The Atlantic: Must all college humor be politically correct?

August 13, 2015 • 2:15 pm

There are clearly unsavory aspects of a policy allowing “free” speech, even when that policy prohibits, as does America’s legal system, speech calculated to incite imminent violence. Who wants to hear a latter-day Klansman natter on about the inferiority of blacks, or a Muslim talk about the need to keep women from any contact with men? That’s just offensive to all rational people.

But the problem is that what is deemed “offensive” is not clear cut.  For example, debates on abortion, particularly of late-term fetuses, or about how trans women should be classified, can be instructive, even if you’re opposed to what the speaker says. It beehoves us, as liberals who love science, to at least consider the arguments of our opponents—unless, as in the case of racism, they’re so far out of bounds that the issue can be seen as settled. (But even in these latter cases the adherents must be free to speak.) The key point is that what one person considers offensive can be seen by others as instructive, and even when there’s disagreement, well, that’s what education is all about.

And so comedy that is seen by many as offensive, as with George Carlin’s routines about God or the “seven dirty words,” or Lenny Bruce’s infamous routine on “Are there any niggers here tonight?“, can prompt not only laughs, but discussion and even enlightenment. Even Sarah Silverman’s song in the nursing home, telling old people that they’re going to die soon, has a point, reminding us of our mortality and the possiblity that many of us may in fact wind up in such homes. It’s at once disturbing and funny, and funny because it’s disturbing.

All of those performances have been seen as offensive, but does anyone have the right to ban them, or even say that they shouldn’t be performed? Colleges campuses routinely do, banning all but the most squeaky clean comedians from campus—those who adhere to a code that respects all diversity and doesn’t venture into the dark recesses of the human psyche. That’s why both Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock announced that they will no longer perform on campuses: the humor they’d like to purvey simply isn’t welcome there.

The unhealthy relationship between colleges and comedy is the subject of long piece at The Atlantic by Caitlin Flanagan, “That’s not funny” (subtitle: “Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke”). It’s a wee bit ambivalent, for it recognizes, as I noted above, that free speech can truly be offensive, without redeeming qualities. But the view that free speech is nonoffensive speech has become the norm.

Flanagan visited the annual convention of the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA), where prospective comedians who aspire to do the college circuit—described as quite lucrative, as it’s steady work—and found a chilling atmosphere around comedy. Only comedians with the right schtick could secure prized contracts at the convention.

A few excerpts:

The colleges represented were—to use a word that their emissaries regard as numinous—diverse: huge research universities, tiny liberal-arts colleges, Catholic schools, land-grant institutions. But the students’ taste in entertainment was uniform. They liked their slam poets to deliver the goods in tones of the highest seriousness and on subjects of lunar bleakness; they favored musicians who could turn out covers with cheerful precision; and they wanted comedy that was 100 percent risk-free, comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke.

. . . When I attended the convention in Minneapolis in February, I saw ample evidence of the repressive atmosphere that Rock and Seinfeld described, as well as another, not unrelated factor: the infantilization of the American undergraduate, and this character’s evolving status in the world of higher learning—less a student than a consumer, someone whose whims and affectations (political, sexual, pseudo-intellectual) must be constantly supported and championed. To understand this change, it helps to think of college not as an institution of scholarly pursuit but as the all-inclusive resort that it has in recent years become—and then to think of the undergraduate who drops out or transfers as an early checkout. Keeping hold of that kid for all four years has become a central obsession of the higher-ed-industrial complex. How do you do it? In part, by importing enough jesters and bards to keep him from wandering away to someplace more entertaining, taking his Pell grant and his 529 plan and his student loans with him.

Clearly Flanagan decries the trend towards squeaky-clean comedy on campuses, where challenging acts should be almost the norm. Her ambivalence occurs at the end of the piece (do read it!), where she describes the dilemma of Geoff Keith, a comedian forced to clean up his act to secure college gigs. (He’s been quite successful.) But she reinforces her thesis with the last sentence.

