Canadian Comedian Fined $42,000 for Telling a Joke | Hacker News Reader

Canadian Comedian Fined $42,000 for Telling a Joke

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34 pointsJerry267 comments

This headline is very editorialized.

This comedian Mike Ward has made this kid the centerpiece of his repertoire for years now, and the ruling has to do with harassment more along the lines of the "Star Wars Kid" variety, where the consistent abuse heaped on him was making him hard to live his life.

https://www.reddit.com/r/montreal/comments/4wod9b/david_mitc...

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> In context of Jeremy signing for the pope and along Celine Dion. Lets just say it; A kid sang a song, was not much of a performance and was looking kinda funny at the time no one knew about him. It was something that Ward refered to in once, twice...Again and again. Mike ward's bashings can be ruthless and he somehow though that this gag was shocking enough that he made it it his signature basically.

>> Have any people commenting on this ever listened to the entire bit? The only bit that people talk about and seems to get translated is the first part where he makes fun of his appearance. Nobody seems to talk about the second half of the bit where he launches into "Fuck, he's still not dead! The little fucker just won't die! [...] I defended you, you need to die now! Fucking heartless asshole, die already[...]"

https://youtu.be/zYrsECWQuM8?t=1m40s

I am in no way for this kind of ruling. Nobody has a right to not be offended. But, is someone repeatedly calling for the death of a child acceptable satire/humour?

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Also worth reading:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mike-ward-comedian-hu...

It's yet another fairly complex ruling being coopted into the "omg the PC police are after us" boogeyman.

No 'star wars' kid had his video stolen.

Then treated like shit over the internet on mass.

Given he didn't ever opt in, pretty awful.

The joke here is in the establishment loving him. Not the kid.

Its hard. No kid can sign off on what happens to them.

But if society is wrong and idolised a kid, can you not fight back, else you hurt the kid?

"en masse"

In a way, a society is like a living organism. If it's not confronted with enough real problems and threats, its "immune system" finds something anyway and attacks the normal cells. If some people can't find anything sufficiently outrageous recently, then some idiotic jokes will do.

I'm a big comedy fan and found this whole case to be pretty disturbing. It validates the idea that a comedian should be punished, legally, for doing their job and telling a joke. It's not a particularly good joke in this case, but a joke nonetheless. It gives fuel to the social media lynch mobs who take every tweet or comment as an excuse to get comedians (and really, anybody) fired from their jobs (which seems to be happening with increasing frequency -- look no further than the Kurt Metzger mess from this week).

To make a profit bullying people that aren't public should not be considered a job.

The kid is a public figure, so I'm not sure what you mean there. Public figures are frequent subjects for comedians because of the shared experience between them and the audience. If it was some random disabled kid I doubt anyone would have found it funny, Mike Ward included.

And whether you like it or not, it is a job. HN seems to be pretty hip to letting the market dictate whether or not an enterprise should thrive or fail. Don't like what a comedian has to say? Don't support that comedian with your money. If you're at a comedy show and you're so terribly offended, get up quietly, find a manager, ask for your money back. If you're offended watching a comedian on TV, turn the channel. Tell your friends and family you don't like them. These are all ways you can "vote with your dollars".

But it's not your (or the government's) responsibility to punish and take away from them for saying something you find to be offensive. At least it shouldn't be, and I find a world where that's okay to be pretty terrifying.

The fact that you so casually dismiss the comedian's right to free speech and his way to make a living simultaneously in one sentence is a little frightening.

I'd wager you would have a different perspective if someone came along and prohibited you from making software unless you met someone's asinine set of arbitrary criteria.

You can say the same about drug dealers and buglars, but it would make "less" sense.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

Which is an American philosophy. Most countries, including Canada, do not treat free speech quite as highly, but instead find it more important to control hate speech (eg: banning Money for Nothing, by Dire Straits)

Voltaire was French. Evelyn Beatrice Hall used the quote to sum up his beliefs in the biography she wrote about him. She was English.

Indeed, what I think he means is that the US has a constitutional amendment that explicitly addresses the right to free speech, something that other countries may not explicitly codify.

Then again I find it annoying how media in Canada has become so "Americanized".

Censoring product labels with blur, bleeping out the word ass I mean come on even my conservative grandmother said ass. Then there is censoring of any and all nudity which was rare when I was a kid you'd often see bare breasts on TV at 8pm in the evening.

Now every damn show has "warning some viewers may be offended by strong language or adult ...blah blah blah.

Blurring product labels isn't about censorship; it's usually because shows that go to syndication don't want to violate any promotional clauses. Like, if I'm a television station and one of my primary sponsors is Coca Cola, I probably can't (or at least shouldn't) buy a show that shows a person conspicuously drinking a Pepsi.

I understand the reason for the blurring but the suppressing of an image at the request of a rival seems to be censorship.

