrageousness. His recent comments about immigrants were entirely within this character and role. Just what he was there to do.

Don Cherry is a clown. He even wears motley, for goodness sake. He even has a straight man.

Humor requires the reversal of expectations—always. That’s what makes things funny. Accordingly, the job of a clown or comedian is always to say or do things that are superficially outrageous.

To fire a clown for clowning is unreasonable and unjust.

You might respond, “Don Cherry’s not funny.” Matter of taste. He does not make people laugh out loud. But he obviously entertained. His viewership numbers prove it. He made folks smile.

It is worse than bad form, bad manners, to be unable to take a joke. Joking also serves important social functions. For one, jokes and laughter allow us to let off steam, which otherwise will be expressed in more disruptive ways. Every clown also at least in part serves the traditional role of the court jester: gently and unthreateningly speaking truth to power. We always need this so as not to slip off the rails and be lost in our own delusions. There is not much authentic humour in a totalitarian state.

Firing Don Cherry is a strong indication that this is the way we are headed.

And any aggression here, any ‘bullying,’ is not by Don Cherry, but by the wider society. He has always said things like this; he has not changed. The rules have, without fair warning.

And there was nothing objectively wrong with what he said this time, for anyone, let alone a clown.

Xerxes cites the legal adage, “your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose.” This helpfully demonstrates why all ‘hate speech,’ let alone anything Cherry said, should be constitutionally protected. It is in the US. The Canadian Constitution matches the American in guaranteeing free speech; but in the US, this matter has come to the Supreme Court, and they have ruled so.

For words, after all, never come in contact with anyone’s nose.

Except in certain specific circumstances, words cause no material harm. The specific circumstances are well-defined in common law: libel, slander, fraud, incitement to violence. One can see the common thread: material harm. Upsetting someone does not count. Any such imagined harm is ultimately self-inflicted: nobody is obliged to watch Don Cherry.

Abandon this principle, and there is no free speech whatsoever. The term then means nothing.

But even were this not the case, Cherry’s recent remark was not “hate speech,” illegitimate as that term is.

It is one thing to criticize people as groups based on race, creed, or colour. That is, at best, morally wrong, even if it must not be illegal. The problem is that these are things over which no one has any control. (Religion fits here because, if one believes, one’s conscience puts the matter beyond free choice.) But “immigrants,” or rather, to use Cherry’s words, “you people that come here,” are defined only by a shared action, done freely, that of moving to Canada. It is perfectly reasonable to suggest that actions have or should have consequences, implying certain responsibilities. If it is discriminatory to make general unfavourable comments about such a group, defined only by a voluntary action, then it must, to be just, be considered equally discriminatory, and a firing offense, to make any criticism of lawyers, or politicians, or used car salesmen, or the rich, or the Toronto Maple Leafs, or Torontonians, and so forth. Theoretically, it would seem wrong even to say anything against, say, criminals.

Which may, I suspect, be the real reason behind the growing social intolerance. A lot of people have a guilty conscience, and so are invested in objecting to anyone pointing out anything wrong about anyone. This seems of a piece with the US Congress trying to impeach Donald Trump for asking for investigation of a possible crime by Hunter Biden, rather than investigating Hunter Biden. Or the US media suppressing the story of Jeffrey Epstein, and attacking in full outrage the supposed ‘whistle-blower’ who revealed that the story was suppressed. The crime now has become pointing out the crime.

Surely it is obvious that it will be impossible to run a democracy on that basis. Let alone tell jokes.

Another little bit in Xerxes’s column perhaps shows why clowns are needed.

He reports approvingly that “the United Church of Canada has policies that will not permit an unmarried minister to fall in love with a member of the congregation.”

Now, that statement is surely false. To begin with, falling in love is not something any authority can prevent from happening, or even know has happened. Moreover, it is an entirely good thing, and certainly not harmful to its object. See St. Paul on the nature of love. Surely any denomination should want its ministers to fall in love with all their congregants; it is the core of the Christian message.

What he or the United Church actually mean, surely, is that their ministers are prohibited from having sex with members of the congregation. They do not want to say this because it sounds unsettling. It requires the tacit admission that their ministers are otherwise free to have sex outside of marriage.

This is the sort of politically correct falsehood, meant to mislead, that we need clowns to call us on. Like John the Baptist in his day, they “make the paths straight for the Lord.”

Which is to say, aside from gravely harming our democracy, and social peace, the firing of Don Cherry does not speak well for our shared morality either.