Tag: wokism

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ideological culture media and media people

The French King Flip Flap

Jerry Seinfeld, censorship, woke culture, wokeism

There’s this great Jerry Seinfeld bit about how we treat our “important” friends on our smartphones: “They don’t seem very important, not the way you scroll through their names on your contact list like a gay French king.” And Mr. Seinfeld flipped his wrist in a motion of dismissal. “Who pleases me today?”

Well, Seinfeld is not pleasing the woke. Not today. Not The Washington Post’s Brian Broome. 

“Wake up, Mr. Seinfeld. Mean-​spirited humor isn’t cool anymore,” is Mr. Broome’s title. And his opinion is that times change, and meanie Mr. Seinfeld is a has-​been for making fun of marginalized people. 

You may have judged Jerry Seinfeld as one of the lighter, cleaner comics, his act almost universal. Broome says you’re wrong. “I have never found Jerry Seinfeld funny,” he explains. “Even in the ’90s when his show was all the rage, I didn’t get why people thought it was hilarious. It always seemed to me to be about immigrants being odd or unhygienic or making fun of women’s faces or body parts. The show always seemed mean-​spirited to me, and that’s just not my kind of humor.”

O, shall thy pearls be clutched!

Wasn’t the self-​described “show about nothing” really a comedy of manners where the main characters, George Costanza, Elaine Benes, Cosmo Kramer, and Jerry himself served as the actual butts of the jokes? These four egoists fretted over their ultra-​liberal concerns about good manners but always behaved badly. And we always knew it. And somehow still liked them — because Seinfeld was not mean-spirited!

Broome characteristically ends on a vindictive note: “So, yes, if you make ham-​fisted jokes about women or the LGBTQ+ community or people living with disabilities or the French, someone will come for you.” Thus, the mob beheaded the king. And the priest. All with wrong opinions.

Would Broome think the point of the “gay French king” joke was to make fun of gays? But recall the actual target: ourselves.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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They Don’t Get It

Jerry Seinfeld, woke culture, humor, comedy, TV

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 his position.

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 on TV tonight.’

“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 kills comedy.

“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 your comedy.”

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.

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folly ideological culture nannyism

The Wider Conversation

Richard III, acting, art, theater, wokeism, woke culture

“There can be nothing about us without us.”

That’s the clever slogan of the Disabled Artists Alliance, which last week tweeted a complaint about the casting of Richard III by Shakespeare’s Globe.

They weren’t complaining, as a naïf might suspect, about an actress playing the king.

Oh, no.

“We,” the signed letter explained, “are outraged and disappointed by the casting of a non-​physically disabled actor in this role, and the implications this has not only for disability, but the wider conversations surrounding it.”

Michelle Terry, the Globe’s current artistic director, cast herself as Richard. Daring move? An advance for her “gender”? You may find the choice forced, or kind of dumb, but on the London stage it may seem like turnabout as fair play. In Shakespeare’s own time, men and boys often portrayed women and girls on stage. So the acting profession has a long history of making do with less-​than-​convincing performers in roles. 

The Disabled Artists Alliance wants us to side with disabled actors, as a class, even if, as has been noted, past disabled players of Richard III had not suffered from the precise disability of the historic English king: scoliosis.

The idea is that a disabled actor has more relevant “lived experience” to offer to the role than a healthy actor.

Yet, that’s just one element of the character. Why not look for actors with the same moral defects? There’d be plenty.

Or choose a royal. For the relevant experience.

Isn’t Prince Harry out of work?

Next up: Flat-​earthers complain about the name of the theater wherein the scandal occurs: the Globe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture political challengers

Two Libertarians, North and South

Milei, Rectenwald

Two scholars have entered politics: Javier Milei in Argentina and Michael Rectenwald in the U.S. The latter’s work has been discussed before in these pages, but the former’s has not. 

Michael Rectenwald, an erstwhile Marxist who began criticizing woke leftism and found his way to libertarianism, spurred by his cruel rejection by the leftist academy and also by reading the work of Ludwig von Mises, is now running for the U.S. presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party.

