Graham Linehan's memoir is, by turns, horrific, informative, and a hero's journey
Graham Linehan
is 55-year-old Irish writer and director of sitcoms. He's the winner of five
BAFTA awards, that is awards from the British Academy of Film and Television
Arts. He has also won awards from the Writers' Guild of Great Britain and the
Irish Film and Television Academy. In recent years, Linehan has made public
statements disagreeing with trans extremism. For this, he has been canceled.
Friends and colleagues rejected and abandoned him. Work dried up. His marriage
ended. The LGBT website Pink News, he reports, has published 75 hit
pieces on him – they've published more since that tally.
On October 31,
2023, Eye Books Limited released, in the US, Linehan's memoir, Tough Crowd:
How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy. The book is 288 pages long. It
includes black-and-white photographs. Most of the book addresses Linehan's
comedy career and comedy and popular culture in general. Much of the book is a
meditation on the impact of the internet. The second half of the book addresses
Linehan's canceling and the extent of trans extremism in the UK. Irish identity
in the twenty-first century and Linehan's jaundiced view of Catholicism are
constant themes.
Linehan created The IT Crowd, a British sitcom that ran 2006-2010, with a farewell broadcast airing in 2013. In an episode entitled "The Speech," there is a comedic fight between Douglas (Matt Berry) and April (Lucy Montgomery). April – the character, not the actress who plays April – is a man who identifies as a woman. Douglas becomes uncomfortable dating April, and he breaks up with her. April is crushed to be rejected. At first she pleads in a hyper-feminine way for Douglas to recognize her as a woman. Douglas, apparently distraught and speaking in an exaggerated melodramatic style, insists that the two must part. April changes from sad to enraged and punches Douglas in the face. The two engage in highly choreographed, hand-to-hand combat typical of an action movie. The setting enhances the comedy. They are duking it out in a sterile laboratory as masked, white-coated workers look on. Eventually their fight breaks through a wall and into the resolution of another subplot in this episode. The combatants crash onto the stage where another character is delivering a speech she's been anxious about. The scene is funny. It can be viewed here.
"The
Speech" first aired in 2008. After it was rebroadcast in 2013, Linehan was
accused of transphobia. These denunciations are hysterical, in both senses of
the word "hysterical." Online denunciations of Linehan are funny but
they are also reflective of the unhinged psyches of Linehan's accusers. See for
example here, and a condemnation of "Linehan's
descent into deplorability" here. Nobodies of negligible stature,
elevated to high priests in the Church of Woke, shriek imprecations into the
void. Creatures with inert cortices, who lack any aesthetic taste, struggle
into the black leather uniforms of wanna-be thought police and crack their
whips of outrage over the heads of truly gifted creators like Linehan. As has
happened before in history – see the rise of any given totalitarian apparatus –
spiteful losers morph into terrifying monsters wielding outsize power when they
inject just the right combination of Toxoplasma gondii and battery acid into
the brains of the least integral of humans who achieve their destiny in the
formation of froth-mouthed mobs.
Linehan writes,
"my friends were giving me odd looks, ghosting and blanking me, not
returning calls, giving my wife shit on the phone, writing nasty letters about
the importance of kindness … I still believed it was only a matter of time
before these friends and colleagues from the entertainment industry would fly
to my aid. The satirists, the stars, the progressives, the feminists ... Those
I'd made famous, and who had made me semi-famous in return … I thought they'd
be along any minute." But of course they were not along any minute.
Linehan opens
Tough Crowd with a description of his Irish childhood, and his job, begun
when he was just a teen, as a movie and music critic. He offers insights into
the career of a critic and advice on how its done. For example, as a critic,
Linehan prefers to use the word "I" and to report his own reactions,
even when his employer, Select magazine, told him that use of the word
"I" violated their house style. He rejects the critical stance behind
avoidance of the word "I," that is that art has a "standarised
value" that can be objectively quantified. A critic, Linehan insists, is
as subjective as anyone, so he should use the word "I" when writing
his own opinion, and not pretend it is some objective truth.
