It’s all over the news today: Sharon Smith, a lady with a 5-year-old daughter who has Down’s Syndrome, went to see comedian Frankie Boyle live. She was offended by some of his material and wrote on her blog:

Frankie Boyle spent a good few minutes in the second half of his show making joke after joke about people with DS … jokes about the way people with DS talk, jokes about the way they dress, jokes about the jobs they can do, jokes about their haircuts, jokes about their parents being old and old-fashioned.

The media has seized on this as an opportunity to be morally outraged. And no doubt, it’s pretty scummy of Boyle to make fun of people with a disability — laughing at them, not with them. Sky News even reported that he:

labelled those with the disability "Mongoloids" and said they were destined for an early death

But what moral right does Sharon Smith have to complain about these jokes? Writing on her blog, she said:

One of the reasons that we wanted to see Frankie Boyle was that we have seen him on shows like Mock the Week and have loved his humour, how dry he is, how nasty he is, how clever he is. We wanted to see him out of the confines of a TV editing suite, to hear him say things he could not get away with on mainstream TV.

And:

I expected dry, nasty, crude humour, yes, but unimaginative humour poking fun at the stereotype of people with Down syndrome was not something that I expected.

So the main reason she wanted to see Boyle live was because she likes the nastiness and crudeness that he is renowned for. She thought the live show would be an opportunity to see him without TV censorship, and she was willing to pay for that. In other words, she likes hearing nasty, crude jokes about other people. That’s her sort of humour. She finds it funny. She’ll pay to hear those jokes in their most extreme, uncensored form.

Unless the jokes are about someone close to her. Then it’s too much, too far, not acceptable, and it’s time to talk to the newspapers.

Update: Follow-up blog post from Sharon Smith, basically saying that she’s going to put the whole incident behind her and she doesn’t want any journalists hassling her about it anymore.