Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal
has called Donald Trump a disgrace to the United States following his
call for a ban on Muslims entering the country, and demanded the
Republican front-runner withdraw from the US presidential race.
Trump
triggered an international uproar when he made his comments in response
to last week's deadly shootings in California by two Muslims who
authorities said were radicalised.
"You are a
disgrace not only to the GOP but to all America," Prince Alwaleed, the
chairman of Kingdom Holding, said on his Twitter account, addressing
Trump and referring to the Republican Party.
"Withdraw from the US presidential race as you will never win," the prince added.
Within hours, Trump's response came back, also on Twitter.
"Dopey
Prince @Alwaleed_Talal wants to control our US politicians with daddy's
money," he said. "Can't do it when I get elected."
Trump's
comments have already cost him business in the Middle East, with a
major chain of department stores halting sales of his glitzy "Trump
Home" line of lamps, mirrors and jewellery boxes.
On
Thursday, Dubai real estate firm Damac, which is building a $US6
billion ($A8.23 billion) golf complex with Trump, stripped the property
of his name and image.
Prince Alwaleed, a nephew of
Saudi Arabia's King Salman, has holdings in a number of international
companies, including Twitter and Citigroup. In July he said he will
donate $US32 billion to charity in coming years via Alwaleed
Philanthropies.
Sam Newman is hitting out at political correctness. Picture: JAY TOWN
THE Footy Show star and controversy magnet Sam Newman has lashed out at what he says is a growing culture of political correctness “gone mad”.
Newman, 69, said a “critique industry” exists where groups leap on supposedly controversial views in order to push their own agendas.
As a result, he told the Herald Sun, fewer people were willing to say what they thought — including politicians or public figures who “bend and submit to lobbyists”.
He says this often leads to accusations he is sexist, racist, or “anything else that ends in ‘ist’”.
“If I said my religious beliefs did not allow me to accept gay marriage as a legal institution, I would be called a homophobe,” he writes.
Newman cites examples in the United States, including when presidential candidate Ben Carson was branded racist for saying he didn’t think a Muslim could be president because of America’s history and culture.
Fellow presidential candidate Marco Rubio, he says, was branded an anti-Semite for visiting the home of a collector who owned a document signed by Hitler.
“What chance have we of engaging in meaningful dialogue with stupidity like that?” he writes.
Sam in the spotlight.
In comments likely to rile some people he is criticising, Newman revisits Billy Brownless’s gaffe at a footy function, when he called a mother and daughter “strippers”.
“I find it astonishing, when one stands back and looks at the context and circumstances, that this was manufactured into the furore it became,” Newman writes.
“That by no means ignores the offence, or the subsequent apology from Brownless, but the incident was whipped-up by self-appointed PC zealots who urged action: the removal of Brownless, and me, from The Footy Show and a suggestion that a female producer be appointed.
“To use the new communication, LOL!
“By the way, I am all for a female producer, if she’s the best man for the job.”
Newman also hits out at the change in approach to language used to describe gender.
“We are all destined to be pigeonholed by the bleaters, those who tell us that ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are taboo but ‘parents’ are acceptable,” Newman writes.
The highly anticipated Zoolander sequel has been
slammed for its "harmful", "cartoonish" portrayal of an androgynous
character played by Benedict Cumberbatch, with an online petition
calling for a boycott of the film.
In the trailer for Zoolander 2,
Zoolander and Hansel — portrayed by Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson — ask
Cumberbatch's character if they are a "male or female model" and if they
"have a hot dog or a bun".
"Cumberbatch's character is clearly portrayed as an
over-the-top, cartoonish mockery of androgyne/trans/non-binary
individuals," the petition initiated by Sarah Rose reads.
"This is the modern equivalent of using blackface to represent a minority.
"If
the producers and screenwriters of Zoolander wanted to provide social
commentary on the presence of trans/androgyne individuals in the fashion
industry, they could have approached models like Andreja Pejic to be in
the film."
Pejic — who until 2014 described herself as "in
between genders" and worked as an androgynous male modelling both
masculine and feminine clothing — now identifies as a transgender woman,
and was the first openly transgender model to be profiled by Vogue.
Ms
Rose added: "By hiring a cis actor to play a non-binary individual in a
clearly negative way, they (sic) film endorses harmful and dangerous
perceptions of the queer community at large."
