You can guarantee a few things in my life, one is my
ears will hurt and the other is I will get abused online.
So I woke up Saturday morning with the usual leaky sore
itchy ears and spent the day dosed up with painkillers. There is nothing can be
done about my ears, they keep being leaky and wet, and specialists don’t know
what to do.
I went onto twitter and saw that Armando Iannucci the
Scottish comedy writer had been given an OBE by The Queen (something am not
really into) but anyway, he was taunted by Alistair Campbell (former press aide
to Blair and who Iannucci based his character Malcolm Tucker on the TV show
Thick of it) Campbell taunted Iannucci for accepting the ‘establishment’ and
added those three little letters make a lot of difference to which Iannucci
replied “WMD” referring to Campbell’s involvement in the illegal war over
‘weapons of mass destruction’ made me laugh my ass off.
Anyway I captured the hilarious online twitter spat and
uploaded it to twitpic upon which many famous tweeters decided to reTweet and
so my timeline went mental. You need to understand twitter to get that last
paragraph, to think the words Re tweet weren’t even forming on our lips until
at least 3 years ago now we say it daily. Or at least I do. So thanks to Peter
Serinafowitz and Rob Delaney I have heaps of new people reading my tweets.
So, after I got swathes of new followers, I got some
twitter people abuse me and call me fuckwit and gobshite etc and I embraced
them. The thing about trolls (the name for anonymous people who abuse you on
twitter) is that they like to think they can hurt from afar or at least from
behind a screen.
It’s a bit like being at a huge super bowl crowd and
someone sneaking up through the throngs of people and stabbing you in the groin
with dirty needle on a long stick, watching your expression and running away
before you can call them out.
I tend to block abusive people not because I am weak but
I want to imagine I run back through the same crowd and gaffer tape their mouth
and run back again to my own space.
The haters and trolls really take pleasure in hurting
people as I have found out.
One troll who is related to a comic I know started
writing to my daughter telling her she fantasised about my own childhood
abuse...this shocked my daughter for a few moments then she laughed her head
off as she imagined him with a long stick and a dirty needle...and then she
felt sad he would want to hurt someone and begged me not to get angry at him.
I wasn’t angry- I was amazed nobody had said something
like that before, as Ashley and I have both cracked very dark jokes about my
past and we like to think that’s our way of coping. That poor bloke just
pointed that out and I like to think of him as perceptive to a point, but then
we blocked him as he did sound suicidal and that’s not my area.
Witnessing haters on other people really disturb me, for
instance a wee chubby pre-teen boy uploaded a really cheesy video of him
singing and dancing. Personally his parents should have stepped in and stopped
him, thats my opinion.- maybe they were unaware he was uploading videos?
You see something that looks cute and cool to a 13yr old
with no critical input can come back and bite you in the arse. Am glad YouTube
wasn’t around when I was 13 as there would be a plethora of clips of me looking
wistful singing weepy touching songs to photographs of Donny Osmond as I hang
over damp rocks near the stream at my old home. (it was the 70s all music
montages looked like that)
Anyway the wee chubby boy got millions of hits and
thousands of hateful ‘kill yourself fatty’ responses. There is the flip side to
this, maybe the wee boy enjoyed the attention and can cope with the haters
after all Irish irritators Jedward taught us one thing, stupid people with no
talent can make millions.
But I digress, I despise people being hurt by trolls
online and yet, I will always strive never to have them charged by the police.
Unless someone is psychically threatening my life I can cope with verbal abuse,
I am a comedian, I fight for the right to say things onstage so therefore I
have to accept the things people say to me offstage.
Follow me on twitter @janeygodley
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