Why Stand Up Comedians Can Stop Whining about Political Correctness

Clint Aaron
Sep 9, 2018 · 6 min read

It’s a familiar scene. Tune in to HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher and eventually its host will rail against the great plague of our age: political correctness. Invariably, Maher will tell a joke that falls flat or gets a vocal response other than laughter, and he will glare at the crowd and berate them for being overly sensitive or too uptight for his shtick.

Other established comedians from Chris Rock to Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Burr have all complained that comedy audiences are too touchy, can’t take a joke, and have allowed their political agendas to fuel disapproval that stunts the comics’ art. The argument goes that everything can and should be fodder for humor, that they are champions of freedom of expression and that those not amused by humor that seems to cross invisible boundaries of taste or decorum are failing democracy.

While it may be true that some of their audience could be applying unreasonable standards of taste to a form of entertainment that survives in part through lapses in taste, their argument is really more self-serving than that, and it is the self-centered focus of it that renders it unconvincing. Furthermore, the constant attacks on political correctness have real world consequences by emboldening those on the far-right with less innocuous intentions in using the same line of reasoning. People who are not particularly funny or gifted blame political correctness on their not being able to use the n-word more freely, to tell racist jokes at work, or to sexually harass women as often as they’d like.

The comedians who make these claims are established, older comedians whose careers usually extend 25 or more years. Comedians tend to be an insecure lot who have developed a sense of humor as a defense mechanism or as an alternative to appealing to people that doesn’t involve being attractive, athletic, or the like. So they take it personally if their shell of an identity they’ve formed for themselves feels threatened.

In developing their acts, they expend a great deal of effort finding their “voice” — stumbling upon and then amplifying through repetition the kind of stage persona, humor, and delivery that will be their brand (for lack of a less nauseating term).

So the comics who make these charges honed their comic voices decades ago. Their stage personas are their bread and butter and responsible for their flow of income and fame.

However, culture does not remain stagnant. What was funny in the past is not guaranteed to be funny in the future. Tastes can change collectively. Try watching an old silent film, or a romantic comedy from the 1950’s, or a teen comedy from the 1980’s. Many of the jokes will fall flat or be unrecognizable as jokes. Racist caricatures used to be hilarious. Old Warner Brothers cartoons are filled with them. Even Bugs Bunny got in on the act, appearing at times in black face or in shorts like “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips” (note that “nips” is an insulting slang term for Japanese people). Mickey Rooney’s Japanese character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is now infamous. When I was growing up, Japanese tourists with cameras were a ubiquitous stereotype uninterrupted by more realistic portrayals of Asians in American cinema. Condescending males treating women like immature children was also common in earlier eras, as was sanctifying women as kitchen-dwelling homemakers who should rarely leave the house except to shop for food.

As time passed and the culture matured, so, too, did our viewing habits. When you start to recognize members of marginalized groups as human beings, it becomes less funny to mock them and stereotypes lose their power.

In stand-up comics, however, you have individuals who shaped their style and humor in the past. Chris Rock would spend portions of a set referring to women as “pussy.” Bill Maher asserts himself as a woke bastion of liberalism, then falls back on intellectually lazy jokes about Chris Christie being fat. Bill Burr rails against fat people or entertains the idea of exterminating large numbers of people. Louie C.K. and other “edgy” comics would try to save America by trying to work the word “rape” into their humor or get us to laugh about pedophilia. Some of this type of humor has roots in the old stereotyping, some in the slash-and-burn shock comedy popularized by the National Lampoon in the 1970’s.

But here’s the thing: that shit’s old. To a certain extent, the American sense of humor has evolved past at least some of it.

But these comics cannot develop new techniques. They spent years crafting what worked for them before. Their jokes used to work in the past; so they conclude the problem must be the audiences. It must be a terrifying prospect to look at the career you’ve built and realize it’s a house of cards waiting be blown down by the natural ebb and flow of culture. But that’s what’s happening.

In public speaking, a bedrock principle is that your communication must be audience centered. If you give a speech and the audience did not feel it was a good speech, they are right. They are always right, because the duty of a good public speaker is to tailor his/her presentation to the audience and occasion. That doesn’t mean one should pander to an audience and say things one doesn’t believe. But if you are giving a speech to a group of first graders, you shape it to suit first graders. You don’t complain about having to dumb down your material and break out your long explanation of quantum physics and then blame the audience for being too stupid to get you. Likewise, you don’t unleash your 50-minute set written for a botanists’ convention on an unsuspecting conference for hardware salesmen.

But comedians spend months trying out material to generate a solid chunk of jokes that mostly work in a general way, and then travel across the country trying to shoehorn that material into their acts for different populations. And they blame political correctness when that approach fails.

Why have cultural tastes shifted?

Much of the change involves the various civil rights movements over the past half a century. Over the past twenty years, what is derided as “identity politics” by the right is really the assertion of different groups that they are worthy of respect. Media representation matters when audiences’ only exposure to some groups is through the media. For example, studies by the late media researcher George Gerbner showed that heavy viewers of television shows that have few women in positions of authority were less likely to want to vote for a female president. Other studies indicate that when local news features only crimes with African American perpetrators, viewers believe that African Americans commit more crime. Given our all-encompassing media landscape, a number of groups have pushed for more accurate and diverse representation (as the most recent success of Crazy Rich Asians shows).

The more people are exposed to better representation of marginalized groups, the more they identify with them and care about them and about the issues that concern them. So stereotypes no longer fit and people don’t care for jokes at the expense of people they care about. So while this steady evolution of being conscious of one another may be challenging for stand-up comedians, it is a positive good for our society.

Consider this: about 100 years ago, thousands of members of the KKK gathered for a march in Washington, D.C. following the release of Birth of a Nation, a film that glorified the Klan as heroes. This was at a time when lynchings were a real occurrence and black stereotypes were part of popular entertainment. Products in supermarkets bore racist slurs in their names. No substantive counter-protest movement showed up to challenge the Klan in a society steeped in overt racism. Today, ever shrinking alt-right marches are met with Americans committed to challenging efforts to drag our country back into that tragic time in our history. When individuals attack others with racist slurs, videos of the encounters go viral and those people are held accountable for their actions. Whatever your opinion about that trend, it’s a sign that the culture at large rejects such behavior.

While some of what comedians complain about may have merit in a time when people are uncertain about what is offensive, that uncertainty is the natural byproduct of a culture that is changing, growing, and maturing. If it makes a few comics uncomfortable at the thought that they might have to change their approach to their jokes to reflect the world in which they live and adapt to the audience they have and not the one they had 25 years ago, that seems inconsequential when viewed in light of our nation’s progress.

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