What killed comedy? According to comedian and actor Jerry Seinfeld, it’s “the extreme left” and political correctness nonsense that destroyed funny shows on television, as good jokes couldn’t make it past the censors and soo shows lost the spirit and humor that once made them beloved and widely watched in America.
Such is what he said in an interview with The New Yorker published over the weekend on April 28, saying that comedy is something people always need, so it used to be generally unimpacted by societal nonsense. But then, with the rise of political correctness, that was thrown out of the window, and comedy was kneecapped, much to the detriment of comedians and the viewing public.
Explaining what sort of situation that has created, Seinfeld said that people still need comedy like they used to, but are unable to get it in their lives because of the rampant political correctness and its destruction of funny things, particularly on television. He said, “Nothing really affects comedy. People always need it. They need it so badly and they don’t get it.”
Then, explaining how things used to be, back before out-of-control leftism ruined comedy, he said that people used to have shows they could retreat to when they got home, shows that were funny. He said, “It used to be, you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, “Oh, ‘Cheers’ is on. Oh, ‘M*A*S*H’ is on. Oh, ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ is on. ‘All in the Family’ is on.” You just expected, there’ll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight.”
Continuing, he noted that such shows, shows that are both funny and enjoyed by a huge swathe of society, are gone, dead and buried by the woke need to worry about offending people rather than just being funny. “Well, guess what — where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people,” Seinfeld explained.
So, instead of turning to television shows, they have to seek out comedians who aren’t willing to be silenced by the political correctness nonsense, joking that the audience keeps comedians funny and on track. He said, “Now they’re going to see stand up comics because we are not policed by anyone. The audience polices us. We know when we’re off track. We know instantly and we adjust to it instantly.”
Returning to the issue of how wokeness in the television industry killed comedy but hasn’t yet managed to kill individual comedians, Seinfeld said, “But when you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups — ‘Here’s our thought about this joke.’” He added, “Well, that’s the end of your comedy.”
Giving an example of how comedy is ruined by such people and committees, he added, “We did an episode of the [‘Seinfeld’] in the nineties where Kramer decides to start a business of having homeless people pull rickshaws because, as he says, ‘They’re outside anyway.’ Do you think I could get that episode on the air today?…We would write a different joke with Kramer and the rickshaw today. We wouldn’t do that joke. We’d come up with another joke. They move the gates like in the slalom. Culture—the gates are moving. Your job is to be agile and clever enough that, wherever they put the gates, I’m going to make the gate.”
Listen to the audio of the interview here:
Make comedy legal again!
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Featured image credit: By photo by Alan Light, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1318511
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