Linehan is a
big fan of pop culture, British and American. He says if given a choice between
saving the life of a human being and saving the last existing copies of Fawlty
Towers, he is not sure which he would choose. "I loved fanzine
culture, comic culture, music culture, nerd culture." He devotes to pop
culture a religious fervor. "The Beatles turned the lights on and the
world was never the same."
Before he was
canceled, he maintained an active online presence, sharing his enthusiasms with
other fans. He writes, "One of the most painful aspects of my eventual
exile from polite society was not being able to share things any more. I could
no longer recommend a band or a comic or a game or any piece of art – which is
essentially sixty percent of what I used Twitter for, to share the things I
found exciting and valuable and life-enhancing." He realized that if he
continued sharing in this way, trans extremists would immediately contact any
artists whose works he enjoyed and demand that these artists condemn him or
suffer themselves if they refused to condemn him.
Linehan's world
is very male. He himself says that when he had intimate contact with a woman –
sex on the floor of a comic book store – that that contact violated everything
he had said about himself so far in the book. His ex-wife, Helen Serafinowicz,
is hardly mentioned. The reader will not discover how the two fell in love, or
the details of their separation. No woman in Linehan's memoir is described
using the vocabulary of passion, longing, admiration, and intimacy that Linehan
devotes to his male colleagues and role models.
Linehan's hair
is coiffed in just-rolled-out-of-bed style and his attire is rumpled casual. Linehan
doesn't like to exercise, he likes to eat junk food, and he prefers to spend
his time bathed in male-centered music and male-centered films by directors
like "Scorcese, Truffaut, Tarantino, Mamet – all the standard film school
male crushes." As a young man, he would have, he said, spent all his money
on movies, comics, and music. He didn't because, of course, as a published
critic, he received all this material for free. "If you had a mattress, a
CD player, and photos of Beatrice Dalle, Iggy Pop, and Raymond Carver on the
wall then you were living large."
He adores the
older men who mentored him in his journalism career. He partnered with Arthur
Mathews, another Irishman. Mathews is a "gentle, punk, comic genius … I
worshipped the man … my heart belonged to Arthur." Linehan developed
"an entirely unreciprocated romantic bond" with Mathews, his
"first love." Later, Linehan "fell in love with" a man with
whom he drank so much that his urine became stained with blood.
In his
self-descriptions of himself and his friends, Linehan reminded this reader of
Jay and Silent Bob, two fictional cinematic characters played by Kevin Smith
and Jason Mewes. They, too, are homosocial guys who dress like slobs, hang out,
and consume and talk about pop culture films and comic books.
With Arthur
Mathews, Linehan created comedy that resisted current British norms. Others
created comedy that reflected "liberal groupthink – a winky, middle-class,
everyone's-reading-The Guardian secret handshake. Always the same targets too.
There was one particular award-winning TV show that we literally couldn't
watch, it was so grimly politically correct; all the right opinions, all the
right targets." Demands that comedy "punch up" are really
demands that comedy "operate along tribal lines." But, Linehan
insists, "comedy isn't tribal. Comedy is a mirror in which the whole of
humanity is supposed to see itself. If you remove certain groups from comedy
and criticism, you remove their humanity. Cosy political satire only served a
single purpose for a single group; to flatter."
Linehan's
observations about "liberal groupthink" comedy reminded me of Jon
Stewart, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, and Saturday Night Live. All of
these are talented, and, at times, funny. All are supposed to be courageous and
daring. They are supposed to skewer the powerful and tell, through humor,
truths too shocking to speak in other registers. But all are terminally smug
and lacking in self-awareness. And all are, in the end, cowards. In recent
weeks, the world has been focused on Israel and subsequent massive
demonstrations. We fear World War III. And Meyers, Colbert, and SNL keep
making the same, tired Trump jokes, jokes they have made hundreds of times
before. Bill Maher, no paragon, has shown the courage to mock pro-Hamas
protesters and to mention Israel in his monologues.
