“Calm down mate: it’s only banter.”
This phrase from my student days still cuts through me like an air raid siren: something stupid this way comes. Banter went mainstream last week, deployed in defence of football manager Malky Mackay after some unpleasant abusive text messages came to light. For my sanity and yours, we need to end this scourge.
“Banter” – if you’ve been lucky to avoid it so far in your life – is a term for friendly piss-taking. It was once the sole preserve of sports teams, army cadets, risk-taking scouts and wannabe-soldiers who need their fun rigorously structured and easily understood. Yet at some point over the past few years banter went from niche social activity to major youth discourse, often neatly mocked in comedies such as Fresh Meat and The Inbetweeners.
Suddenly complete strangers you met in the pub would start conversations with a stream of abuse before blinking, uncomprehending, at you for not getting “the bants.” Non-PC jokes and comments you were no longer divided into categories as nuanced as funny or not funny, bad taste or offensive, insulting or edgy: they were all simply “just banter.” To not laugh along while some braying idiot declared your mum a whore was tantamount to heresy as long as they declared it in the name of banter.
Announcing the joke you’ve just uttered is “banter” recalls F Scott Fitzgerald’s warning to young writers not to use exclamation marks on the grounds it was “like laughing at your own joke.” I try not to be too sniffy: I’ve been in sports teams, worked in offices and bookmakers, run student welfare services and each has its own unique kind of bonding and unwritten rules for banter. I tend to agree with Salman Rushdie that “without the freedom to offend, [freedom of expression] ceases to exist” and we should be at our freest when talking in private, even if others overhear. As a principle of free speech, that should also extend to expressing views that many others may find repellant.
I also become uneasy when public figures get hauled over the coals when embarrassing or even deeply unpleasant private emails and text messages are revealed, as though laughing about something was the same as acting upon it. I get wary when others start pronouncing on what is “appropriate” behavior for others in private, as though the whole messy context that is human life should be reducible to the grim bureaucracy of a human resources tribunal.
But if the current censorious climate has the effect of knocking banter off its perch, we may all be a little grateful. Banter is irony at its most cowardly and dishonest. Declaring something as “just banter” isn’t about striking a brave blow for free expression or the right to be offensive in private. It’s a way of distancing yourself from responsibility for what you’ve said: less the free speech rallying cry of “publish and be damned” and a little more “publish – and call it banter if someone gets upset.” Its sheer disingenuousness is probably why that bloke who calls himself the “bantersaurus” isn’t funny.
We all tell jokes to loved ones and friends, for all kinds of reasons, that we don’t really mean or wouldn’t dare express to others. If you make a joke that someone else finds offensive or upsetting then be prepared to defend yourself or apologise: simply adding an ironic, passive aggressive disclaimer to it won’t help. Laughter, argued the philosopher Henri Bergson in a famous essay, usually requires “a momentary anaesthesia of the heart.” It’s a useful reminder that sometimes we joke about things precisely because we don’t mean them, and it’s also helpful to note that we wouldn’t still be quoting Bergson today if he’d followed it up by simply shouting “bants!”
The opinions expressed in The Columnist do not necessarily represent those of IdeasTap.
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Image by Chris Peacock Martinez