"Tell Paramount Pictures, Ben Stiller, and Benedict
Cumberbatch that mocking transgender/androgyne/gender fluid people is
not okay."
The term "cis" or "cisgender" refers to an individual whose gender identity conforms to their anatomical sex at birth.
The petition has so far garnered almost 9,000 signatures, with many supporters expressing their frustrations.
"I am transgender. How long do we have to be mocked by Hollywood before they just leave us alone?" one person wrote.
Another
wrote: "This part of the movie basically encourages people to see
transgender people are just a surgical experiment instead of from an
understanding point of view.
"How immature and regressive."
Paramount Pictures, Cumberbatch and Stiller, who also directed the film, are yet to respond to the backlash.
The test of a society's commitment to freedom of
expression lies in its defense of marginalized forms of speech. I say in
class, free speech is for speech that you hate, not for speech that you
like. The logic of the principle is simple: we don't need to protect
society's treasured ideas and institutions--they pose no danger to us;
we pose no danger to them. It is for those forms of expression that
disturb, offend, and even anger us that we actually need freedom of
expression, as these types of speech are those in danger of being
suppressed if society were not serious enough about a democratic
culture. --Florin T. Hilbay
This
week I've reviewed a series of articles spanning a Bell's Curve of
polarities in opinions, practices and policies regarding freedom of
speech on campuses. I confess to feeling deeply troubled.
Forty-three
years ago I was in high school in a conservative-leaning town in the
South. The Vietnam war was still eating away at us, desegregation was
still clawing its way into our consciousness and the War on Poverty had
been declared, but there were still no arms with which to fight.
It
was a tumultuous, disruptive and extraordinary time to be alive. I was
the co-editor of our high school newspaper. A young, feisty and
incredibly smart journalism teacher was assigned to us that year.
She
took us through all of the basics of journalism and helped me get an
internship under the formidable Kathryn Duff, Editor at our local paper.
My teacher encouraged me to write and submit articles to what were then
the Saturday Evening Post and Holiday Magazine. I received scholarships from both for college.
My
teacher was a fierce editor. I've never had one of her calibre again.
She forced me to think about what I was really trying to say, not just
how I was trying to say it.
She left at the end of my junior year
for a job at the capitol in New Mexico. She gave me a gift during her
short time, an extraordinary season of encouragement to deconstruct the
premise and practice of freedom of speech. She taught us to look at the
underbelly of our fears and isms.
She was not popular with some
faculty and some administrators. But she was my hero. She shook me up
and I am so grateful. I wrote about the war, the racial imbalance in our
troops, institutionalized racism in leadership election processes on my
campus (I was a class officer).
And, our small newspaper staff
shook up some things ourselves. I believe we carved a bit off the
deeply embedded roots of policies and practices in our school system and
community that were designed to preserve white supremacy.
When
my extraordinary teacher departed, a new teacher was hired. I suspect
she was instructed to put an immediate stop to the free-wheeling thought
and expression that had been cultivated in our newspaper staff.
Perhaps she acted on her own. She is dead now and we will never know.
She
shut down any publication of anything meatier than football scores and
4-H club. No questioning of authority or status quo was allowed. After
my first three articles were censored under her tenure and pleas to our
administration went nowhere, I quit my post as co-editor. Some other
team members and I started an underground newspaper. There was no
Internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat or email.
The
administration quickly sanctioned us and I received a warning by the
Vice Principal that I was inciting potential violence by talking so
openly about racial tensions. My status on an honors group was
threatened if I didn't cease writing about contentious ideas. I gave up
and graduated.
Forty-three years ago seems like a short time
when I read today about censorship on campuses by administrators, often
fueled by what students do not want to hear because they feel
triggered.
I am deeply concerned about the censorship crawling out of this Pandora's box. In recent years, I have been many places
in the world talking about the death spiral effects on society of
racism, gender-ism, sexism, homophobia, trans*phobia and censorship on
all of us.
It never occurred to me that those of us who are
fighting to create freedom and stop violence would find ourselves unable
to speak of these problems for fear that we would use words or images
that would trigger students so deeply that they could not or would not
participate in the dialogue.
