Humourless idiots

Air New Zealand has caved to recent complaints about a brief gay non-kiss in their flight safety video. I wrote about the video nearly four months ago after I saw an American blog post in which the blogger disliked the “grimace” of Richard Kahui when he turns down a male flight attendant’s request for a kiss on the cheek. My post four months ago included the video.

At the time, I felt the blogger’s reaction, and those of some of the folks commenting on the post, were imposing American values on New Zealand, expecting us to see the world their way and to share both their sense of humour and their over-sensitivity to supposed slights. As an American-born New Zealander, I’m probably more perceptive of that tension than either Americans or New Zealanders generally. I’m sure that also means more sensitive to it, which inevitably means I’m probably over-sensitive sometimes, too.

But in this case, I thought the video—and that scene in context within the video—was just a bit of cheeky fun. To me, it was clearly not intended to be offensive—and it wasn’t.

Clearly most Air New Zealand customers agreed with me because the video ran with little turmoil all this time. Then last week they received a lot of complaints about it. My gut-level suspicion is that there was some event on around that time and a bunch of like-minded people flew Air New Zealand, were offended, and complained. But who?

There’s nothing in any of the media reports I’ve seen that described anything about the complainers. Most people, including the gay flight attendant, assumed it was humourless gay people. They’ve been branded as “professional victims” and worse. But unless someone has seen some information the newsmedia haven’t reported, the complainers aren’t necessarily gay people: There’s a certain segment of heterosexuals who would’ve been offended by what is the only overtly (albeit, mildly) gay part of the video.

It really doesn’t matter what sort of people complained or why. To me, they’re humourless idiots who think they have a right to decide what everyone can and cannot see. To me, the bigger question here is why did Air New Zealand decide to delete the scene now, after it’s run for months and only had a few more weeks to run, anyway?

Humourless idiots abound, it seems.