Javier Milei was a footballer and rock-​n-​roll musician before becoming an economist and a politician. The Argentine with the wild hair spoke clearly and rationally to Tucker Carlson days ago in Buenos Aires, defending what he called “liberalism” (and opposing socialism in all its forms). Mr. Carlson identified Milei as a libertarian, claiming that the popular economist may become, next month, the next president of his country. At the ten-​minute mark Milei explains that “liberalism” means something different in Argentina than in the U.S. He makes it clear he means freedom under a rule of law.

Michael Rectenwald formally introduced his campaign on comedian Dave Smith’s podcast Part of the Problem on Saturday. Rectenwald explains that his main goal is to speak the Truth. “The conclusion I’ve come to is effectively that the means that these elites use are actually the ends that they seek.” In short, those in power didn’t cook up lockdowns and mask mandates and jabs to fight a pandemic, but to extend their power.

Milei, in one popular video, takes a similarly dark view: “You can’t negotiate with leftards. You don’t negotiate with trash because they will end you!”

This politics stuff isn’t so easy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Bigger Boycott Before Bud Light

Bud Light, boycott, woke, wokism

It’s bigger than the beer.

“Bud Light’s business has collapsed since April,” explains sports commentator Clay Travis in a recent column for Fox News, “plummeting 30% in consumption, the result of the company putting a trans influencer on a can to celebrate the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament.” 

Travis calls it “the most crushing boycott of a large consumer product brand in modern history,” adding that Bud Light “might be finished as a popular beer.”

However, Travis also rebutted “many in the media” for “proclaiming Bud Light as a unicorn, the first of its kind conservative boycott that has obliterated decades of goodwill for a company.”

Not true, he argues: “The most consequential consumer boycott of the 21st century didn’t come from drinkers’ rejection of a beer, it came from sports, in particular the NBA, which has destroyed its brand with a large percentage of the American sporting public by embracing woke, political, far-​left-​wing messaging in its games.”

Travis informs that, since the 1998 NBA Finals, when superstar Michael Jordan sank a late jumper to win, there has been a 75 percent drop in viewership of the National Basketball Association’s championship. “Indeed,” he offers, “four of the five lowest-​rated NBA Finals of the past 30 years have occurred in the past four years.”

Count me as one data point: I watched that great 1998 NBA Final and yet, today, I do not tune in. Why? I disagree with the NBA’s political bent and its repellent propaganda.

“More people were interested in watching” the Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship “in 2023,” reports Travis, “than the NBA Finals in 2020 and 2021.” (I saw that women’s championship game and declined both NBA Finals.)

But … why has the NBA’s nosedive in popularity not been news until now?

Mr. Travis says it’s because “the media loves the NBA embracing woke politics” and, therefore, “refused to share the data right in front of their eyes.”

Another case of so-​called journalists deciding they like their readers and viewers less informed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Bud Lite, basketball, woke, wokeism

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture Internet controversy

Two Thumbs Up for Netflix

Netflix, Dave Chappelle

Although a new “Artistic Expression” section in Netflix’s culture memo could be improved, I’m giving it two thumbs up instead of the customary one and a half accorded to promising but imperfect credos.

In these censorious times, why not applaud any sincere testament upholding freedom of speech?

Even if called “diversity,” in Netflix-speak.

According to the revised memo, the company supports “a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values. . . . If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”

This is probably not about Netflix’s willingness to rent The Wizard of Oz no matter who objects to the spectacle of weepy tin men or broom-​riding green-​faced women in pointy hats.

Recently, Netflix has been roiled by employee protests against videos they find annoying, especially Dave Chapelle’s comedy special “The Closer.” Chapelle, who appears to lean more left than right, turns out not to be the type to run his riffs by a lefty censorship board.

Now let’s see how Netflix follows up on its delicate suggestion that working for Netflix “may not be the best place” for employees demanding censorship. Will Netflix show the door to all sullen saboteurs of speech-​diversity?

Also, will it more fundamentally diversify its own original content?

In any case, good for Netflix for resisting the mob, for now. Until further notice, it’s two full thumbs up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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