“I wasn’t even aware that Corbyn was an expert on the subject of English irony. I always assumed he preferred the robust congeniality of Gerry Adams over the acerbity of a Michael Palin or Ian Hislop. But I am no expert on the mind of Mr Corbyn, which seems like a sort of ball bearing ricocheting around a pinball machine, illuminating one Marxist trope after another. And the face of the Corbyn Labour Party is rarely one that smiles, being both humourless and menacing all at once. It is, after all, the party which includes as High Apparatchiks the likes of Dawn Butler and Emily Thornberry, neither of whom strike one as likely secretaries of the PG Wodehouse Appreciation Society.”
– Sean Walsh. The whole article, even though it is about the disgusting subject of the Labour Party leader’s anti-semitism and association with terrorists, is an essay containing several mirthful sentences such as the final one of the paragraph above. My only beef with the comment is that frankly, I don’t find Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, very amusing these days.
To be fair to Mr Corbyn I have always found British irony difficult – Mr Corbyn could take this as evidence for his case that people of all or part Jewish ancestry have difficulty in this area.
Mr Corbyn and John McDonnell have, so far, been less extreme than Karl Marx who (ignoring his ancestry) declared in his “On the Jewish Question” that “the God of the Jew is MONEY, his religion is Hucksterism”, or the radical “liberal” Hobson who argued that the British Empire was a Jewish plot to exploit people round the world.
Of course, poor old PG really misread the whole situation during his internment by the Nazi’s so perhaps that last crack is actually more apt than it might look at first glance.
_XC
XC, well indeed.
Didn’t Corbyn lay a wreath on the graves of terrorists, referring to them as “victims of terrorist attacks”? I think that’s a pretty decent example of irony.
George Weinberg – accept that, as you know, Mr Corbyn did not intend his actions and words to be ironic (he meant them literally).
As for “Private Eye” – a group of elderly establishment leftists making “jokes” that are on the mental level of a worm.