Graham Linehan
and Arthur Mathews created the Father Ted sitcom. It ran on Channel 4
1995-1998. The show centers on three priests who, for their misdeeds, have been
exiled to the fictional Craggy Island with a housekeeper, Mrs. Doyle. At least
two of the priests are atheists; one is an "idiot," and one is an
alcoholic. Linehan imagines Mrs. Doyle, a woman in her sixties, as
"boiling with repressed sexual desire." This characterization of an
elderly woman is a reflection of his lack of knowledge of women.
Linehan says
that growing up in Ireland was very boring. When the internet came along, it
seemed miraculous. "We were making great strides as a species, in our own
chaotic way, flapping and gasping into a new, exciting part of our existence
like prehistoric lungfish, exhilarated on the first few gulps of air … I simply
couldn't imagine how an epoch-defining darkness like the Holocaust could ever
occur again. If we were all keeping an eye on each other, then everything
should be fine, shouldn't it?"
Graham Linehan
was very surprised that the internet was used to destroy his life. He is an
atheist and he says he hates the Catholic Church. He's very much a people
person. He really believed that humanity would use the internet mostly for
good, and that his friends would eventually support him. I'm Catholic and it
doesn't surprise me at all that humanity has managed to muck up the internet in
the same way that humanity mucks up everything else. The Garden of Eden story,
to me, is an allegory, and not literally true. But it is literally replayed age
after age. Humans find themselves in something really good, and humans turn
that something really good into something really bad. Including the internet.
Including friendship. Including marriage. We need something higher than Lennon
and McCartney to guide our paths and save us. That something higher, to be
useful, must acknowledge the darkness we are all capable of, including
Linehan's former friends, colleagues, and drinking buddies, who had once seemed
such great lads.
After the
re-broadcast of "The Speech" episode of The IT Crowd stirred
up allegations of transphobia, Linehan began to "dig into" trans
extremism. He turned up disturbing material. Aimee Challenor was a young man
who identified as a girl. He became a Green Party spokesperson for equality. The
Guardian published a "fawning profile." Challenor's father,
David, was Aimee's representative and photographer. David was arrested in 2016
for the imprisonment, rape, and torture of a ten-year-old girl. At least one senior
Green Party official knew about these charges but didn't speak out. David
Challenor was sent to prison. Aimee Challenor claimed transphobia. Aimee
Challenor became a fundraiser for Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign.
Aimee then moved on to Reddit, where he became an influential moderator and
paid employee. Challenor's spouse, Nathaniel Knight, is a furry fetishist who
admits to writing about molesting children.
Linehan also
writes about Barbie Kardashian, born Gabrielle Alejandro Gentile. The boy's
father abused his mother and encouraged his son to join in the abuse.
Kardashian is now a violent and dangerous adult man who insists that he is a
woman. He wants to put a "knife into [my mother's] body and into her
genitalia [and] prolong my mum's suffering for as long as possible." He
brutalized a woman social worker, tearing her eyelids as he attempted to gouge
out her eyes. Her screams were, he said, "music to my ears." His
"continuing wish to murder and to rape" women was "a source of
pleasure" to him. Because he declared himself a female, Kardashian was
housed in a woman's prison.
There's much to
be said about the damage that trans extremism does to young bodies. Linehan
details just one topic, breast binders. Breast binders are not surgery or
drugs; they might be seen as a minor intervention. And yet even breast binders
cause lasting damage.
Linehan writes,
"a major US study had found that almost ninety-seven percent of women who
bind their breasts experience a negative physical effect … Back, chest,
shoulder and abdominal pain … Almost half [report] musculo-skeletal problems …
from bad posture to spinal and rib changes, shoulders ‘popping' in their
joints, overall muscle-wasting and even fractured ribs. Half … experience
shortness of breath, and a small number end up with respiratory infections.
Forty per cent experience neurological problems." Breast binding can also
cause a lung to collapse.
Linehan also
mentions the negative impact of trans extremism on others, who, like him, have
been canceled by trans extremists. One victim of trans extremism is Rachel
Rooney. Rooney is a children's book author who wrote a picture book called My
Body Is Me. The book, like most picture books for children, is short. It is
lovely. The book invites children to celebrate their bodies, no matter how much
those bodies depart from powerful beauty norms. Rooney was called a terrorist.
