Last week, Britain’s comedy treasure, Ricky Gervais, took to social media to rant about how his proposed billboards for Dutch Barn Vodka had been rejected.
Each banner featured a dark but hilarious slogan that would have inevitably won the applause of Britain’s disillusioned masses.
Its rejected lines include:
- “Dutch Barn, drugs this good are usually illegal.”
- “Dutch Barn, your tube driver’s favourite drink in the morning.”
- “Dutch Barn, one day you’ll be underground for good.”
Ironically, the slogan to cause the most amusement of all among social media followers was the following:
- “Welcome to London, don’t forget your stab vest.”
Brits particularly appreciated this version as it bravely stood as a dark, tongue-in-cheek nod to Britain’s knife-crime epidemic.
But to the rule makers it was just another offensive idea that was banned due to being too ‘inappropriate’.
Merely a day after Gervais delivered his rant, reality took a terrifying turn. On a Doncaster-to-London train, a man went on a blood-fuelled rage, stabbing 10 innocent people. Real life quickly turned darker than the joke, and not even the most intuitive writers could have scripted it.
Gervais, who has made a career out of saying what others daren’t, simply held up a mirror. The reaction proved his point: in Britain today you can be stabbed on your commute, but you can’t harmlessly address it on a poster. And, if you have to know a single fact about the British psyche, it is that we cope by mocking life’s miseries – that’s the British spirit for you.
Transport for London was quick to deny the censorship, insisting the campaign was never formally rejected. Who knows, maybe it was all a publicity stunt – but that only underscores the point. In today’s climate, Gervais’s kind of humour wouldn’t stand a chance of official approval.
