The reasons for my suspicion are well captured in Graham Greene’s classic short story “A Shocking Accident”. It is never funny for most women.” I am highly suspicious of these kinds of claims. Rape is many things - humiliating, degrading, physically and emotionally painful, exhausting, irritating. The piece continues, “ I don’t have it in me to find rape jokes funny or to tolerate them in any way. But are some things categorically unfunny? As one writer in Salon put it, perhaps a touch naively, “Humor is subjective but is it that subjective?” The contention is that some subjects are so awful and disturbing that no treatment could ever make them appear funny. What one person finds funny, another may not. funny.” Finding out what this phrase means to those who use it and how it became so important may tell us a great deal.Īs is repeated wearingly often, comedy is subjective. All these beleaguered comedians have met with the same statement, “That’s. Looking into it can yield insights for our larger conversations about public discourse. It is, at once, political discourse, discourse about art, and discourse about the intellectual life on our college campuses. Outrage over comedy has become something of a regular feature of American political life, and it is worth talking about, partly because it brings together so many of the most interesting parts of our discourse. Loveable degenerate Jim Norton has even made censorship something of a cause celebre, often spitting bile at “coddled, hair-patted little babies” (Norton’s view of American college students). In rapid succession, Daniel Tosh and Anthony Jeselnick made national news for telling jokes involving rape. Chris Rock has gone as far as to say that he has given up on college audiences, and so too, to hear him tell it, did the late, great George Carlin. Only recently, Patton Oswald got in a protracted and often amusing debate with Salon over criticism leveled against a joke that was deemed “racist.” Jerry Seinfeld, always a remarkably clean comic, has complained about increasingly sensitive audiences. Certainly I am not the only one, as over the years, there has been a regular stream of controversies and shouting matches over what kinds of jokes ought to be deemed permissible. I want to focus on one small area of our public discourse and its troubled relationship to censorship and that’s comedy. I can’t remember a time when so much energy (and printer’s ink) has gone into debating free speech and censorship.
One good thing to come in the wake of these frequently misguided and often intolerant student protests has been a real and surprisingly hopeful national conversation about public discourse.
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