Jerry Seinfeld seems so everyday-observant you get the idea that there can be nothing controversial about his comedy. But that just isn’t so. He’s had to avoid colleges for many years because the humorless young simply cannot take thoughts that lie even slightly outside their safe-space delimited comfort zones.
Right now he’s getting some viral shares for an interview he did, wherein he clarifies
Comedy, he says, is something everyone needs. “They need it so badly, and they don’t get it. It used to be you’d go home at the end of the day, most people would go, ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, M.A.S.H. is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on.’ You just expected, ‘there’ll be some funny stuff we can watch
“Well, guess what. Where is it? This is the result of the extreme left, and PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”
In other words, wokeness
“When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups, ‘Here’s our thoughts about this joke . . .’ well, that’s the end of
Yet, Seinfeld went on to explain how he works around all this. Avoiding colleges is only a part of it.
In the end, it helps being good at what you do. Work around the nonsense, most of the time, but speak out against it, as he does now and then.
And it might help to continue laughing at the woke as well as laughing in spite of them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly
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3 replies on “They Don’t Get It”
Jerry must not get out much. I see plenty of comedy, and quite a bit of it is “politically incorrect.” Network TV was dying long before the “woke” controversies, and college campuses aren’t the center of the universe.
Well, you’ve chosen an antagonistic way of not actually disagreeing with what he actually said. A somewhat less antagonistic response would be “One just needs to look elsewhere.”
Of course that response provokes the question “Where?” Which question might still be asked of you.
Comedy can indeed still be found, but it is in retreat. And much of what passes for comedy these days does not exhibit any clever violation of expectations, but just expression of contempt or of hatred for the members of some opposing group.
Even better than being good at what you do: being well-established and financially secure enough to have loyal customers and to be able to ignore people who don’t like what you do. Seinfeld can afford to laugh at or even ridicule the woke. Most people who are trying to make a living, no matter what line of work they are in, don’t always have that luxury.