By Kyle Smith
Wednesday, January 08, 2020
‘Poll Finds Most People Would Rather Be Annihilated By
Giant Tidal Wave Than Continue To Be Lectured By Climate Change Activists,” the
Babylon Bee reported in December, adding in an attached news story that
one man’s response to hearing “just 30 seconds of a Greta Thunberg lecture” was
to scrawl on the survey form, “Come, sweet death.”
The Bee was, as usual, ahead of the pack, but
these days it’s becoming common for even left-leaning comics to mock Thunberg.
“Iconic”? “Courageous”? Nah. Just tiresome. Far from being a visionary
difference-maker who put it all on the line for her righteous cause, Thunberg
is increasingly being derided as just another hyperemotional, tantrum-prone,
attention-seeking teen brat.
Joan of Arc became Veruca Salt.
Ricky Gervais (a lifelong lefty) saw the opportunity at
the Golden Globes Sunday when he smacked the audience and the tiny Nordic
doom-monger with a classic double punchline: “You know nothing about the real
world,” he told a ballroom full of celebrities. “Most of you spent less time in
school than Greta Thunberg.” BBC Scotland ran a skit in which comics playing
Thunberg’s parents talk about all of the fun they’ve been having while she’s
been away and blanch when she returns. When the BBC starts making fun of Greta
Thunberg, it’s like L’Osservatore Romano satirizing the pope.
Meanwhile, Thunberg has become shorthand for
environmentally based vapidity, which becomes all the funnier the more clueless
earnestness with which it is delivered. After fashion designer Stella McCartney
presented Joaquin Phoenix as the new world champion of climate-change activism
for committing to (top this!) wearing only one tuxedo during
Hollywood awards season, the deluge of mockery that followed on Twitter
included lots of collateral comic damage to Thunberg. Personal favorite: the
British man who replied, “f*** me. I wore the same undercrackers for over a
month before I got some new ones for crimbo [Christmas]. I’m basically a sexy,
bald, bloody Greta Thunberg.”
On The Last Leg, a British chat show, comic Rosie
Jones (who has cerebral palsy and is no one’s idea of a bully) made a dirty
joke at Thunberg’s expense on New Year’s Eve, and another standup, Josh
Widdicombe, called Thunberg “the first person to perfect the art of bunking
school.” Days later, Dave Chappelle joked about Thunberg in a San Francisco
set. I don’t know what Chappelle said, but a San Francisco Chronicle
writer who declined to quote the remark instead wrote, “Let’s just say the 17-year-old
activist irks him, to put it mildly, rather than going into detail about
Chappelle’s joke involving R. Kelly and [Thunberg].” Do tell.
Thunberg’s overwrought September speech to the U.N. — “I
shouldn’t be up here,” she said, as though she had to be dragged up to the
podium in chains, forced against her will to do all those photo shoots and
interviews — might have looked like a bravura performance to her disciples in
the media but turned out to be far too easy to mock. “Yet you all come to us
young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood
with your empty words,” Thunberg thundered. A bit strong. Maybe the girl should
learn the art of self-deprecating banter or rephrase her paranoia as a rap.
Anyway, to an ordinary point of view the wee thing seems to be doing pretty
well for herself. “‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood,’ says girl
currently gracing the cover of Time magazine,” was the Babylon Bee’s
perfectly honed take after Thunberg was crowned World’s Wokest Human or
whatever it was.
That Thunberg — a non-scientist, non-wonk, and non-adult
— has very little insight to offer the world, and that youthful indignation is
not actually very useful or interesting, much less new, begins to sink in. Mary
Wakefield writes in The Spectator, “The most sophisticated adults in the
world have signed up to the bonkers idea that children can somehow intuit the
answers to humanity’s existential problems, though Lord knows what the
grown-ups expect the kids to do — build a better world on Minecraft?”
Wakefield continues, waspishly but astutely:
Of course [young people] bang
drums, sit on roofs and declare the world to be doomed. It’s what they’re
supposed to do. What’s strange is that so many grown-ups seem content to
imagine that this is, in itself, an answer. Got a problem? Simply make like a
teen and shout about it. Job done. When Greta turned to the Davos crowd and
said ‘I want you to panic’, they should have asked her: why? Surely the graver
the crisis the more important it is not to panic.
Thunberg is too young to know this, but achieving
celebrity status is relatively easy compared to the challenge of maintaining
it. Far from being the historic figure she and Time magazine imagine her
to be, she may go the way of many a precocious child star of the past. The good
news is that after she disappears from magazine covers, she can look forward to
a gig on Big Brother or Dancing with the Stars.
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