• Calendar
  • Contests
  • Villager Blog
  • Jobs
  • Our staff
  • Media kit
    • Contact advertising
    • Specifications and sizes
  • Current print edition
  • Home delivery
  • Previously published
    • 2011
    • 2010
    • 2009
    • 2008
    • 2007
    • 2006
    • 2005
    • 2004
    • 2003
  • Buy a copy of The Villager
  • Get email updates
  • Classifieds
The Villager Newspaper
  • Home
  • Editorial
  • SPACES
  • Global Village
  • The Angry Buddhist
  • Progress Report
  • COLUMNS
  • CARTOONS
  • Talking Point I
  • Talking Point II
  • Gallery Seen
  • News
    • Community
    • Police Blotter
    • Education
    • Obituaries
    • Politics & Government
      • District One
      • District Three
      • Borough Pres.
      • Mayoral Race
    • Villager Videos
  • Opinion
    • CARTOONS
    • Reporter's Notebook
    • Talking Point
    • Notebook
    • Guest Editorial
    • Columns
      • jack wells
      • Leaders
      • LENORE SKENAZY
      • Books
      • Eats
      • Technology
      • People
      • Pet Set
      • Spin City
      • Clayton
      • Jerry Tallmer
      • Ira Blutreich
      • Evan Forsch
      • Flashback
      • Horoscopes
      • History
      • Youth
      • Sports
      • Health
      • Poetry
    • Editorials
    • Your Letters
    • Scene
    • Publisher
  • Arts
  • Scoopy's
  • In Pictures
  • Real Estate
  • Villager Blog
  • Special Sections
    • Film Fest
    • Sponsored Content
    • Why Pink?
    • Art Corner
    • 80th Anniversay
    • Pride
    • Meat Market
    • Progress
    • Union Square
    • Volunteers
    • Literature
    • Downtown Directory
      • From the publisher
      • Community Listings
        • Handicapped & Disabled Services
        • Health Services
        • Hotels
        • Legal & Financial Services
        • Neighborhood Associations
        • Police
        • Political Organizations
        • Post Offices
        • Public Officials
        • Recreation
        • After School Programs, Daycare and Nursery Schools
        • AIDS Services
        • Business Associations
        • Cultural Organizations
        • Education Colleges & Universities
        • Educational Services
        • Libraries
        • Museums & Attractions
  • Jobs
  • RSS for Entries

Comics can’t kill when P.C. police kill speech

August 4, 2016 | Filed under: LENORE SKENAZY | Posted by: The Villager

skenazy picBY LENORE SKENAZY | Just a few weeks after the terror attacks of 9/11, Gilbert Gottfried took to the stage of the Friars Club
and explained he had to leave early to catch a plane to California.

“I couldn’t get a direct flight,” he said. “We have to make a stop at the Empire State Building.”

The crowd booed and someone yelled, “Too soon!” But in fact, Gottfried’s timing was impeccable.

He told the joke before the invention of Twitter.

Also before outrage became America’s consuming passion.

The rollicking new documentary “Can We Take a Joke?” brings our lust for umbrage into sharp focus. Audiences, it points out, have become hypersensitive — especially on campus. Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld have both sworn off college gigs, because, as Rock put it, “You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”

And so the film, by documentarian Ted Balaker with support from the free-speech advocacy group the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, interviews comedians both famous and up-and-coming about how they’re dealing with the onslaught of offendedness.

One interviewee, stand-up Jim Norton, has worked his frustration into his routine.

“Why is comedy the only form of the arts where people think they have to agree with, or approve the content?” he asks. “You don’t walk through a museum with a towel and throw it over paintings you don’t like [saying], ‘I don’t want anybody else seeing this because I don’t enjoy it.’ ”

Comedy’s job is, as George Carlin once said, “to find where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.” That’s been the comedian’s job ever since the first jester joked about the king’s much younger wife.

“If we steered clear of every topic that could offend someone, we couldn’t open our mouths,” says Lisa Lampanelli, whose entire act is making fun of absolutely everyone. That might not be your thing. But if it’s not, stay home.

