NO LAUGHTER – AT 7:23 P.M. ET:  We write often here about political correctness.  It has many negative effects, but one we don't normally think about is the impact on comedians who are engaged to perform on college campuses.  Turns out it deadens them as well.  From Campus Reform: 

Comedians are becoming increasingly reluctant to perform on college campuses due to a sensitive culture of political correctness, and college bookers don't seem to mind.

According to VICE News report published last week, several successful comedians, including Judy Gold, Jerry Seinfeld, and Chris Rock, now avoid going to college campuses because their jokes can be deemed offensive.

“Why is it that everyone has to adjust to everyone else? Don’t hire me if you don’t want to hear what I have to say,” Gold told the publication.

When asked to explain how she would react if her jokes offended an audience member, Gold pointed out that broad jokes about traumatic experiences are not meant to target individuals in the audience.

“The joke is not about you. You have to learn how to be in this world. The world doesn’t have to adjust for you,” she told VICE. “You don’t tell a comic what topics they can discuss on stage; it’s ridiculous. When people tell me not to do something, it makes me want to do it.”

According to the report, the content of a comedian’s campus performances is often decided by university bookers, who also negotiate the terms of the contract with comics who wish to do standup for students.

“Every time we put our label, or any time we put our name on an event it is now an extension of an entire campus climate that we are trying to create,” Kat Michael, a Simmons College booker, told VICE.

“When I am working on a contract, especially with the comedian, I’m very upfront in saying, ‘you know, transphobic language isn’t going to be tolerated—if you say something in your set, like, we reserve the right in our contract to have a conversation with you about payment and I will also pull the microphone,” Michael added.

The booker explained that comedians who have made offensive jokes on sensitive topics in the past would be asked to remove them from the performance, if they were even invited to campus at all.

“[If] I knew that this comic had a bit [where] they made light of sexual assault, I would either ask them to completely remove that from the set or we just wouldn't book them. And that’s happened before,” Michael said.

COMMENT:  This is an arena where common sense is needed.  In fact, there have always been standards of speech for performers, and those standards depend on the venue.  On commercial television, some years back, there were serious Standards and Practices departments whose word was law.  Standards in recent times, in television, have declined.

People expect, and have a right to expect, greater latitude for comics on college campuses.  The campus should be a free and open place.  You're not being beamed into someone's living room.  Your audience is young and not captive.  And yet, restrictions on campuses are now so great that all the spirit, all the bite, all the real humor can easily be taken out.

A documentary was made several years ago called "Can We Take a Joke?" focusing on the problems of comedians trying to entertain at a time of rigid political correctness. Comedians interviewed in the film told how they were appalled by the lack of a sense of humor in today's students.  That sense of humor had been washed out of them by the campus thought police.  Common sense was out the window.  The concept of a dull, gray society was, and is, very much in.

Whatever happened to laughter?  To smiles?  To laughing at one's self or one's group?  There is something terribly totalitarian about what's being taught to our kids.  It's the same thing taught in any dictatorship.  You may not say this, or think that.  We will report you.  You will be shamed.

Is that America?

June 3, 2018