[Keith] would not tell the jokes that kill at the clubs. He would not do the bit that ends with him offering oral sex to the magician David Copperfield, or the one about a seductive woman warning him that she might be an ax murderer, or the one about why men don’t like to use condoms. Those jokes include observations about power and sex and even rape—and each, in its complicated way, addresses certain ugly and possibly immutable truths. But they are jokes, not lessons from the gender-studies classroom. Their first objective is to be funny, not to service any philosophical ideal. They go where comedy always wants to go, to the darkness, and they sucker-punch you with a laugh when you don’t think you should laugh.

And maybe you shouldn’t. These young people have decided that some subjects—among them rape and race—are so serious that they shouldn’t be fodder for comics. They want a world that’s less cruel; they want to play a game that isn’t rigged in favor of the powerful. And it’s their student-activities money, after all—they have every right to hire the exact type of entertainment that matches their beliefs. Still, there’s always a price to pay for walling off discussion of certain thoughts and ideas. Drive those ideas underground, especially the dark ones, and they fester.

Sarah Silverman has described the laugh that comes with a “mouth full of blood”—the hearty laugh from the person who understands your joke not as a critique of some vile notion but as an endorsement of it. It’s the essential peril of comedy, as performers from Dave Chappelle to, most recently, Amy Schumer understand all too well. But to enroll in college and discover that for almost every aspect of your experience—right down to the stand-up comics who tell jokes in the student union—great care has been taken to expose you to only the narrowest range of approved social and political opinions: that’s the mouth full of blood right there.

70 thoughts on “The Atlantic: Must all college humor be politically correct?”

  2. Makes one wonder how the Harry Nilsson song “I’d Rather Be Dead” (1972) would go over today (vocals by Harry Nilsson with the senior citizens of the Stepney & Pinner Choir–Club No. 6, London, England)


    I’d rather be dead–I’d rather be dead
    I’d rather be dead than wet my bed
    I’d rather be dead–I’d rather be dead
    I said dead than wet my bed
    Oh, I’d rather be gone–Than carry on
    I’d rather go away–Than feel this way
    Oh, I’d rather be there–Where you haven’t got a care
    And you’re better off dead–Though it doesn’t seem fair
    Oh, I’d rather be dead–I’d rather be dead
    I’d rather be dead than wet than wet my bed
    I’d rather be dead–I’d rather be dead
    I’d rather be dead than wet than wet my bed
    (Ladies)
    I’d rather keep my health–and dress myself
    But you’re better off dead than sitting on a shelf
    (Men)
    I’ll tie my tie ’till the day I die
    But if I have to be fed then I’d rather be dead
    And when he takes my hand on the very last day
    I will understand because it’s better that way
    Oh! It’s nice to be alive–When the dream comes true
    You’ll be better off dead–It could happen to you
    Oh! I’d rather be dead–I’d rather be dead
    I’d rather be dead than wet my bed
    I’d rather be dead–I’d rather be dead
    I’d rather be dead than wet than wet my bed
    (Alright! Give yourselves a big hand!)
    (Clapping.)

    1. O O O, my thanks ! for this … …

      The funniest part of Mr Armisen’s “Fehn” routine, since I first learned of his on Mr Meyers’ Weekend Update portion, is actually this: too, too many “this isn’t going anywhere” – people, including right here in the Academy (to which Ms Flanagan’s article addresses), exist ! They so exist ! Exactly as Mr Fehn ! Daily !

      I was just in the umpteenth .such. Staff meeting. Seriously, .this exact countenance and demeanor. was, indeed, the very non – substance and shallowness of it.

      And, for next month’s Board meeting? Because of noooo substance and depth to its actual six hours’ worth of my (in – house, minutes’ scribing / stenographic) time? ! I want to be there this person whom I found on the tw**ter just the other day: “For a reasonable daily rate, I am available to sit cloaked, hooded and silent at your next board meeting.”

      “All right, ENOUGH !”
      Blue

  5. Q: How many college students does it take to change a light bulb?

    A: That’s not funny.

