WSJ story on clean comedy

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on December 1st, 2006

Someone posted Jeffrey Zaslow’s article in today’s Wall Street Journal in its entirety on the Philly Comics’ Newsgroup. (We’d post a link to the WSJ site, but the article is accessible to subscribers only. Is this theft? Not sure.)

Anyway, it’s an article on how clean comedy is back, because…

…comedy clubs have become a breeding ground for anything-goes slurs, culminating in the recent onstage racial tirade by Seinfeld star Michael Richards.

This exact article gets written about every 18 months or so and it has quotes from more or less the same people. Only this time, the author convinced his editor that the “hook” for the story was the Richards incident, making the article “fresh” again.

It’s no joke. Those in the funny business are saying that, despite all the explicit sitcoms and mean-spirited Internet humor, there’s a quiet countermovement toward clean comedy. Some comedians are deciding they’re tired of using profanity as a crutch. Others find clean comedy can be more lucrative.

It is not “a quiet countermovement,” it is not “a backlash, 40 years in the making.” There have always been comics (Redd Foxx, Pearl Williams, et al) who have preferred to work “blue.” There have always been comics who have preferred to work clean (or not blue). Stories like this one treat working clean as though it’s a “solution” to a “problem.” And they regard the use of certain language as “a crutch.”

Penn Jillette, as usual, brings sanity to the debate when he…:

…argues that the difference between clean and dirty is like the difference between electric and acoustic guitars. “Both make music. Both are valid,” says Mr. Jillette, the co-producer of last year’s “The Aristocrats,” a documentary in which dozens of comedians told variations of the same offensive joke.

Mr. Jillette says that if someone prefers not to use blue material for artistic or personal reasons, he understands. “It’s like an artist saying he doesn’t like using the color blue in a painting. I respect that. But if someone says people shouldn’t use blue because it’s immoral, then I say [string of expletives].”

We have taken Mr. Zaslow to task in the pages of this magazine before when he described comics as “neurotic, cranky, potty-mouthed attention-seekers.” Near as we could tell, the characterization was only somewhat ironic.

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