Instead, audiences are coming in, sitting down, and demanding that comics not say anything crude or cruel. But when my idea of cruel is your idea of hilarious, my super-sensitivity automatically wins. I get to declare not just that the comic isn’t funny, but that he is a bad person and needs to be punished.

Consider what happened at Washington State University, where a student named Chris Lee wrote a musical designed to offend absolutely everyone. In fact, he billed it as such. But one night, the university itself requested 40 tickets.

Those ticket holders came in and started shouting, “I’m offended!” They stood up and shook their fists. The shouts grew into threats. And guess what?

Turns out the university had paid them to attend and disrupt the show. When Chris asked the cops for protection, they wouldn’t promise it. He had become someone not worth saving, because he was politically incorrect.

Then there’s Justine Sacco. The young publicist was on her way to South Africa. As she boarded the plane she tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white.” She was making a lame joke about the way whites see Africa, the continent where her parents had worked as anti-racism activists.

But one of her handful of Twitter followers assumed this was actually a racist remark and retweeted it. It got picked up by more and more people, and by the time Sacco got off her 12-hour flight, she found herself the No. 1 trending item worldwide on Twitter, with people calling for her to be raped or killed.

Because of a bad joke.

Jon Ronson wrote about her story in his book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.” As he notes in the film: The mob that took her down wasn’t actually making the world a better place. It was just getting off on outrage.

“Do you really want to live in a world where everyone has to think twice before they tell any kind of a joke?” asks Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE.

America, lighten up — or be prepared for dark times.

“Can We Take a Joke?” is showing at  Cinema Village, 22 E. 12th St., through Thurs., Aug. 4, and is available through iTunes and on demand through most cable and satellite providers.

The Villager encourages readers to share articles:
Tweet

Advertisers from our print edition



Comments are often moderated.


We appreciate your comments and ask that you keep to the subject at hand, refrain from use of profanity and maintain a respectful tone to both the subject at hand and other readers who also post here. We reserve the right to delete your comment.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.


2 × = twelve

Search The Villager


Share This Post

Tweet


Sponsors

Sponsor


ClickHereForCalendarButton
ClickHereForCalendarButton

RSS Gay City News

  • Can Three Parents Make a Family in New York?
  • Federal Court Orders Trial on Trans Military Ban
  • David Buckel, Passionate LGBTQ Rights Litigator, Dead at 60

RSS Chelsea Now

  • Back to Work We Go — But First, Some Back-Patting!
  • Seeds Planted for Rooftop Gardens to Feed Midtown Needs
  • 10 Indicted for Stealing $500K Via Check Fraud, Mail Theft

RSS Downtown Express

  • High impact: Could ‘developmental impact fees’ ease Downtown’s growing pains?
  • Back on the beat: Community policing program comes to the First Precinct
  • Police Blotter: Week of April 19, 2018
  • Beware the Coarsening
  • We Are The Champions: ‘Bathtubs’ Compels Us to Respect the Art of Industrial Musicals
  • Tangible and Social: Virtual Reality at Tribeca Immersive
  • Transit Sam: Week of April 19, 2018

RSS East Villager News

  • Best in Screen, 2015
  • A Coney Island of the East Village at City Lore
  • NYCHA will build on ‘hot’ East Side, chief assures
  • After 50 years, famed fashionista Patricia Field closing Downtown store
  • God’s Love We Deliver is back and cooking again in its gleaming new Spring St. building
  • Scoopy’s, Week of Sept. 3, 2015
  • ‘N.Y. Corporate U.’ is crushing us, critics cry
  • Foodies steamed after wonton rent hike, taxes force out Charlie Mom
  • Crusty punk whose pit bull terrorized East Village is dead
  • Spring forward to fall festivals

NYC Community Media LLC also publishes:
The Villager • Gay City News • Chelsea Now • East Villager News


ONE METROTECH, 10TH FLOOR NORTH
NYC, NY 11201
Main Telephone: 212-229-1890
Fax: 212-229-2790
Advertising: 212-229-1890

© TheVillager.com (Copyright 2017). Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to TheVillager.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Log in - The Villager - Published by NYC COMMUNITY MEDIA