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Comment by fluxquanta | Hacker News Reader

This ties in with the other article that was posted here about over-sensitivity[0]. I follow stand-up comedy pretty closely, and so many comedians seem to be facing more and more verbal (and sometimes physical) push back from jokes that are "offensive", and I find this trend really disturbing.

It's an interesting phenomenon you don't see in other artistic performances. Comedy is the one realm where an audience will show up, uninformed by reviews or any research into who they're seeing perform (as opposed to say, watching a movie trailer, for example), and be so offended (and entitled) that they feel they must take public action against the performer directly.

A comedian's jokes may very well be unfunny to a group of people, but does that inherently give anyone the right to try to silence it from being said? And should a joke someone finds offensive cost a comedian opportunities in their career?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533219

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I can totally picture Anthony Jeselnik's first album Shakespeare causing a huge backlash these days. That album was released a few years ago, but the state of "offense sensitivity" is so heightened now that it would not have gotten him very far today. It's one of the greatest comedy albums of the last 15 years, but considering he's a white cis male, the amount of fire he would get today would be unbearable.

Let's see how some examples go down:

"People say it's easy to make fun of retarded people, but it's not. You really have to explain it to them."

"My great grandmother threw herself in front of a bus. The police tried to say she had committed suicide but the family knew she was just trying to stop civil rights."

"I’ve spent the past two years looking for my ex-girlfriend’s killer... but no one will do it."

http://scomedy.com/quotes/Anthony-Jeselnik

The last special he made, he bombed so hard I just stopped following him. It's just hard to find things funny when absolutely no one else is smirking...

On the other hand, that kind of outrage is my most reliable source for finding great comedians that I didn't know about.

Check out Kurt Metzger.

Also check out Stewart Lee.

>The last special he made, he bombed so hard I just stopped following him. It's just hard to find things funny when absolutely no one else is smirking...

I thought it was his best yet, but you touched on a good point: If his (or anyone else's) comedy isn't your style anymore, that's fine -- you just stop following/listening to them. If you're at a club, you get up quietly and leave. Maybe ask a manager for your money back if you feel you deserve it.

I'm not offended by it, and they are somewhat funny, but your examples just feel lazy to me. They're just very basic wordplay, and not particularly clever. I think there are a lot of comics who use offensive topics to spice up mediocre jokes, but adding an offensive element doesn't actually make the humor better. You might attract an audience because of the shock value, but I don't know that it's the sort of thing that's going to keep an audience long-term.

Nothing wrong with incorporating offensive subjects in comedy, but there needs to be more meat to it.

With Jeselnik it's all about the delivery and the persona he has. You're right, though -- it's classic misdirection which can be a bit cliche.

It's all about delivery. You can't read those jokes and get the same experience. I could read those lines on stage and no one would laugh at all. Anthony has great stage presence and his deadpan delivery really enhances his jokes.

> the state of "offense sensitivity" is so heightened now

Is it? This keeps being repeated, but I'm not seeing it in the general population. Sure, there are some loud people here and there, but overall it seems exaggerated to me. Of course, that's anecdotal, but still, I'm not buying it just yet.

In doing a quick search for research on the topic all I could find was an essay on why 2015 was the year of the SJW http://www.salon.com/2015/12/31/5_reasons_2015_was_the_year_...

I am aligned with the positions explored for the most part, but it seems like self-righteous offense inevitably emerges as a defense mechanism for these types of views.

Fake moral superiority for the purpose of subjugating others.

Some people value being 'right' more than they value being happy. Some have an agenda or hidden motivation to talk down to others.

As long as there's an advantage to be gained from it there will always be individuals who bully others. Old school bullying has been replaced with 'moral' grandstanding and public shaming.

We used to teach kids, "sticks and stones will break my bones but words can never hurt me." At some point, that tradition was abandoned and some individuals shifted to assume the stance of 'perpetually offended' so they have a justifiable platform to attack others.

I hear this "people are being silenced" thing a lot, and it always makes me think.

If other people find those jokes offensive, and want to raise a stink about it, would you "silence" them?

Especially since this is all happening entirely in the marketplace of ideas--people aren't passing laws banning jokes, comics aren't being arrested or shot--if the general tide of public opinion has turned and a comic can't make a living telling jokes of a certain type of offensiveness, isn't that just the way a society evolves?

I was speaking more to the comedy club setting, in which case yes, I would absolutely attempt to silence a heckler (and have). In no other public performance is it acceptable to cause a ruckus because you don't agree with what the performer is doing or saying.

I don't think that's true. Tchaikovsky's "Rite of Spring" caused riots when it was premiered. The audience was laughing derisively, getting into fights, throwing things... and this was at a ballet!

Galleries and museums are often the site of protests about their own content. I've been in the theater during a really terrible movie where the audience starts loudly heckling the movie itself as if the people who made it could hear them.

When you make the case for acceptable behavior on the part of the audience as an attack on someone else's idea of acceptable behavior on the part of the comic... that seems like shaky ground to me.

At least I will say that my feelings here are consistent -- those examples you provided are also unacceptable.

You know what? I'm totally off my rocker, not sure what I thought I was responding to. Sorry! Wish I could delete my original comment!

In the comedy club itself, I'd say yeah, definitely! The proprietor ought to be able to set any rules they want, definitely including "no heckling" or whatever. I didn't realize that in-the-moment heckling was going on for "offensive" comedians in any widespread way.

I always hear about it through social media, like someone on twitter calling out someone for making jokes they didn't like--and that's the speech I can't imagine silencing (even if some people can't get gigs anymore).

Market forces will prevail, absolutely, but in my opinion the biggest factor in criticizing comedy should be one question: is it funny? One problem is, or so I hear, that people aren't even listening long enough to make that determination. Some people will hear "trigger words" and then it doesn't matter if the joke is funny or not because they've already passed judgement.

Take for instance the account of comedian Kurt Metzger beginning one of his bits with "Are you guys for gay marriage? Well I'm not," (I believe it was this joke told in a club [0]) at which point a woman sitting in the front row grabbed a drink, not even her own, and threw it at him because he said he was "against gay marriage". In what world is that okay to do?

And of course my analysis of it being a growing trend is purely anecdotal from the shows and festivals I've been to and the podcasts I listen to.

[0] http://www.cc.com/video-clips/h6f2uv/stand-up-kurt-metzger--...

There's a lot to unpack there. Who's doing the silencing? Can the comedian not get gigs because enough people are offended by them? What is meant by "silencing"? Is it just complaining or are they actively preventing that person from working?

Obviously, in a specific venue, only the proprieter has the right to remove the comedian (also, for those of you that go to standup shows: no one wants to hear what you have to say, be quiet). I fully support the comedian's right to say whatever they want to say and bear the full brunt of what that means for their career.

Well, one bad joke against the pregnant wife of someone with high-connections caused a stop in the career of a Brazilian Comediant some years ago. But the same kind of joke, now made against a not-so-popular target, went flawlessly

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