    1. Lol!

      I saw on BBC World the other day that young people don’t say lol anymore because “old” people say it, so they’ve reverted to the haha oldies used to use before we understood about Internet abbreviations. For us “oldies” perhaps we can reclaim our original meaning of lol now – lots of love.

      1. ” . . . young people don’t say lol anymore because “old” people say it . . . .”

        Yes, well, they do hope to live to an old age themselves, don’t they? Maybe the “old” people should also go around saying “cool,” and “OMG,’ etc., eh?

          1. Yes, well, seniors likely won’t, it sounding so fatuous to utter it in response to the least little thing, though the current youngsters will be uttering it as seniors if they are fortunate to reach that age.

            (“OMG, I have a hangnail!” “OMG! Look how she’s wearing her hair!” “OMG! He dropped the football!” “OMG!” says the middle schooler in response to the teacher standing her ground in response to his misbehavior. Are people petitioning Heaven to deliver them from their dismay and grief when they carry on like this?)

            At what age does (society presume to dictate that) one becomes a “senior”?

            On the other hand, “Good Lord!” and “Lord Have Mercy!” are locutions that have obtained for a good while among the more senior set.

          2. When you look like one.

            On a recent trip to the US, I was charged the seniors’ rate for entry to the Salton Sea State Recreation Area, even though I’m still a few years shy. But I save a dollar, so …

            /@

          3. Yeah. Used to peeve me inwardly when people offered me a seat in the train (I was always polite about declining, because they meant it kindly). It was almost invariably teenagers, usually girls, who looked like ‘lower socio-economic’ status (i.e. often Maoris or Islanders) who did so. Interesting.

            cr

  6. This reminds me of a great cartoon that I saw circulating on Facebook weeks ago. It’s since gotten buried and I don’t know where to find it. It was about a comedian attempting to tell jokes at a college and constantly getting booed because everything he said was offensive in one tiny way or another.
    “So I just flew in…”
    “Fear of flying is on our list of trigger warnings!”
    “I just did a vacation in Jamaica…”
    “Racism!”
    “…with my dad…”
    “Patriarchy!”

    Has anyone else seen this?

  7. Maybe they could just watch reruns of Leave It To Beaver. Big time television in the 50s. Although that Eddie Haskell might have caused a problem for College kids.

    1. I remember when Ricky Nelson had a date with 3 girls on the same night. That was one decadent era.

        1. I didn’t watch it all the way to the end to find out, but I think they ended up going bowling or something. Incidentally all three were named Betty.

  8. Great quote from Jerry Seinfeld:

    “Tell a joke to a liberal. Between your punchline and his laughter, there is a Progressive Comedy Pause. In this second or two, the liberal will process the joke to make sure he is allowed to laugh.

    Is that joke racist? He mentioned Obama, but didn’t make light of him, so to speak. He also mentioned Michelle, but I didn’t notice sexism. Is it dismissive of the LGBTQIA community? Latinos? Muslims? Vegans? Will this joke hurt progressive causes? Will my laughter trivialize oppressed communities? Will I appear intolerant? I think it’s okay if I laugh. Yes, I’ll laugh now to signal my appreciation and to indicate that I’m not a joyless liberal scold.

    “Ha ha.””

    1. Sounds like “Kids these days!!” He’s a performer who’s not getting the laughs he used to so he scolds the audience about why it’s their fault they don’t find him funny.

      I’ve seen several stand up acts in person in the past few months that are not “politically correct” by any means and who still get lots of laughs.

      They’re playing at smaller venues and probably not making much money. And if they complained that people were to blame that they weren’t funny, they’d be booed off the stage, as they should be.

  9. Jerry Coyne’s reference to racist being beyond the pale, I assume is based on the original concept of the word, the hateful, sometimes violent treatment of people based on their race.

    However, the censors have mutated the scarlet R to even the slightest satirizing of perceived stereotypes of ethnic groups, it’s become a social third rail to even playfully look at ourselves and others through the exaggerated lens of perception (would ‘All in the Family even be allowed on TV today?)

