Comedy icon Rowan Atkinson, who will forever be immortalized as Mr. Bean, slammed political correctness and its stranglehold on comedy.
Speaking to The Irish Times, Atkinson said that comedy should not be drained of its potential to offend, arguing that offense is sometimes its primary job.
“It does seem to me that the job of comedy is to offend, or have the potential to offend, and it cannot be drained of that potential,” the Johnny English actor said. “In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
Atkinson further described tragedy and comedy as “extremely close bedfellows, and you can’t really have one without the other.”
“Every joke has a victim, whether fictional or non-fictional or notional, ideological or human and, therefore, there’s always someone suffering if there’s a joke,” he said. “I suppose you have to accept that’s the way it is.”
In 2021, Atkinson came down hard on cancel culture, likening it to the “digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn.”
“The problem we have online is that an algorithm decides what we want to see, which ends up creating a simplistic, binary view of society,” Atkinson told the U.K. Radio Times. “It becomes a case of either you’re with us or against us. And if you’re against us, you deserve to be ‘canceled.’”
“It’s important that we’re exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion, but what we have now is the digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn,” Atkinson added. “So it is scary for anyone who’s a victim of that mob and it fills me with fear about the future.”
Rowan Atkinson also defended British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2018 after he made a joke about women wearing burqas.
“As a lifelong beneficiary of the freedom to make jokes about religion, I do think that Boris Johnson’s joke about wearers of the burka resembling letterboxes is a pretty good one,” the comedian said at the time.