Jerry Seinfeld, a billionaire whose relationship with a woman he met while she was a high schooler didn’t slow his rise to ’90s superstardom, is SICK of the woke left deplatforming his radical truth telling about airline food. In a recent interview he surveyed the decay of mass culture sitcoms and concluded “This is the result of the extreme left and PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”
Absolutey Fabulous star Joanna Lumley agrees, saying you couldn’t make that show now: “Because everything has now become unacceptable … a lot of the language would have been suspicious, particularly Eddie, who was forever saying the most appalling things about people, which was hysterically funny because she was such a ghastly character”. Apropos of nothing, the movie version of Ab Fab came out in 2016, and featured a Japanese character called Huki Muki played by a white woman. But apart from that, they’re right, you can’t make jokes about anything anymore.
If only they could go back to the ’90s, when we didn’t have to deal with any of this nonsense…
Alas, even in 1999, political correctness was killing comedy. Frank Oz told The Age that he tried “very hard not to be politically correct” on his then new film Bowfinger. “We wanted to make fun of religion and blacks and whites and directors and actors,” he said. “Somebody just said to me that they’ve heard a lot of ‘Seasons Greetings’ as opposed to ‘Merry Christmas’, because they don’t want to insult the Jewish population, so it gets pretty silly if you can’t say ‘Merry Christmas’. That kind of political correctness is not just in films, it’s everywhere.”
“I think political correctness is the death of comedy,” Peter Farrelly told the St Louis Dispatch in 1998.
“Political correctness is ruining this business,” Kevin Spacey furiously announced in the Toronto Star in 1994. “The other day, I rented an old Blake Edwards movie called The Party with Peter Sellers in which he plays this Indian actor. It’s one of the funniest, most outrageous and most real comedies you could ever hope to find. But if a white actor attempted to make that movie today, there would be a revolution. Because he wasn’t Indian, the controversy would be enormous.” So true!
It wasn’t just racial sensitivities destroying comedy. Feminist scolds tried to take Sleepless in Seattle from us for its emphasis on Meg Ryan’s apparent lack of characteristics outside of her need for a man. “People who apply political correctness to romantic comedies are out of their tree,” she told the Toronto Star in 1993.
I guess we need to go back further, to the ’80s when we were surely free of all this?
”The movie will be seen as politically incorrect,” Paul Schrader felt the need to tell Reuters about his upcoming Patty Hearst biopic in 1988. ”But if you have to choose between being politically correct and doing the things that interest you, you’d better choose the latter.”
“Politically correct movies are fairy tales,” director Joel Schumacher insisted in The Scotsman, in (get this) 1984.
I guess the ’70s must be when we were allowed to say what we thought. After all, who doesn’t look back fondly at outrageous comedies like Life of Brian? You could never make that now! There would probably be some controversy!
Sadly, even in those way out times, the PC brigade was on the prowl. Take this review of Burning Questions, by Alix Kates Shulman in the Washington Post in 1979: “No matter what criticisms are hurled at this feminist fiction, no doubt the author will be cushioned by her political correctness”.
Maybe it was the 1960s with all its campus radicalism and hippie-dippy nonsense that conclusively ruined comedy? Apparently not.
“We’re afraid to laugh,” The Saturday Evening Post lamented in 1958. “What else is left to laugh at? One by one we’ve herded all our sacred cows behind a barbed-wire fence of patriotic or social or racial sensitivity. If a comedian trespasses inside, he is promptly punished.”
That same year, Malcolm Muggeridge (who on this topic, and many others, has some nerve) wrote in Esquire: “The area of life in which ridicule is permissible is steadily shrinking, and a dangerous tendency is becoming manifest to take ourselves with undue seriousness”.
“It is becoming more difficult for us to laugh at ourselves. Everybody’s terribly cautious. They’re afraid of offending someone,” Charles W. Morton complained in 1955.
“Americans are losing their sense of humour,” comedian Jack Albertson observed. “No longer will anyone laugh at himself. Minority groups carry chips on their shoulders … this makes life rough for the comedian.” This was in 1954.
The earliest recorded joke so far discovered has been traced back to 1900 BC, a zinger from the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
I await the discovery of a 1899 BC papyrus lamenting the fact that you couldn’t tell a joke like that anymore.