I don't know how to change anything for the better if we do not or cannot name it, discuss it, debate it and yes, disagree.
I've
been accosted by ultra-conservative protesters who have called me some
despicable names (Fred Phelps comes to mind). I've been arrested
for civil disobedience for daring to sing a church hymn about freedom
and unity in a denominational meeting that excluded the voices of gay
clergy.
I've encouraged young activists in China and on fundamentalist religious college campuses to come out about their sexual orientation and gender identity knowing that they might be punished, expelled, imprisoned and even killed.
I
can relate to the impact of saying what one believes to be true when
other people don't want to hear it. That is why I feel alarmed today
about the campus-based and society-wide movement toward censorship.
This
movement, in part, emerged out of the last forty-five years of activism
to improve life for those who had been excluded and silenced. Creative
protesters formed names for these oppressions, marginalizations,
discriminations and stigmatizations and photographed them, memorialized
them in art and music and literature.
They raised awareness and
forced people to see atrocities and admit to them. I am one of those who
did this work. I never contemplated a day when these expressions of
freedom would be considered weapons against those they were designed to
free.
I have no doubt that the majority of what I wrote 43-years
ago would be censored by students and administrators today. The imagery
that I chose would be offensive, perceived as appropriating or
co-opting. But, for that time, it was revolutionary and it did what we
hoped to do. We blew a hole in a wall of white supremacy and some
people were able to get through to the other side and keep going.
The
first persons of color (then called black and Chicano) were elected as
class officers and cheerleaders in that extraordinary year in a town in
the middle of nowhere in the most unlikely of circumstances.
Some
of them and some of us who were subsequently censored by faculty and
administrators went on to become city managers, mayors, public
activists, advocates and educational administrators ourselves.
Our
high school journalism instructor taught us well about the gift of
differing opinions, civil disobedience, freedom of speech and more. I am
grieving today for young adults, faculty members and administrators who
may no longer feel free enough or psychologically resilient enough to
read To Kill a Mockingbird together and unpack it for what it was and is today.
What we fear is sometimes exactly what we need to face.
Freedom of speech is the crucible in which real freedom is born.
This
column is dedicated to Tam Baldwin, advertising manager for the Abilene
High School Battery in 1971. Without her dedication, the work of our
team would never have made it to print.
Gad Saad - Evolutionary
behavioral scientist at the John Molson School of Business in Canada.
He writes for Psychology Today and is an outspoken free speech
proponent.
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topics, real news, real people.
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riccardo.fissore/FlickrThere
are many mad and worrying things about the speech codes spreading
across campuses like a contagious brain funk. There's their treatment of
even everyday words as "problematic" terms of abuse. There's the
branding of the most anodyne forms of friendly banter as "aggressive"
(apparently it is a microaggression to say to a Latino or Native American,
"We want to know what you think"). And there's the idea that even
static objects can commit acts of violence against students: one
university bemoans "environmental microaggressions," which
can include a college in which all the buildings are "named after white
heterosexual upper class males." What these codes add up to is a demand
that everyone be permanently on edge, constantly reevaluating their
every thought before uttering it. It's an invitation to social
paralysis.
But perhaps the worst thing about these tongue-clamping rules is how
they incite hyper racial-consciousness. Indeed, some college speech
codes chastise students who refuse to think racially, who balk
at the idea that they should always be actively mindful of their own and
everyone else's racial make-up.
The "problematization" of students who refuse to think and behave
racially is best captured in a University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA) guide to "Recognizing Microaggressions."
In keeping with other campus speech codes, the guide treats as dicey
everything from simple questions (such as asking someone "Where were you
born?") to expressions of faith in meritocracy (like saying "America is
the land of opportunity"). But even more perniciously, it warns
students and faculty members against being non-racial, telling them they
must always "acknowledge" other people's race.
UCLA says "Color Blindness," the idea we shouldn't obsess over
people's race, is a microaggression. If you refuse to treat an
individual as a "racial/cultural being," then
you're being aggressive. This is a profound perversion of what has been
considered the reasoned, liberal approach for decades—that treating
people as "racial/cultural beings" is wrong and dehumanizing.
UCLA offers the following examples as "color blind" utterances that count as microaggressions:
"When I look at you, I don't see color."
"There is only one race: the human race."
"I don't believe in race."
