Let’s spend a minute thinking about Frankie Boyle. Frankie Boyle has of course every democratic right to be a complete and utter shit, and I am not going to proselytse about ‘turning the other cheek’ at this juncture.

I am not in any audience of a Frankie Boyle skit. This means I am not sitting in the audience when he performs at the Hammersmith Apollo, and I do not download his video in HD from the iStore. I choose not to listen to his routine, simply as it is not my type of comedy in general. This volitional decision is not because I find the material immoral or offensive – my higher cognition simply doesn’t come into it. Though, wearing a different hat, I wasn’t at the Holocaust, but to say that I find the Holocaust an immoral or offensive event would be the biggest understatement of the year.

I know that some disability campaigners loathe his stuff, and I am sensitive to their views in being offended. However, as a disabled citizen myself, I am simply not offended – like followers of religion, I do not judge Islam because of how certain muslims react. I am not saying that certain disability campaigners are fundamentalist about their beliefs, but it is a broad church. It is so broad that I feel that the word ‘disabled’ is unhelpful: but – even then – I don’t particularly care about it, despite once having given a well-known outspoken able-bodied journalist a very hard time for talking rather patronisingly about ‘disabled people’. I certainly don’t care enough about it enough for people to take special precautions, like talking about this ‘heterogeneous class of differently-abled individuals’. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

I think removal of a Facebook page, hypothetically, which read ‘Cancer is fun’ would be justified on the grounds of the number of people who may be upset, having lost perhaps a dear relative with cancer. By these standards, I should care about Frankie Boyle’s jokes. But I don’t – this is simply because Frankie Boyle is a small cog in a giant commercial wheel, with many people in the Boyle entourage (such as PR, marketing, booking agents, DVD producers, CD producers, and and so). Frankie Boyle is a product, like David Beckham or Damien Hirst, with a high brand equity, and part of the distinctiveness in his humour is his risqué manner. Like a cinema which does not make most of its money from the film itself, most of the money of the Frankie Boyle product is to be found in the Frankie Boyle entourage.

Crucially, Frankie Boyle has what intellectual property lawyers would call “distinctiveness”. This distinctiveness is what set Bernard Manning apart. Whilst thought crimes are not against the law, incitement to hate crimes would be – most reasonable people would deplore this, and Frankie Boyle would not be allowed to perform his skit if the ruling authorities felt that such crimes were being committed. Discrimination has no boundaries under the current equality legislation (ranging from age, sex, race and disability), but the danger is that Frankie Boyle humour gets legitimised by society when racist or sexist jokes are simultaneously frowned upon. While it may be ‘cool’ to respect Boyle’s right to be odious, just remember the democratic right of certain political parties to knock on doors at Luton or Dagenham? Tackling a different angle, Frankie Boyle’s jokes are not even political, although one may hazard a guess that he might be more left-wing than right-wing. And is disability itself a mechanism by a right-attack government may attack its citizens through ATOS? This argument is not especially tenable when you consider that it was actually ‘Labour’s fault’ that ATOS was awarded the disability benefits contract in the first place.

All publicity is good publicity. In the time it has taken you to read this, the Frankie Boyle share price has increased, and it’s been “kerching” for him and his whole entourage. So you should have been, in fact, devoting the last minute of your time thinking about something else, I feel.