Caitlin Flanagan, Atlantic - Three comics sat around a café table in the chilly atrium of the Minneapolis Convention Center, talking about how to create the cleanest possible set. “Don’t do what’s in your gut,” Zoltan Kaszas said. “Better safe than sorry,” Chinedu Unaka offered. Feraz Ozel mused about the first time he’d ever done stand-up: three minutes on giving his girlfriend herpes and banging his grandma. That was out.
This was not a case of professionals approaching a technical problem as an intellectual exercise. Money was riding on the answer. They had come to Minneapolis in the middle of a brutal winter for the annual convention of the National Association for Campus Activities, to sell themselves and their comedy on the college circuit. Representatives of more than 350 colleges had come as well, to book comics, musicians, sword swallowers, unicyclists, magicians, hypnotists, slam poets, and every kind of boat act, inspirational speaker, and one-trick pony you could imagine for the next academic year..
The colleges represented . . . liked their slam poets to
deliver the goods in tones of the highest seriousness and on subjects of
lunar bleakness; they favored musicians who could turn out covers with
cheerful precision; and they wanted comedy that was 100 percent
risk-free, comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a
single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and
aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly
wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him
like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to
toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless
sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke....
Two of the most respected American
comedians, Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld, have discussed the unique
problems that comics face on college campuses. In November, Rock told
Frank Rich in an interview for New York magazine that he no
longer plays colleges, because they’re “too conservative.” He didn’t
necessarily mean that the students were Republican; he meant that they
were far too eager “not to offend anybody.” In college gigs, he said,
“you can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.” Then, in
June, Seinfeld reopened the debate—and set off a frenzied round of
op-eds—when he said in a radio interview that comics warn him not to “go
near colleges—they’re so PC.”
When
I attended the convention in Minneapolis in February, I saw ample
evidence of the repressive atmosphere that Rock and Seinfeld described,
as well as another, not unrelated factor: the infantilization of the
American undergraduate, and this character’s evolving status in the
world of higher learning—less a student than a consumer, someone whose
whims and affectations (political, sexual, pseudo-intellectual) must be
constantly supported and championed...
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2 comments:
Similar to Sam, I went to a Friends school in Philadelphia - Penn Charter. So I was exposed to Quaker philosophy at an early age, and regularly too. An hour a week in Meeting. Some of the more strict Quakers at Penn Charter, the ones who would call Sunday first day and January first month, were very wary of humor. Their stated logic was that humor always requires a "butt", as in the "butt" of a joke. Consequently, they opined that humor was intrinsically abusive, therefore to be avoided. The only circumstance, in their view, where humor might be acceptable is when the "butt" of the humor was the speaker himself. But self deprecation was also to be avoided. I remember as a youngster thinking that their position on this was logical and had merit, even though I thought Polish jokes were funny. Despite the seeming strictness of their rationale, it does lead to a more civil and humane social order, to which I can attest and from which I personally benefited.
Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld; Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce; Moms Mabley, Groucho. Neo-Nuremburg laws to protect the Nordic corporate culture.
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