Apparently such comments deny individuals' "racial and ethnic
experience." But on a campus like UCLA a few decades ago, refusing to
treat individuals as "cultural beings" would have been the right and
good thing. Now, in an eye-swivelling reversal, the polar opposite is
the case: to demonstrate your politically correct virtue you must
acknowledge the skin color of everyone you meet.
The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point similarly advises that
color blindness is a racial microaggression. It lists "America is a
melting pot" as an aggressive phrase. It brands as problematic any
comment by a white person that suggests he or she "does not want to
acknowledge race." Anyone who claims to be "immune to races"—that is,
who prefers not to think about people as racial beings—is viewed as
aggressive.
At the University of Missouri, the guide to "inclusive terminology" lists
color-blindness as a form of prejudice, even as it recognizes that this
term "originated from civil-rights legislation." Once, color-blindness
was considered cool, but now we know it can be "disempowering for people
whose racial identity is an important part of who they are," says the
school.
And in the University of New Hampshire's (UNH) barmy guide to "bias-free language"—brilliantly mocked by Reason's Robby Soave at The Daily Beast, and now disowned by UNH's president—students
are expected to take account of a person's skin color, age, and
heritage before engaging with them. Whether they're being told that
using "American" to refer to people born in the U.S. is wrong, that they
should call Arabs "Western Asians" (what?), the message to students is
clear: judge your acquaintance's skin color, consider his or her
cultural origins, and then decide what to say. Think racially, always.
Gwendolyn R.Y. Miller, a diversity consultant who advises educational
institutions on how to tackle racial microaggressions, says being color
blind is a "microinvalidation," since
it serves to "exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts,
feelings, or experiential reality of certain groups." She says the
phrase "We all bleed red when we're cut" is a microaggression. (Perhaps
Shakespeare was being microaggressive to Jews (and others) when he wrote
his great, humanistic line: "If you prick us, do we not bleed?") Miller
says the claim that "character, not color, is what counts with me" is a racial microaggression too.
If that line sounds familiar, that's because it is almost exactly
what Martin Luther King said in his "I have a dream" speech. But
American colleges in the 21st century demonize those who follow the King
approach of judging people by "the content of their character" rather
than by the color of their skin. Today, MLK would be viewed as naive at
best and suspect at worst, conspiring to deny the primacy of our selves
as "racial/cultural beings."
But here's the thing: King—like many other postwar radicals, liberals, and progressives—was challenging the idea that people should be engaged with and judged as "racial / cultural beings." He,
and others, preferred to treat people as people, not as products or
expressions of "culture." Now, 50 years on, the regressive, racial
politics of identity has won out over that old humanistic dream of a
post-race society, to such an extent that anyone who refuses to think of
whites and blacks as different is treated as problematic.
New college speech codes don't only infantilize students and stymie
open, frank discussion. They also point to the creeping re-racialisation
of society, and to the rebranding of universalism itself as a form of
racism. Call me microaggressive all you like but, as a humanist, I will
not treat my fellow citizens as "racial/cultural beings."
Peter
Cook and Dudley Moore’s relentlessly filthy 70s albums anticipated
punk, and influenced both alternative comedy and a generation of smutty
teenagers. But is this re-release just too offensive for modern ears?
Dudley Moore, left, and Peter Cook promote the first Derek and Clive album in 1976.
Photograph: Estate of Keith Morris/Redferns
What’s
the worst job you ever had? Ask the right (wrong) person and their eyes
will light up with mischief and horrible recognition. They have found a
kindred spirit. “I had the terrible job,” they will tell you, suddenly
slipping into one of those whining, droning, ultra-boring, ultra-cockney
accents that you no longer hear in real life, “of retrieving lobsters
from up Jayne Mansfield’s arsehole.”
They may go on to inform you of Lady Vera, who can tell your future
from your farts, or their schooldays when Sir would get “jolly batey”
with them, or the time they earned a crust collecting Winston
Churchill’s bogeys, one of which was so huge it stood in for the Titanic
(“There was no such THING as the Ti-fucking-tanic!”). They’ll probably
be in their 40s and they won’t be able to control themselves laughing.
