Hypocricy, Or Why Jeremy Clarkson is Better than Russell Fucking Brand

BBC viewers seem to have gone sack mental at the moment. Any time anyone says something they don't like, they're now straight on the blower to BBC headquarters shouting about sackings and firings and rolling heads, all because the furore over Russell Brand and Jonathan Woss's phone call led to one of them resigning. Now Barbera Jaques from Milton Keynes thinks she can have Nigella Lawson sacked for showing too much leg while her husband was in the room.

Alright, so that didn't happen - as far as I know - but things are getting almost that silly. Today the BBC has been reporting that complaints about Jeremy Clarkson's joke about truck drivers murdering prostitutes should lead to his immediate sacking, birching and hanging from a tree. All I can think is that whoever filed these complaints must have really overdone the Ovaltine that day and got a little bit overexcited when the large lumpy man started telling jokes they didn't really like. Bollocks to them, I say.

But here comes the difficult part. "How", you may ask, "can you defend Jeremy Clarkson while condemning the actions of Russell Brand?". Which is a fair question. The answer, of course, is simple; I'm a hypocrite. I like Jeremy Clarkson and would be deeply unhappy if he was removed from BBC2, while I detest Russell Brand so much that I'd be in half a mind to support the return of Stalinism if it promised to get that insufferable troll doll off my television for a whole five minutes.

There is also the small matter of humour. What Clarkson said wasn't a particularly fantastic piece of humour, I'll admit, but it was at least worthy of a giggle. More so than a man telephoning a septegenarian to inform him what a good lay his granddaughter was, anyway. If Clarkson had been phoning up the families of murder victims to crack his jokes, I would perhaps see the point in condemning him, the same as if Russell Brand had simply made the joke in the studio rather than ringing people up to laugh openly about having sex with their granddaughter, I'd have dismissed it without comment in the same way I do all tediously 'kooky' people who are easily starved without the oxygen of attention. Clarkson has more talent than that. He is educated and verbose, and his boorish personality is set off by the fact he means no harm by it. When he says what he says, he is saying it for no reason other than to get a laugh; the adult equivalent of the class clown. Russell Brand said what he said merely to boast about his own supposed achievements. If Jeremy Clarkson did nothing but tell us about his best lap times, we'd all switch him off, but the whole point of Jeremy Clarkson is that he doesn't. He just acts like a boor on TV. It's not politically correct and it's likely not even his real opinion, but what it is is raucously funny. He pokes fun at nebulous groups of people with wildly over-the-top behaviour designed to make us smile, while Brand pokes fun at individuals purely to fuel his own enormous ego.

It's the difference between class clown and school bully. It's the difference between oafish buffoon and preening pretty-boy. Between jest and spite, joke and ego-stroke, stupid hair and... stupider hair. Anyone with half a modicum of intelligence knows that Jeremy Clarkson could not possibly be that profoundly oafish without actually turning into a Tory back-bencher, but spend five minutes watching Russell Brand insult people and you'll see that he means to be cruel with every jab. It's not being catty, it's not being an effeminate man-bitch for comic effect, it's just being a cunt to people.