Why is this flagged? HN doesn't like free speech issues? The number of comments tells a different story.

http://www.frankieboyle.com/frankie/free-speech.html

> “If I lose that I’ll just move to Syria or Saudi Arabia, or some other country that respects free speech as much as Canada does,” he said.

I would pay to a crow-funding campaign to send him to Syria or Saudi Arabia for a month.

Free speech must be protected, and it is certainly legal to tell a joke about non-identified disabled child. But he was targeting one specific kid, so I am not sure if he didn't infringe upon his human rights. Maybe he really did.

Which human right would that be? The right not to be made fun of?

The right to dignity, presumably?

It wasn't just some random child -- it was a public figure. Where do we draw the line?

Yes, that's the point, he rather brutally insulted one specific disabled kid. I find it to be different from just telling a joke about a politician, for example. Can you publicly insult someone, by using a form of joke? I don't know, either. But the title sounds as if he just "told a joke" - that's misleading.

Remember Susan Boyle from a few years ago? The talent show star with the great voice who perhaps wasn't the most attractive woman in the world? Hundreds (probably thousands) of comedians have jokes commenting on her perceived ugliness. Was that hate speech? Should they all be punished for it?

Unless what he said resulted in direct abuses of the person from other people, I can't think of what he could say about a person that could possibly constitute a human rights violation.

Singling out the child wasn't in the child's best interests. There's article 16, which is the right to privacy; article 19 which is about protection from harm.

Perhaps someone can find the court documents so we can see which human right they say was being violated.

A “joke” which consisted of insulting their disability, I take it?

It's hard to have sympathy for such “comedy”.

You don't have to find it funny. That doesn't make it not a joke.

Maybe it is a “joke”. So? Absolutely any statement, no matter how provocative or hateful, can be excused on that pretense.

So that begs the question: should “jokes” be protected? Why?

Because it's speech and speech is--or should be--protected.

> Absolutely any statement, no matter how provocative or hateful, can be excused on that pretense.

Yes, that's kinda the point of free speech: the State doesn't get to send men with guns and truncheons to silence people who are merely saying things.

> So that begs the question: should “jokes” be protected? Why?

Because they're expressions of ideas, i.e. speech.

Jerry Seinfeld often speaks of why offensive jokes are needed even though many people may not like them.

In the end professional comedians are artists and art can offend.

Jerry is more eloquent than I am he can explain it better he often does on his show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

Hard to have sympathy yes-- but freedom of speech/expression is still freedom of speech. Regardless of how tasteless it is, and should be protected..

No country in the world has absolute freedom of speech, and with good reason: speech can be harmful. Indeed it is precisely because speech can be powerful that it is protected in the first place.

Is this where to draw the line? I'm not sure, but it is not the case that absolutely any “joke” is costitutionally protected free speech.

The fundamental problem with the government drawing any line is that you can't have free speech under those circumstances. Is advocating for Communism harmful to Capitalism? Is advocating for the rights of women to abort their babies harmful to the fetuses? What about touting the benefits of Schedule I drugs? Surely that can be seen as harmful to the public health.

It doesn't matter what you or I think about the examples I gave above. It only matters what the government thinks. And if they think any or all of those are harmful concepts, then by using your reasoning any speech invoking those concepts would be controlled by the government.

That's simply untenable as far as I'm concerned. The only way to ensure the government doesn't have that kind of power over words, is to allow any and all ideas to be expressed. It's impossible to draw lines on which ideas are allowed to be expressed and those that aren't, without running into this hazard.

Those are all abstract speech and therefore are usually legal everywhere. (They might be "treason" in some places, but that's separate from the issue of whether they're harmful. Treasonous speech is whatever speech a government doesn't like, whereas "non-protected" speech is the set of things its citizens don't care to defend you for saying.)

The thing Canada mostly considers illegal is saying something like "hey everybody, you should hate/kill X because they're {Native American, gay, old, disabled, etc.}!" with a specific X that people might then go and kill.

It's not even that we don't want to protect that speech as speech; it just seems to lead directly to hate crimes being committed a non-negligible proportion of the time. So we make hate speech itself illegal, to try to stop the hate crimes early.

> The fundamental problem with the government drawing any line is that you can't have free speech under those circumstances. Is advocating for Communism harmful to Capitalism? Is advocating for the rights of women to abort their babies harmful to the fetuses? What about touting the benefits of Schedule I drugs? Surely that can be seen as harmful to the public health.

These are complicated questions. But this is what case law exists for. The US, for example, allows one to speak of revolutions “in broad terms”.

> That's simply untenable as far as I'm concerned. The only way to ensure the government doesn't have that kind of power over words, is to allow any and all ideas to be expressed.

Allowing absolute freedom of speech is self-defeating. Yes, now the government can't hurt you, but your opponents can use their “free speech” to silence you. It's not healthy for a democracy, and this is why no country on earth has absolute freedom of speech.

> Yes, now the government can't hurt you, but your opponents can use their “free speech” to silence you.