These are the men – and yes, it’s usually men – who were exposed to the
comedy albums of Derek and Clive at an impressionable age. And they’re
about to go overboard again, for all of this unfathomably filthy
material by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore is re-released this week in a box set, A Right Pair of C****: The Complete F****** Derek and Clive.
It is a (vile) body of work that stands alone in the annals of
comedy. Derek and Clive are juvenile, relentless, cheerfully disgusting
and achingly funny, but their unmatched nihilism stares so deeply into
the abyss that they’re almost unbearable to listen to for long
stretches. In the witterings of two toilet attendants, you can hear the
old head-to-head Pete and Dud sketches – the ones that won Cook and
Moore fame and affection on their 1960s BBC2 series Not Only ... But
Also – curdling into a thing of genuine darkness.
Even their fans will admit that the Derek and Clive stuff – three
largely improvised spoken-word albums recorded between 1973 and 1978 –
was truly obscene, a litany of turd jokes, masturbation gags,
splattering fart sound effects and liberal use of the C-word for which
the term “toilet humour” seems pitifully inadequate. At their worst, as
on the ugly second album, Derek and Clive Come Again, the act was a
formless, cruel mess and a reflection of the duo’s increasingly toxic
relationship. Both were drinking heavily. Cook, deep into alcoholism and
fearing to gaze upon his own decline, increasingly took out his
frustrations on Moore. At their best, though, they’re a deep dive into
British scatology and – paradoxically – a breath of fresh air. They’re
the guiltiest guilty pleasure available.
In New Zealand in 1971. Photograph: The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images
Which raises the question of how they’ll be received in today’s climate. Bluntly, there isn’t enough #problematic
in the world to cover Derek and Clive. On Come Again, Moore sings about
his mother sucking his penis. On the Sir sketch from the bleak third
album, Ad Nauseam (it came with a free sick bag), he plays an excitable
and uncomprehending schoolboy relating the time one of the masters
sexually abused him.
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Not
horrified enough? Try Cook laconically saying: “I’ve raped people ...
but always in good faith.” Or how about the infamous Soul Time sketch,
in which Moore plays exuberant R&B piano while singing: “I’m a
nigger and I fucked a white chick”? It won’t get you very far to point
out that the victims of paedophilia, rape or racism aren’t the butts of
these jokes. The targets, insofar as there are any in Derek and Clive’s
world, are your uptight bourgeois sensibilities.
“I consider myself incredibly prudish and very right on,” says
comedian Iszi Lawrence, a Derek and Clive fan since her teens, who
recalls getting into trouble for singing their Dutch Bitch song at the
school piano. “I’m very nearly a social justice warrior myself,” she
admits. “But the things that make me really cackle are the most wrong
and fucked up. Derek and Clive is supposed to be offensive – if
it doesn’t sicken you, it’s failed. Listening to it is not going to
turn you into a horrible sexist misogynist rapist. It’s comedy, and I
refuse to take comedy that seriously.”
The roots of Derek and Clive lay in Cook and Moore’s complex and
increasingly strained relationship during the early 70s. Cook’s problem
drinking and collapsing home life fed a resentment towards Moore, the
untroubled partner without whom he couldn’t work. This would worsen as
Moore struck out on his own and, later, began to make headway in
Hollywood.
The outwardly cold and aloof Peter Cook
was in fact a sensitive man, easily hurt. His heavy drinking, initially
a way to cope with his separation from his children but soon a pursuit
in itself, meant that he was often hopelessly drunk onstage during Pete
and Dud’s tours. As the late BBC comedy producer Harry Thompson relates
in his masterful Peter Cook: A Biography, the old warm double act
degenerated into a cruel new dynamic whereby Cook would torment Moore
for his own amusement.
Pete and Dud, the ‘old warm double act’. Photograph: Alan Messer/REX Shutterstock
Bored during a New York residency in 1973, Cook suggested they try
improvising some sketches in a recording studio, purely for their own
entertainment. Perhaps they could take the dirtier, unrecorded end of
their ad libbed conversations even further. Cook began the recording, in
Bell Sound Studios, with words from an old sketch he’d done around the
Private Eye office: “I’ll tell you the worst job I ever had ...” Enter
Jayne Mansfield and the lobsters, and new personas far removed from
TV-friendly Pete and Dud. They were now the seedy toilet attendants
Derek (Moore) and Clive (Cook).
