Mr. Bean spitting tea

Jokey title aside, I wanted to share these serious videos because they resonate with my feelings.

Big thanks goes to my father who, about a month ago, I caught watching a video of Rowan Atkinson give this speech and sparked my interest in looking up the full thing. I'm embedding it below, but for anyone that doesn't feel like watching a video, here's a transcript.

A couple of quotes that stood out to me:

a culture that...with the reasonable and well-intended ambition to contain obnoxious elements in society, has created a society of an extraordinarily authoritarian and controlling nature.

We need to build our immunity to taking offense, so that we can deal with the issues that perfectly justified criticism can raise. Our priority should be to deal with the message, not the messenger.

And then youtube recommended me the following short video. For anyone who prefers to read, check out the transcript on youtube, it's accurate.

I particularly liked the closing lines.

You put something out there, you paint a watercolor, you make a joke, you make a television show, whatever it is. If people are offended, that's their problem. It's not yours. You've done your bit. [...] I'm a great believer that if a joke has an appreciative audience, no matter how small, no matter who they are, then it is worthy. It should be, as it were, allowed.

Obviously, the first is aimed at the British government and the second is mainly about comedy but I feel like they still apply to art and writing in a broader sense.

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N.b. Racism is bad and ao3/otw should do better to take care of its volunteers and the people reporting they were harassed. However a campaign that strongly and immediately turns against and alienates anyone who questions even small parts of it is flawed.