Laugh it Off

Mr Nose: Heineken sues over Gallic  humour

Noiseweek Issue # 106 -August 2008

A South African who has the good fortune to spend his winters in France tells Mr Nose that that country, too, is happily endowed with its very own Justin Nurse: a T-shirt mocker called Thierry Boeuf.

Apparently Boeuf has been creating T-shirts which take the piss out of the likes of Lacoste and Heineken. Both those companies have now sued him.

Heineken’s action demonstrates that the men at Heineken not only have small dicks; clearly they’re still not on speaking terms with their erstwhile friends at SAB, following the tiff about Amstel. Had they been, SAB would have told them what happens to corporate and other moguls who don’t have a sense of humour: in SA, when SAB dragged Nurse to court for his parody on Black Label’s logo (”Black Labour/White Guilt”) they got told by the Constitutional Court to grow up and laugh it off.

When the US manufacturers of the Barbie doll, Mattel,completely lost their cool because a Scandinavian pop group parodied Barbie as a “blonde bimbo” (isn’t that what we all thought Mattel had intended her to be?) the Federal Court told them to “chill”.

A year earlier Mattel had lost another case when a court ruled that an American artist was within his rights to use Barbie dolls in his work. Tom Forsythe’s photographs depicted the blonde in sexually compromising positions. The court ruled on that occasion too that parody of Barbie was an acceptable activity.

Apparently ignorant of all this, Heineken is mirroring SAB’s stupidity and suing Boeuf for substituting the words “Bien Plein” (”Had Enough” – literally “very full”) for “Heineken” in an imitation of their label.

But Thierry’s main target has inevitably been that funny little man who rushed in an orgasmic flurry to President Mbeki’s aid recently – when the lights went out, remember? – bearing offers of expensive French technology (commission subject to negotiation).

We refer, of course, to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Now you might think a five-foot-tall Hungarian, known for his right-wing views and love of things American, who goes on to become president of La Republique and then promptly ditches his wife for a six-foot model whose tits are firmly in the public domain, might have learnt to handle the odd poke.

In the ribs.

But, no, unfortunately humour is another thing Monsieur Sarkozy is short of: he, too, has sued Boeuf.

It seems Sarkozy and Heineken are relying on France’s courts to drag the country back to darker ages

when mocking the rich and powerful could earn you a date with Madame La Guillotine.

http://www.noseweek.co.za/

2008/07/31