There might be too much to comment on in this article from the UK Guardian.
We don’t know where to begin.
Check that. We do know where to begin. Let’s take a look at the sub-headline.
Let’s parse that head:
Political correctness used to rule comedy…
And then there’s the second part:
… but now comics routinely offend their audiences.
And, finally:
How did things get so nasty?
Whoa! Hold on there! How did things get so nasty?
We had a different question: How did political correctness come to “rule comedy?” Perhaps that is the bigger question. Perhaps that is the question that should have been asked all along. (It certainly is a question that we’ve been asking for the past ten years.)
Perhaps the another good question is: Why, when “political correctness was ruling comedy,” was this considered by anyone to be a good thing? Further, why, when “political correctness was ‘ruling comedy,” was this not considered to be a horrendous thing, a slow death to standup and speech?
Why, when political correctness was ruling comedy (and who says that use of the past tense is even legitimate?!), was it tolerated? Why, when political correctness was ruling comedy, was an array of targets/victims roped off? And, perhaps most troubling, why were a select group of comedians “allowed” to use their comic gift in service to bashing certain “approved” targets?
Forgive us if we don’t sympathize with the folks who are offended in this article.
We are also rather puzzled that Brendon Burns, Jim Jeffries and Scott Capurro aren’t accorded the hero status that other previous “groundbreaking” alt comics have enjoyed in countless interviews.
Instead, they’re regarded as pariahs. Capurro, it is suggested, might be “smuggling out bigotry under a veil of irony.” Comic Richard Herring, it said quite unironically, argues “that racists have a point.” Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais provide “notorious” examples of “serial political incorrectness.” There is much tut-tutting about how today’s New Offenders “deny any responsibility for how audiences interpreted their work” and how their “offensive comedy (has an) unsavoury edge.”
In the past, such iconoclasm was celebrated. Now, an eyebrow is raised. Questions are floated, darkness is hinted at. Academics (of all people!) are consulted and the conclusion, they sniff, is that none of this is funny and come up with fancy terms like “aversive racism.”
The author of the piece, Brian Logan, comes close to an insight when he says that Pryor, Bruce and Hicks, “tended to offend against establishment opinion, and came from what might broadly be described as a left-libertarian perspective,” and that “it is this right-on orthodoxy that today’s New Offenders have been reacting against.”
Now, historically, such a pushback would be celebrated. The New Offenders would be described in glowing terms for identifying the orthodoxy and seeking to upend it. Not so in 2009. History is over.
Logan seems totally unaware of the oppressive nature of the “right-on orthodoxy.” Or that comics might find any orthodoxy– regardless of its newness, regardless from which direction it emanates– might serve as a foil, or as something to push back against. Or that pushing back against something so oppressive might resonate with an audience– in a good way, not a bad way.
Further, Logan seems befuddled that an audience that laughs at such material might not be doing so, not with evil in its heart, but merely with the goal of catharsis. Instead, the audience who laughs heartily at the new offenders, Logan frets, might be doing so with a black heart. (It is all too similar to the nervousness that some in the U.S. press regard the audiences of Dan Whitney or Carlos Mencia.)
We have long held that it is not just foolhardy to proscribe certain topics or ethnic groups or public figures as immune to jokes. We have also held that it has long been this country’s tradition to bust hard the balls of the new arrivals, to razz and parody and mercilessly poke fun at those who stand out, who are the least comfortable in their new surroundings. Going back even further than vaudeville, it had been the way that new arrivals were greeted, that they were welcomed to the club. It had been the way that the new arrivals figured out how to gain a certain sort of comfort in their adopted homeland by turning that same “torture” on each subsequent gang of new arrivals, to reinforce their Us-ness and separate themselves from Other-ness.
Somewhere along the way, some folks sought to break that natural chain of comedy events. We maintain that this era of political correctness interrupted a fundamental right of passage. It irreparably damaged a highly useful function of comedy in society.
The political correctness franchise was extended further to include not just ethnic groups, but genders, sexual preferences, political parties and others.
This brings about an unnatural situation.
Comedy is like a steam valve. Steam (animosity, resentment) builds up… comedy lets it out. If an attempt is made to keep the steam in, the animosity and resentment finds other outlets, some good, some bad. Of all the ways to relieve the animosity, there are perhaps none better than comedy. Folks who seek to proscribe comedy tend to equate it with violence. No distinction is made between a joke and a declaration of hatred.
Orthodoxy: a belief or orientation agreeing with conventional standards
Up until relatively recently, an orthodoxy, a set of conventional standards, was exactly what comedians needed to do what they did best. If you were a comedian, you needed something to reflect upon, to rebel against, to push off of– either for the purpose of shocking your audience or for the purpose of galvanizing them against it.
These days, the right-on orthodoxy is something that is… settled. Why, the critics now ask, would anyone risk going against the new orthodoxy? They wring their hands and ask, aren’t they concerned, about “the effect that this comedy has out there in the real world?”
What a change has come! Why were these same critics so enamored of mischief before? Why are they now so prissy when it comes to addressing uncomfortable topics? Why are they so convinced of their rightness… and so utterly convinced of the wrongness of those who dare to disagree with them?
And, perhaps most importantly, how can they be so totally unselfaware?