An MSNBC journalist has decided to lecture us about what is and isn’t right to joke about in comedy. This piece could come straight out in The Onion, but it’s very real and very frightening.
The MSNBC op-ed actually talks about the “new” comedy rules, vis-a-vis Sarah Silverman’s latest Netflix special, because what we need right now are guidelines to tell us what is and isn’t supposed to be funny. And there are some still wondering why the comedy genre has been dying.
The author is columnist Jacques Berlinerblau, a total whiz at analyzing comedy. He’s actually advising comedians to self-censor — at least, until racism and inequality are properly dealt with in about “half a century from now.”
Free speech purists and libertarians might respond to this five-step program by fulminating: Voluntary self-censorship! Slippery slope! Isn’t art about liberty, man? Maybe, man. But perhaps comedians ought temporarily ease off the un-nuanced — and even [Sarah] Silverman’s more nuanced — punch down shtick. Just for now. Just until America divests itself of irrational hatreds and inequality in like a half century. Or half a millennia. Or whenever the Messiah comes.
This is straight-up 1984 sh*t. When the Taliban was handed Afghanistan one of their first acts was to target comedians. Coincidence? Of course not. In fact, I found this list of comedians having being detained in authoritarian countries for telling jokes.
What the world needs right now is to laugh, but everything, including the movies, feels so self-serious.
In 2019, director Todd Phillips complained that outrage culture killed the big screen comedy. The media attacked him for that. Others have shared Phillips’ sentiments, they’ve also been attacked.
Comedians like to push and push and push until that very fine line of what is deemed acceptable and unacceptable is somewhat squeezed to its very limit. As George Carlin once said, “It’s a comedian’s duty to find the line and deliberately cross over it.” That, to me at least, is what some of the very best comedy can do.
The truth is, in comedy, there really shouldn’t be a firm line as to what's funny and what's in poor taste, but in our fevered social media reality everyone now loves to immediately point out when they think that line has been crossed.
While James L. Brooks teased last year that "we'll soon be seeing" Jack Nicholson, 89, act again, and that he was "reading scripts," that idea has now been shut down by his close friend Michael Douglas, 82.