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In
following sessions more bravura filth flowed, including This Bloke Came
Up to Me – Derek and Clive repeating one particular insult in a variety
of inflections – and the absolutely horrible Winkie Wanky Woo, in which
Moore plays a hideous, laryngectomal pervert luring the well-heeled
Cook into acts of gross indecency. It was utterly unbroadcastable, but
never intended for release anyway.
“This is what people need to understand about Derek and Clive,” says
comedian Mitch Benn, of Radio 4’s Now Show. “Originally, none of it was
intended to be heard by anyone. They were just doing it for their own
nihilistic, cathartic reasons. To me, the original Pete and Dud stuff
from TV is funnier but there’s something undeniable about Derek and
Clive. This is comedy that’s absolutely liberated from any constraints –
even from the constraint of an audience. You can’t call it offensive
because they never actually intended anyone to listen to it.”
Cook, however, soon lost interest in this new avenue, too. As the New
York show became an American tour, he fell deeper into drink and pills.
By the time this increasingly fraught and miserable experience ended,
Moore was adamant that the partnership was over, a decision Cook would
long harbour as a betrayal.
But studio engineers had kept the Derek and Clive tape. It found its
way into New York’s music underground, as part of a bootleg that also
featured the infamous Troggs Tapes – the hirsute Andover band arguing in
the studio (“Just fucking play it ... you big pranny!”) – and oddments
such as Orson Welles auditioning for the role of a frozen pea. Soon
bands including the Who, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin had
acquired copies and word began to reach Cook and Moore of their new
currency with the rock elite, who were always in need of lowbrow
entertainment to enliven the tedium of touring. By 1976, cassette copies
were, ironically enough, on sale in Private Eye’s classified section.
Cook, who had been becalmed and increasingly depressed since he split
with Moore, saw an opportunity. Island Records agreed to release the
tapes, plus some extras, as Derek and Clive (Live), this a last-minute
change from the planned title: Derek and Clive (Dead).
To their amazement the album became a worldwide hit, outselling any
previous Pete and Dud LP and shifting more than 100,000 copies in the
UK. Its forbidden qualities doubtless helped sales – radio stations
everywhere had no choice but to ban it – and the warning on the cover
that it should not be played to children was cordially ignored. No fewer
than four police forces reported it to the DPP for obscenity. The two
comics were once again the focus of attention. Although Moore had vowed
never to work with “that man” again, reluctantly he rejoined Cook to
promote the album and they begin writing together again.
There was something prophetic in Derek and Clive (Live), too. Though
the duo had recorded their skits in 1973, the album chimed with the
dirty minded, Uncle Disgusting aspect of punk rock. Derek and Clive’s
cottaging sketches, Jamie Reid’s homoerotic Cowboys T-shirt, Malcolm
McLaren’s rubber fixation, the strange similarity of Cook and John
Lydon’s affectless, nasal voices ... they all signalled a move to the
seedy in pop’s shared unconsciousness. Derek and Clive were not just
perverted, they were prescient.
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“Derek
and Clive anticipated the punk sensibility and the later alternative
comedy thing, too,” says Benn. “There’s a purity to that sort of
extremism that you can see in the Sex Pistols but also in acts like Rik
Mayall and Ade Edmondson as the Dangerous Brothers – of relentlessly
saying and doing everything you’re not supposed to.”
There would be two sequel albums but Derek and Clive proved to be the
end of Cook and Moore’s partnership. Cook had become too erratic and
Moore’s Hollywood career was on the verge of taking off with 10 and
Arthur. “This was the final insult for Peter Cook,” says Benn. “He
thought he might be able to make it as a leading man and who gets there
instead? His short-arsed mate.”
The disintegration of the relationship can be seen up close in the
1978 film Derek and Clive Get the Horn, which shows the fractious
recording of their final album Ad Nauseam. Though Moore is clearly
trying to leave, Cook can’t resist tormenting him. “It’s really
uncomfortable but still really funny,” says Lawrence. “It’s like
watching psychological S&M porn with two out-of-shape white blokes.”
Now the psychodrama is available again, from beginning to end. Will
Derek and Clive still resonate in the 21st century? Or are some things
just too inappropriately, offensively problematic? It remains to be
seen.
