Wherever you look, the "anything goes" crowd have become the "That's not funny!" scolds. No wonder Jerry Seinfeld won't play college campuses anymore. The clean comic of the 90's, the man behind the most successful situational comedy in television history, says he can't make a joke on a campus today because today's Left can't take a joke at all.
You don't have to be a conservative to wonder at what the Wokes have wrought. Louis C.K., a usually liberal leaning comedian who has already come under #MeToo fire for his personal conduct, faced backlash again for a recent set in which he called out millennial progressive Americans for their hyper-vigilant joke policing. According to the Hollywood Reporter, C.K. called out the humorlessness of today's snowflake youth, then went after one of their sacred cows: gender.
"They're like royalty," he says. "They tell you what to call them. 'You should address me as they/them, because I identify as gender-neutral.' Oh, OK. You should address me as 'there' because I identify as a location. And the location is your mother's c--t It doesn't have to be that nasty, but it can be."
C.K. doubled down, mocking the Parkland shooting survivors who have gone on to build political careers from the tragedy. Does C.K. have a point? Does it matter? Should it? He's a comedian. He's supposed to be edgy. This is (or was) a free country.
British comedian Ricky Gervais defended Louie C.K. The Left claims to be oh so tolerant of every opinion, but only so long as every opinion agrees with theirs. Once upon a time, the cultural and legal powers in America thought it necessary to throw legendary stand-up Lenny Bruce in jail for speech violations. Turns out we haven't come very far since then.
Extreme "Wokes" are gunning for every comedian nowadays. They got Kevin Hart knocked off the Oscars. Did anyone notice that the very progressive Academy Awards forced a hard-working black man out of a job last year -- for telling jokes? When telling jokes is his job? That's why they hired him. For the jokes.
Humorless 'Wokes' got Monty Python's John Cleese burnt at the digital stake over a joke about the California wildfires -- a joke that Twitter's bitterest labeled "bad taste."
But what is "taste," and why should the modern version of medieval torch and pitchfork mobs get to dictate it? The same Left that says you cannot legislate morality has positioned itself to regulate taste. But you cannot regulate taste, or even debate it, whether its good or bad. I can eat both the Wendy's Baconator and Royal Ossetra Caviar. What kind of taste do I have? How do you know? Am I allowed to like both? Or one? Or none? Am I allowed to like both Frédéric Chopin and the Wu Tang Clan?
The medieval royal courts had their jesters. This was an official role which allowed truth to be spoken to power from the mouths of fools to the ears of the rulers. Comedians from George Carlin and Richard Pryor forward to today supposedly play that role. But can they anymore? And who are today's rulers? The Wokes? They tell us when to laugh and what to laugh at. They destroy careers. They act as crowd-sourced judge, jury and executioner at the speed of a retweet. And sometimes, they get violent.
Must all of our entertainment choices be mandated by the most mindlessly outraged, on the world's most useless social media platform? Must we all live the lives of silent monks just to avoid having our reputations and lives torn apart in public on social media?
Legendary comedienne Joan Rivers made fun of everything -- Elizabeth Taylor's weight, Elizabeth Taylor's marriages, and well, everything else. Today Rivers' jokes would be called "fat shaming," "slut-shaming," "othering" and all kinds of other humorless and shifting definitions -- always controlled by the Puritans of today's Left -- of what is and is not within the bounds acceptability. If Rivers was still with us, she'd be headed for a full blown international comedy crimes tribunal at The Hague.
Today's social media mobs ought to pause and think. The rage they tweet today will come back to bite. In her seminal work on The Nuremberg Trial, Ann Tusa warns: "These are not days in which the people of the world are inclined to quibble over precedents." That's no joke.
Good, rational people were always taught to keep quiet if they had nothing good to say; these rabid, sensational hyenas are taking advantage of all of the common person's sensibilities. All too often, good people - even in a majority - just keep quiet while these social extremists flog and isolate a good person just for speaking out and voicing their opinion.
I know from experience that rational people are the majority. We need to stick together and fight back against this nonsense.