Over the years, as I've tried my best to navigate how people are trying to define the limits of acceptable speech, comedy has been at the forefront of a lot of conversation.
In the case of comedy, most of the debating about what's acceptable to be joked about seems to happen among sociology and gender studies majors along with self-proclaimed social justice warriors...so...the least funny people on the planet.
That's now. When I was much younger, it was mostly the religious conservatives flipping their lids about Seinfeld making a reference to female anatomy. But, again, these are among the least funny people on the planet.
The good comedians don't seem to really engage actively until they're antagonized.
Now, can the least funny people on the planet be right about comedy? I suppose. Still, when some pipsqueak college student writes an open letter to Jerry Seinfeld explaining how comedy works, I feel compelled to write a satirical open letter to Patrick Mahomes giving him tips on how to throw a football.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jerry-seinfeld-politcally-correct-college-student_b_7540878
One of the critics favorite phrase to use in establishing perimeters if acceptable jokes is, "punching down." Of course, this is all hinged on intersectional, strangely myopic and lazy bullshit. They try to cloak this in compassion, insisting that they just don't want jokes about Asian drivers, tardy black men, or Muslim terrorists. At least, they don't want them told by white men.
Namely, the people who want to set up barriers for comedy on the religious right are all about keeping certain things that they find culturally impure off limits. For the secular left, it's more about dividing acceptable subjects and opinions by race and gender--"Say in your lane."--which I'm sure David Duke and Richard Spencer would love to see.
The thing is, although I detest all censorship and laugh when most people go nuts over jokes (until people start getting violent), the religious right is--at least--consistent. When you're dealing with the religious right, at least Christians, we know that they don't want us to say fuck, piss, shit, tits, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, or tits while keeping references to sex acts or organs to be joked about.
The secular left is entirely cool with all of that language, as I am. In the aforementioned open letter to Jerry Seinfeld, the pipsqueak referred to Any Schumer as a benchmark for comedy done properly and she's made a career being sexually explicit and talking about her private parts. Of course, the author overlooked Schumer's line, "I used to date Latino guys but now I prefer consentual." Doesn't her status as a white, cis, wealthy woman mean that that joke is punching down on Latino men?
The reality is that the secular left who want to set up these barriers for jokes based on "punching down vs. punching up" are operating off of low hanging fruit without thinking about where this inevitability leads: an incoherent form of racism.
Say that we take it as absolutely acceptable for an Arab Muslim to make a joke about Muslim terrorism, but it's unacceptable for a white atheist. We, for whatever reason, say that Amy Schumer can make her joke about Latino men; but, for whatever reason, such a joke would be off limits for white men.
Okay, let's dissect this a bit more.
Did Chris Rock cross the line when he hosted the Oscars and brought out a few Asian kids saying, "They did our accounting after they made our shoes." Was he punching down? How could he be? The Asian community is much better off economically than the Black community. We're not seeing unarmed Asian men getting gunned down by cops once per month. But, I've got plenty of Asian friends who got pissed off. This whole privilege structure is about as unscientific as possible.
"Well, don't make fun of minority groups who recieve a lot of hate. That's punching down." I know that a lot of you like to pretend that every Trump voter is a Nazi; but, they're not. Nazis are a very small minority. By that logic, Nazis should be protected from ridicule.
In the mean time, jokes about global Islamic terrorism are condemned by people as "punching down." So...a libertarian atheist, who belongs to less than one percent of the world's population is punching down against a religion of 1.7 billion and commands a tremendous amount of oil wealth? In that case, it's gotta all be about skin color for you. Thank you Mr. Duke.
Everything is acceptable to be joked about by anybody. It's riskier for some people; but, good comedy always is. As Salman Rushdie once asked, "What does a respectful political cartoon look like?" As Louis C.K. once pointed out, a good joke takes you to a place that you didn't want to go and makes you happy that you went there.
Brendan O'Neill wrote a book called A Duty to Offend and gave one of the most compelling speeches in defense of free speech that I've ever seen. Offensiveness and hurt feelings are the motor of human progress which we can use before resorting to violence. At least comedy can entertain you while hurting your feelings. As George Bernard Shaw was credited with saying, “If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh or they’ll kill you”
But, you know, you've got an undergraduate degree in gender studies; I'm sure you know more about satire than the likes of Jonathan Swift.