I'm interested in some examples of this. At first blush this statement reads to me as a "marketplace of ideas", which is a feature in my opinion. But I could be interpreting your statement wrong.

They can publish your location and tell vigilantes to go to your house and beat you up.

That's speech.

In civilized countries governments do not draw the line.

The legislature and the judiciary do.

A legislature or a judiciary are still the government. I use the term to refer to the whole mechanism, not just an executive.

Regardless of where they derive their power from (democracy, monarchy, whatever). Constitutions exist to provide limits on even the power of the current majority to change fundamental aspects of governance. The U.S. Constitution for example, requires a very high bar before alterations can be made, precisely to avoid even democratically-elected representatives from making changes, even where those changes would enjoy popular support.

I agree that the fine is ridiculously large, but the US concept of almost total freedom of speech is unique to the US. And even in the US there are large groups of people who think freedom of speech doesn't apply to hate speech.

And it's hard to say anything about this joke without actually hearing it. Maybe the comedian has some useful funny things to say about Treacher Collins syndrome?

Unlike the United States Canadian freedom of speech isn't nearly as absolute. As an example hate speech isn't protected (unclear if his bit is / might be considered that).

lol. I'd love to see your reaction to some real dark comedy like The League of Gentlemen.

I'd love to see you point out where League of Gentlemen "punch down" to single out an individual child with a profound condition like Treacher Collins Syndrome.

It was a tasteless joke. And a governments committing disproportionate violence over it is overkill.

(To save us the argument, if it's violence when I do it, it's violence when the government does it too. If I take your money, lock you up in a cage, or kill you, these are all violent.)

How is the “comedian”'s repeated public humiliation of a specific disabled kid less violent than him being fined $42k?

Why is taking money violent? We don't have debtors prisons in the developed world; people who are fined for something and can't pay, just don't pay. Fines, like (most) taxes, are meant to be disincentives, not punishments.

Just not paying a fine is not an option for most of us. If you don't pay the fine (that you have the means to pay) and take steps to prevent the government from collecting, then the next step is jail.

It doesn't matter — a country which punishes such speech is not free.

It was in bad taste, but bad taste is not a crime. What is a crime is using violence to take $42,000 from someone merely for saying words.

In my opinion, bad taste joke would go along the lines "Disabled kid enters a pub and...". But he targeted one specific kid, so apart from being it a joke, it could also be an insult or other offense. (I am not lawyer, though).

Should governments be punishing insulting or giving offense? That's a very scary prospect in my mind.

Could we even have meaningful political dialog if, for example, it was illegal to intentionally offend Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?

The idea of a right to not be insulted has scary implications.

A line has to be drawn. There is no right to not be insulted per se, but persistent abuse and harassment of an individual cannot be allowed.

> Could we even have meaningful political dialog if, for example, it was illegal to intentionally offend Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?

That's actually exactly what Citizens United was about … a group of people were trying to show a film critical of Mrs. Clinton, and the federal government attempted to punish them for it. That's why there was a big push in 2014 to repeal the First Amendment: politicians wanted to make it illegal to oppose politicians.

> Should governments be punishing insulting or giving offense? That's a very scary prospect in my mind

Luckily they're not doing that. They're waiting for the offence to cause harm, and then they step in.

You think insults should be illegal?

No, no, although there might be claims for intentional or negligent infliction of emotional distress. I actually don't say the comedian should be punished like this, I only think the title is misleading, it is not about just "telling a joke".

Why is a fine violent, but repeated deliberate public humiliation not?

> Why is a fine violent, but repeated deliberate public humiliation not?

A fine is enforced with the threat of violence. Knowing that someone somewhere is laughing at one is not, in fact, violence.

It takes two to humiliate: one to mock, and one to accept the mockery.

It's easy to support free speech for things you like. The real test is whether you're able to support it for things you absolutely detest.

Yes, but the fact I don't like something doesn't necessarily mean it's constitutionally protected free speech. Every country in the world imposes limits on speech, because not all speech is harmless. If speech were powerless, it wouldn't be protected in the first place.

My point is that it has nothing to do with "sympathy." If you think it's harmful, that's a whole other thing.

Urgh. What Hacker News doesn't need is more right-wing misogyny cluttering it up. Has nothing to do with technology whatsoever. Flagged.

If you are curious about this decision, the CBC has an excellent explanation of it. Read this, and then decide if what happened is a travesty or not.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mike-ward-comedian-hu...

Yeah, it's a travesty. I can't make a joke about you "if it offends your dignity"?

That's even more overreaching than when Thailand sends you to prison for "insulting the king". There at least it only prevents you about joking about one person! (OK, and his family...and pets...) http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2016/08/08/dont-dare-speak...

I did read it. I do think it is a travesty.

It seems unfortunate to me that we can't have a civil debate about important issues without importing baggage like "right-wing misogyny". Perhaps that is a good reason to flag the story, but if so it seems like more of a bug than a feature.

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