  10. Life in a bubble, meet them everywhere.
    The problem here is, it is creating an artificial environment and it could have a very dark aspect with regards to society. Like a closed shop nothing gets in, what could possibly go wrong? twisted little minds? an expectation of privilege? what I don’t know won’t hurt me? you vile creatures from beyond!
    In my early teens, a young male Jehovah Witness (he was in my home passing on the good word) gleefully told me about how a young women was raped and murdered, reciting all the details from a news bulletin. I felt physically ill and it rocked me for a few days (I still think of it as a horror show) but it did put me off JW for life.
    I can laugh about that little twerp now but not the rape of course, the unknown victim.
    I bottled that incident, these students have all sorts of support if needed and they can laugh it off with their peers.
    It certainly beats being bowled over by a pervert.

  11. The trouble with limiting speech based on offensiveness is that, not only is there no general accepted standard for determining what is offense, but that it is very easy to say one is offended for the purpose of stifling speech.

  12. I think I needed trigger warnings and microaggresions and all the rest to read this months Atlantic. Its been getting worse for a while but really accelerated when those that where not in school yet when Columbine occurred started graduating and I would not be surprised to see another huge bump in 2 or 3 years when 911 kids start to graduate HS.

  13. “Even Sarah Silverman’s song in the nursing home, telling old people that they’re going to die soon, has a point, reminding us of our mortality and the possiblity that many of us may in fact wind up in such homes. It’s at once disturbing and funny, and funny because it’s disturbing.”

    Well, I think we all should be reminded that we’re going to daie, so as to focus on making the best of every day.

    I gather that there’s a video of Silverman sweetly singing her song. Perhaps it should be shown to U.S. middle and high schoolers (and college students, for that matter), as refulgent as too many of them are with shallow narcissism and sense of American Exceptionalism entitlement.

    I wonder what are Silverman’s self-imposed limits. Would she go to the oncology ward of a children’s hospital and sing such a song to children’s faces? (To the parents of an infant who, the parents have just learned, has to have both cancerous eyes removed? One might hope some patients too young to understand, just as some nursing home elderly too addled.

    How do comedians generally feel about telling jokes at their own expense, versus at the expense of others? Not as much fun?

    1. I don’t know how frequently (if at all) Silverman does it, but making jokes at their own expense is the M.O. of many, many comedians – cf. Josh Blue, Jim Gaffigan, etc.

        1. Here you are – try the first three minutes of this. Sarah being funny at her own expense.

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJcOCDM0MV0

          “I was raped by a doctor, which is so bitter-sweet for a Jewish girl”
          I don’t know anyone else who can hit so many verboten targets in one sentence.

          cr

  14. I don’t see why people should avoid hearing their ideological opponents on issues “so far out of bounds that the issue can be seen as settled”. Often those taboo issues are the least examined precisely because people avoid hearing things they don’t agree with. You may be right, but are you really justified in believing so if you won’t examine the counter arguments?

    1. By “settled” I assume Jerry means that we’ve heard the arguments, examined them, and rejected them. Having done that, we’re not obliged to keep listening to the same bad arguments in the name of open-mindedness.

      1. That sounds exactly like what a Social Justice Warrior would say. 🙂
        The problem lies with “rejected” – whether the argument is rejected because the facts on which it is based are false, or the argument is a logical fallacy – or whether it was rejected merely because we don’t like the conclusion, in which case it’s absolutely not settled.

      2. That’s perfectly reasonable, but I think a lot of people refuse to listen to arguments that they believe are offensive without having heard them. A couple examples are arguments against immigration or Affirmative Action. Opposing either of these is frequently considered prima facie evidence of racism, and “racists” can be ignored. While a person might oppose immigration due to xenophobia or Affirmative Action due to racism, they might also have interesting arguments based on economics or social dynamics. They might end up being wrong anyway, but I don’t think they should be dismissed out of hand.