Rooney says, “I was once a gender non-conforming
autistic child … I know how it is to be uncomfortable in your own skin, to hate
what society tells you it is to be female … I had always been progressive, even
woke.” Like Linehan, Rooney was abandoned by friends. Some did “get in touch
privately and admitted to being too scared to speak out — others said they had
been warned off from engaging with the topic." Otherwise, "Fellow
authors discussed my ‘hateful world view', my ‘transphobia', my bigoted, exclusionary
nature and even my autism.” Trans extremists and their allies pushed Rooney out
of publishing. She is a gifted author and her sacrifice on the altar of Woke is
a loss to children and parents.
Towards the end
of the book, Linehan reports the moment that sealed his fate. Hat Trick
Productions offered Linehan two hundred thousand pounds for a staged musical
version of Father Ted. Their condition: he had to disappear. He could
have accepted the money. He could have disappeared. He didn't take the money.
He didn't disappear. Why? He "happened upon" an interview with the
mother of one of the college athletes forced to compete against, and share a
locker room with, Lia Thomas, a man pretending to be a woman. The mother was
afraid to go public. She spoke behind a veil of anonymity. Otherwise, trans
extremists would destroy her and her daughter. Fighting off sobs, the mother
said that her daughter told her that she had no choice but to share a locker room
with a naked and ogling adult male, Lia Thomas. The mother said, "I still
can't believe I had to tell my adult-age daughter that you always have a choice
about whether you undress in front of a man. What messages have these girls
been receiving?" The interview with this mother is here.
Linehan, the
rumpled guy who obsesses on pop culture and who bonds with other rumpled guys
who obsess on pop culture, says something very old-fashioned and noble.
"Men need a code … I see chivalry as just a basic level of respect for
every woman that every man should hold. Our greater physical strength provides
enough reason on its own, but if merely belonging to a group signs someone up
to enduring intense pain for a week every month, then I think it's fair enough
to have a tradition where we open doors for them."
Linehan makes
an observation that just about anyone who has ever resisted trans extremism to
any extent might also make. "None of the people who shot me nasty looks,
or gave the press a juicy quote about me, or refused to share a stage with me,
has ever been able to tell me where my analysis is wrong." This is very
true. Trans extremists resort to violence and destruction exactly because their
ideas are wrong. They destroy because they cannot argue. The facts not only do
not support their positions; the facts do to their positions what tsunamis do
to sand castles.
Graham Linehan
is a vivid, palpable presence to the reader of Tough Crowd. You will
feel as if you are in an Irish pub and, as Linehan says, "someone plays a
fiddle" and maybe even Milo O'Shea, the "Oirish" – Linehan's
term – actor shows up. As the pint does its work on the spirit and the night
goes on, that Graham Linehan guy tells you the story of his life. In this
stream-of-consciousness monologue, he produces some very beautiful and
insightful prose, and offers some trenchant commentary on pop culture, on the
cutthroat politics behind the scenes of beloved TV sitcoms, and on the hope and
betrayal of the internet age. His quixotic tilting at monstrosities like male
rapists in women's prisons breaks your heart. But his way with a bon mot will
delight you. Example: "Oscar Wilde was actually a mediocre wit but a
scientific genius who built a time machine that sent him only two minutes into
the past so he had enough time to think of a good comeback."
A couple of
aspects of Tough Crowd didn't work for me. Linehan was not well-served
by his editors. The book is poorly organized, and there is much repetition, a
sign of poor organization. Linehan has many trenchant observations about what
makes for a good TV show, or magazine article, or joke, but to make his points
he references a lot of material that will not at all be familiar to many
readers outside his milieu. It wasn't familiar to me. I had to look up many of
his references. In a subsequent edition of this book, I hope Linehan will provide,
for his reader, the identity and significance of the material he's citing to
make his point. I also hope his observations will be better organized
Danusha Goska
is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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