Speaking to People magazine, Melissa Rivers, daughter of famous comedian Joan Rivers, said that her mother would have been incredibly frustrated by cancel culture because of the ridiculous constraints it imposes upon comedy and humor.
Particularly, Rivers argued that Joan, known best for her snarky and now-considered “offensive” type of humor, would have been hamstrung by the cancel culture rules of what can and can’t be said, and would have been horrified by the idea of comedians being canceled for making jokes.
Commenting on how her mother would have felt about the current cancel culture regime and its constraining rules, said, “I think she’d be very frustrated.” Explaining from where her mother’s dislike of the cancel culture regime would have stemmed, Rivers noted that it would have made her unfunny and she would have detested that. “She’d hate not being able to be funny,” Melissa Rivers told People.
Continuing, Melissa Rivers went on to tell People what her mother’s philosophy regarding comedy was and how that view of why it is important to be funny and make people laugh was something that was so important to her. Rivers said, “She always said, when you make someone laugh, it’s like giving them a mini vacation. So when we all lost our sense of humor about everything, she would not have liked it.”
Then, building on that, she joked that Joan would not have cared a bit if the cancel culture types tried to cancel her, saying, “On the one hand, she wouldn’t give a s— if she were canceled.” Jokingly, Melissa then added, “Then again, that would only happen if I let her out of the closet and removed the duct tape from her mouth.”
Melissa also noted how Joan tried to fight back against the cancel culture walls closing in on comedy by the end of her career, using words to help the audience realize that jokes were jokes. Melissa said, “Towards the end of her life when she was performing, she’d come out on stage and just come up with every horrible word there was for everyone and let loose with a string of it, and you could just hear the audience gasping. Then she’d say, ‘See, every single one of us, we’re all something. Now let’s get started.'”
Building on that story, Melissa used it to show how Joan viewed comedy and the culture of victimhood and outrage, saying that people need to laugh instead of taking everything so seriously. She said, “Her whole thing was, oh God, everybody take a deep breath. The world and life is hard enough as it is. Everyone’s got to stop. There’s plenty of times that we have to take things incredibly seriously in our lives, but cancel culture, while it feels like it’s lessening up in a way, it had gone way too far.”
And, giving an example of how cancel culture and sensitivity have ruined comedy, Melissa told People, “The Golden Globes were an example of that. People decided they weren’t going to laugh, so they didn’t. The fact that Jo Koy was taken to task for a joke that essentially complimented Taylor Swift … I know what my mom would say, ‘Everybody lighten up! We’re the entertainment! We’re not serious people. We’re not doing neurosurgery! We’re not solving world hunger! We make entertainment!'”
Featured image credit: By Peter T. – Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59642803
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