        Another example could be both sides of the pro-choice / anti-abortion debate. Most people on both sides seem to dismiss opposing statements out of hand. I remember when Richard Dawkins was pilloried for arguing that fetuses should be afforded moral consideration to the extent that they can suffer. This seems philosophically uncontroversial to me, but it was ridiculed and dismissed apparently without consideration by many (everyone I saw write about it, anyway) solely because it sounds like an anti-abortion argument, so of course it couldn’t possibly have any validity…

  15. I agree with the point about people taking offence where none is intended, but I’m happy for people to call out comedy that is genuinely racist, sexist, homophobic or whatever. It’s a good thing that liberals — and, increasingly, everyone else — is more sensitive to these matters nowadays. Even if some people take it way too far, that’s far more preferable to the days when unironic sterotyping was a central part of any comedian’s routine.

  16. Universities have forsaken their educational mission to become the equivalent of industrial farms: taking in high-school hatchlings; fattening them on a pre-digested, gluten-free diet; keeping them penned in intellectual cages as confining as those veal farms use on their calves; then turning them out four years later as plump broilers and fryers ready for trimming and quartering in the corporate marketplace.

  17. A question that someone might be able to answer. Do the various trends in ‘correctness’ described above reflect the views of the majority of students or are they those of a highly vocal minority? An adult lifetime spent in universities suggests that the majority of students are fairly middle of the road people and usually apathetic to or distant from the more strident causes pushed by activist groups.

  19. When she appeared on Bill Maher’s show last week, Flanagan said the war is over, and free speech lost. I thought her best point was that people now, and especially young people on college campuses, are consumed by identity politics and the culture of resentment. So much so that shared human values and principles like fairness, justice, compassion, etc. are forgotten.

  20. The sad part is when these poor children get out into the “real” world they’ll be eaten alive.

  21. It’s ironic, and sad, that, “The National Lampoon” was born on a campus- when it became a magazine, there were NO topics too “forbidden” for it to make disgusting, and even violent fun of them- I remember being amazed that it was being sold on magazine racks, what with the language it used. One of its monthly “columns” was, “The Adventures of Bernie X”, about a “classic” Jewish cabdriver who was a secret agent of Mossad and had all kinds of wild sexual misadventures the very description of which would today have feminazis calling for your execution (“The sisters turned out to be two, ‘Stevie Nicks lookalikes'”). The racial jokes and cartoonish sterotypes served the same purpose as Lenny Bruce’s, “Nigger, nigger, nigger”: they DESENSITIZED people as to the “power” of TRUE racial and gender slurs and allowed us to have a good, hearty laugh at ourselves. “Grimness” and intolerance seem to be two of the symptoms of the “P.C. movement” today. I’m reminded of the old saying: “Don’t take yourself too damned seriously.”

  22. I’ve been rewatching Seinfeld recently, and I’ve taken to trying to find all the things in the show that would be points of outrage on the net today. Since the show deals with people, and in particular archetypes of personality traits, the show would really be at odds with an internet culture that frowns upon such things.

    I remember 15 years ago Howard Stern complaining how he can’t say the kinds of things he said in the 80s. It seems now that the 90s is fast becoming too offensive.

    1. And Mel Brooks said: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

      1. ‘And Mel Brooks said: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”’

        Also by Brooks: “Critics can’t even make music rubbing their legs together.”

  27. I’m just astounded that there’s a central organization for this sort of thing. In my day — when we learned Latin because people actually spoke it — college student groups did their own booking. If there’s going to be a central organization like NACA, that, in itself, will guarantee the blandest, most anodyne, broadly-acceptable comedy will get the inside track to the best gigs.

  28. “Policially correct college humour” = an oxymoron. When I was a student (like, too many decades ago) student humour was unremittingly crude, vulgar and –ist in every possible way.

    Of course in those days bare boobs and four-letter words were NEVER seen/heard on TV. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest college humor is once again a swing to the opposite pole from what the older generation does.

    cr

    1. For a (slightly watered-down) version of college-humour attitudes of those days, see Animal House. We weren’t all so casually anarchic, but we wished we were…

      cr

    2. Got it . . . finally.

      I wonder what the greatest “jock” joke is.

      From an ancient Bill Cosby routine:

      Football player to kid: “Throw it to me, the ball. Pick it up first.”

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