Juno News - December 02, 2019


＂Comedy is not a crime＂： Comic takes free speech fight to Supreme Court


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

171.06557

Word count

754

Sentence count

40


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Comedian Mike Ward is taking his right to make fun of people in his comedy routine to the Supreme Court of Canada after a Quebec court ruled he must pay a $35,000 fine for a joke he made about someone with a disability.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 It may sound like the setup of a joke. A comedian has to go to the Supreme Court to defend his right to tell jokes, but that's actually what's happening in the case of a Quebec comedian, Mike Ward, who is taking his right to make fun of people in his comedy routine to the Supreme Court of Canada after the Quebec Appellate Court ruled against him this week.
00:00:27.000 Mike Ward is the comedian who in 2016 made headlines for a human rights complaint against him for making jokes about a disabled singer from Quebec. The Human Rights Tribunal determined that he had to pay $35,000 to the young man he was making fun of and $7,000 to his mother. $42,000 for jokes that made fun of someone, which is quite frankly a hallmark of stand-up comedy quite often.
00:00:54.940 Now he said he was never going to pay this. He took it to an appellate court and there was a dissenting judgment, but still the court ruled that he still had to pay the $35,000.
00:01:06.900 They threw out the $7,000 to the young man, Jeremy Gabriel's mother.
00:01:11.720 Now Mike Ward has said, simply enough, he is not paying. In a statement posted on Twitter, he said that I am refusing to pay. We are going to take this to the Supreme Court. Comedy is not a crime.
00:01:24.940 In a quote-unquote free country, it shouldn't be up to a judge to decide what constitutes a joke on stage. The people in attendance laughing already answered that question.
00:01:36.240 I'm telling you right now, I'd rather go to prison than pay even one-tenth of this stupid fine.
00:01:42.340 Now Mike Ward's fight is about something a lot more fundamental than whether the joke was funny, whether it's in poor taste or callous to make fun of someone with a disability.
00:01:52.860 It's about whether judges and juries have the right to legislate and litigate on comedy routines, and the answer is a resounding no.
00:02:02.660 Part of freedom of expression, part of free speech is the right to tell jokes, the right to even tell distasteful ones.
00:02:09.540 Just watch a Comedy Central roast, just watch a comedy special of most of the comedians who work blue, and you'll find that they're taking pot shots at people all the time.
00:02:19.480 Even if you don't find it funny, that doesn't mean that someone is entitled to a $35,000 payout because of the joke that may not have landed well on the person about whom it was being made.
00:02:32.780 Unfortunately, Canada's freedom of expression and freedom of speech are confined by reasonable limits as laid out in the Charter,
00:02:41.340 which means that it's not as cut and dry to saying, we have free speech and the Human Rights Commission can bite me.
00:02:47.160 You have to oftentimes be victimized by human rights tribunals, which is exactly what's been happening to Mike Ward for the last three years.
00:02:56.360 Now, he's going to the Supreme Court of Canada because his argument is that there is no jurisdiction, even under so-called anti-discrimination rules, to take aim at a comedy routine.
00:03:08.560 Mike Ward's lawyer, Julius Gray, says clearly the Human Rights Tribunal considered as discriminatory something that was not.
00:03:17.140 I think the Human Rights Tribunal is not a court which can enforce rules against thoughts or ideas that it considers wrong.
00:03:24.200 If anything, it would be a defamation case to be heard in Superior Court, but there's no defamation there.
00:03:29.780 That's basically what's at stake right now.
00:03:32.640 The tribunal and now the appellate court are trying to define the limits of humor, the limits of comedy, and by extension, the limits of free speech.
00:03:41.180 And that is just not right.
00:03:43.240 Now, there are a lot of people who will say, well, the kid he was making fun of was just a kid, or, oh, the person he was making fun of had a disability.
00:03:51.420 And these are fair criticisms.
00:03:53.100 But the response to these criticisms is, don't go to the show.
00:03:56.900 Don't buy a ticket.
00:03:58.260 Tell a comedian, eh, you know what, I don't think that joke was appropriate.
00:04:01.920 The response is not to take the heavy arm of state censorship, which is what such a substantial financial penalty is, and apply it because you think a joke was distasteful.
00:04:11.960 True North is standing up for free speech unabashedly.
00:04:15.620 We can't do this alone.
00:04:16.640 If you can support our work, please head on over to tnc.news and join my Heritage Club.
00:04:22.940 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.