“I’m starting to have a real problem with the word ‘problematic’,”
fumes Benn. “It’s starting to sound like ‘un-American’. Complaining that
Derek and Clive is offensive is like complaining that porn is dirty.
“And anyway, even if people hate it, what are they going to do?” he wonders. “Dig them up?”
• A Right Pair of C****: The Complete F****** Derek and Clive is out now on UMC/Spectrum.
So a comedian talks to a journalist and wonders what’s the deal with political correctness. “That’s not funny!” screams the politically correct as they demand the comic keep his thoughts to himself. The lack of tolerance here serves as the punchline. When Jerry Seinfeld told an ESPN reporter last week that he’s troubled by how insufferably PC college campuses have become, it seemed like he was stating a matter of fact. “I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, ‘Don’t go near colleges. They’re so PC.’” “They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist;’ ‘That’s sexist;’ ‘That’s prejudice.’ They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.” Later in an appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” the comedy legend said the whole ideology creeped him out. To anyone who has heard of a “safe space” and is aware of the treatment that right-leaning speakers and groups face at a modern university, Seinfeld’s comments state something so obvious that he might as well have followed up with, “Did you know the sky is blue?” (RELATED: Liberal Students Are Terrifying Their Own Professors) But for such a basic observation, the response from left-wing outlets bordered on near frenzy, proving that progressives might live in a Bizarro World free of self-awareness. Salon took time away from counting every injustice the Duggars have committed against mankind to devote all of its hatred against Seinfeld. The Huffington Post published a letter from a politically-correct college student lecturing the famous comedian on what it takes to make “provocative” humor. The prolific Amanda Marcotte claimed that the comic was just looking for an excuse to make up for being a “second-rate hack.” Clearly, the underlying presumption of all the outrage is that Jerry needs to start kowtowing to the standards of political correctness. The best articulated statement of this belief is found (surprise!) in the college student’s letter. Anthony Berteaux argues that college students — while being more “sensitive to issues of race and gender politics” — still love offensive humor. They just demand that it have a progressive message. Berteaux cites an Amy Schumer sketch that plays up the supposed idea that young high school and college men are raping women left and right (even though the data paints a different picture). The joke is designed to convey that this is a real problem and men need to be shamed for it — a popular notion on the left and in line with the rape culture narrative. The young student also upholds a Louis C.K. stand-up bit that illustrates the concept of white privilege as a model for how provocative comedy should work. To recap, comedy can be offensive as long as it pushes false statistics about rape and white privilege shaming. While Berteaux instructs Seinfeld and other comics to “offend the fuck out of college students,” what he’s really saying is that comics should reinforce progressive notions with dick jokes. The student’s main point is that comedy should have an “underlying message,” but it’s clear that that message has to come from a left-wing perspective. Which, crazily enough, exactly confirms Seinfeld’s beef with politically correct students. They only want comedy that confirms their own biases. They don’t want to hear jokes that could be conservative in nature or actually offend the fuck out of them. As we all know, college kids these days could be traumatized for life if they get offended. The comedy — and culture in general — that Berteaux wants is one suitable for a safe space. That sounds awfully unprovocative. Comedy, like all art forms, requires freedom on the part of performers to express themselves. The limits imposed on comedians if they come before a campus audience restricts them in what they can say and bowdlerizes their material. It’s essentially censorship. If you care about your craft and you know that it would offend the precious ears of the stereotypical collegian, wouldn’t you follow the lead of Seinfeld and Chris Rock and say no to university crowds? One of Seinfeld’s critics, Dean Obeidallah, did concede that students today are too sensitive, but insisted that it is right for them to demand comedy that conforms to their sensibilities. I disagree. Colleges are supposed to be places where the marketplace of ideas can flourish and young minds can come in contact with a host of different ideas and a myriad viewpoints. Instead, the modern university has turned into an incubator of New Puritanism — with all the ideological dogmatism and enforced conformity that comes with it. (RELATED: The Puritans Behind Jennerpalooza) This mindset does not carry over well into the real world. That’s why it do a world of good for kids these days to expose themselves to viewpoints that genuinely offend them. At the least, they could get the message that not everyone thinks like an Amy Schumer-loving, Salon-reading, patriarchy-protesting college student.
