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On April 20th of this year, a group called the BCHRT (British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, a sort of maple-syrup-flavored version of a Stalinist show-trial committee) fined stand-up comedian Guy Earle $15,000 for offending a lesbian woman, Lorna Pardy, from the stage at an open-mike comedy night back in 2007. The owners of the club which hosted the offending performance were also fined $7,500.

Under this system the complainant needn’t pay the legal fees for their case, while the respondent pays out of their own pocket. Earle couldn’t afford to fly cross-country to attend his phony-baloney Vancouver show trial (he was living in Toronto) and rather sportingly offered to testify by videoconference. The court rejected his offer.

Earle is hardly anybody’s idea of a redneck, homophobic bigot. If anything, he’s a self-described liberal who seems genuinely bewildered at the way those on his “side” have been so eager to throw him under the bus as punishment for what appears to be nothing more than drunken insult-slinging between a comic and an unruly audience. Granted, Earle’s putdowns were not at Don Rickles’s level of heckler-flattening sharpness.

Many observers and even fellow comics were eager to dismiss Earle as not being worth the effort to defend because they didn’t find him funny. They argued that better comics would know how to handle obnoxious audience members without resorting to crude dick jokes. Perhaps they were thinking of subtler, gentler putdowns along the lines of George “Would somebody just put a dick in that guy’s mouth, please?” Carlin or Richard “I’ll slap you in the mouth with my dick” Pryor.

http://takimag.com/article/the_high_cost_of_insulting_a_canadian_lesbi
an/print

107 page Verdict
http://www.bchrt.bc.ca/decisions/2011/pdf/april/101_Pardy_v_Earle_and_
others_No_4_2011_BCHRT_101.pdf

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