Airplane! is another movie that "wouldn't be allowed to be made today"
The line "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" would be a scandal today.
The line "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" would be a scandal today.
I feel like we're stuck in this absurd cycle where the outrage to the outrage becomes a force multiplier. A small number of very vocal people on the left express outrage about X. Not a view shared by the vast majority of the population, left and right included. Right wing media picks up on said outrage and makes vast, sweeping statements about what it means about "the left" and "America today". The whole thing snowballs, some folks on the left end up defending people they don't agree with just because of the outrage on the right... blah blah blah it all eventually dies down until we do the same dance a couple of months later.
It's all an absurd waste of everyone's time, except for the folks like Tucker Carlson that get record viewing figures and a huge pay day from it.
However, I don't think the outrage cycle is really contained within Twitter, or within social media in general. It also spills over to traditional media, at least to some extent. Since it gets a lot of attention, including sometimes from influential people, it can actually affect the kinds of content that people dare make, especially if financial risks are involved.
What you're "allowed" to do is a bit of an imprecise expression unless you go right down to law, but it would be a little disingenuous to pretend that social pressure doesn't affect what people expect others to find permissible. Getting outrage thrown at you can certainly make people feel something is socially forbidden. (That of course serves a pro-social role as well. But I don't think we're used to the idea that it's normal to have outrage or other strong emotional condemnation towards something we do from random people we don't know unless we've done something totally unacceptable. We're wired to think of social acceptance as important and outrage as something that requires our attention. The way social media works throws us off because of that. But I digress.)
Something should replace it, though. Transparent accountability is good, and I think we'll really need to figure this one out before a tech monolopy takes advantage of it again.
True, but don't pretend that folks like Samantha Bee or Joy Reid aren't exactly the same thing for the other side.
If there are examples of this level of disinformation coming from Samantha Bee and/or Joy Reid I'd be interested to see them.
That's a bit of a cop-out in some ways, especially depending on how it's meant.
If it's meant to indicate that Samantha Bee uses humor, that's fine. But by the same token, Rush Limbaugh used humor. Ben Shapiro and Stephen Crowder use humor. None of those people do a show with their primary intention being to get a laugh, though. They do a show with their primary intention being to express a point of view, and if they can use humor to do that, all the better.
If it's meant to indicate that we shouldn't take Samantha Bee too seriously, don't worry; I don't. I also don't take Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson too seriously, either.
But usually, it's meant to deflect criticism. Jon Stewart did the same thing. He would make serious criticisms of commentators (including a much younger Tucker Carlson) as if he was trying to be taken seriously, but as soon as anyone criticized him he would immediately fall back to, "I'm a comedian!"
To his credit though, John Oliver (who was on the Daily Show along with Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert back in the day) doesn't seem to hide behind the "I'm a comedian" shield anymore.
[0] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/06/24/joy_reid_...
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/joy-reid-fact-check-tapper-1546432
[2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/27/17286392/j...
Who is pretending they can't tell the difference?
Studio Execs are very sensitive to outrage. It's part of the calculus.
Often, the outrage is perpetuated within the industry as well.
That said - Airplane would get made - they'd just adjust the jokes accordingly.
When they made Airplane, there were a lot of gags they didn't use because they just were 'too much' - or not funny.
So adjusting the content a bit is always something going on.
That said, the 'fear bar' is much, much lower for certain formats.
My canary for that is Tina Fey. And Judd Apatow. These are staunchly progressive people, but with serious comedy chops. They have been making some passive aggressive public statements lately with respect to this stuff, you can hear what they think on podcasts.
What we need is for Mel Brooks is to come back and save us. He's too old, but if he backed a Ben Stiller remake of 'Blazing Saddles' - I think it would be the funniest thing of the century.
How do you even know it wouldn't be allowed? People love to spout this kind of stuff, but... have you even tried?
Edit: A very nice example I've come across is Ricky Gervais stating that the British Office couldn't be made today. I think he's being very disingenuous saying that because while out of context it could appear to have a lot of controversial jokes touching on taboo subjects, within the show it was always clear who the real target of the jokes was (same with Borat). Masterfully done and I believe (from what I've seen in terms of comedy recently) that kind of stuff would still fly at the BBC. There's even a documentary from a couple of decades back about the success of the office and a BBC producer admits even back then they had to reign in a few of the areas Gervais wanted to go in terms of race & disability (it was also mentioned that he is quite obsessed with these topics), so its all bullshit that people like him are shouting about "THESE DAYS...!".
In fact maybe he's right and the Office couldn't be made today. But that's primarily because Gervais isn't funny these days
But that’s exactly why it could not be made today. Today, you can’t say anything which can be taken out of context. Quote mining has become a national pastime.
His recent standup work has far more objectionable content in it than the Office ever did
TL;DR: of course a standup's routine is much less scrutanized than any other type of content by the nature of it.
> Please stop saying "You can't joke about anything anymore". You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system.
https://screenrant.com/original-office-show-ricky-gervais-ca...
> "Now [The Office] would suffer because people would take things literally...This was a show about everything — it was about difference, it was about sex, race, all the things that people fear to even be discussed or talked about now, in case they say the wrong thing and they are cancelled...I think if this was put out now, some people have lost their sense of irony and context."
> “…They’re even more scared now because people don’t take an explanation for an answer, they just say, ‘Well, I don’t want to see it, so let’s ban it.’”
Obviously the Office isn't in the limelight anywhere near as much as it used to be, but I never hear people having a problem with its tone or style of comedy. A few other sitcoms have had scenes removed from streaming platforms / boxsets (Peep Show, Fawlty Towers etc). But the Office I've never really seen mentioned in a similar way. In fact it's still pretty much beloved by everyone and regularly polls amongst the best British sitcoms of all time.
[1] https://tvline.com/2020/06/26/the-office-community-blackface...
However, they are vastly different shows tonally and so I imagine a scene featuring black face would be handled very differently by the US version
I think a better example of movies which "wouldn't be allowed today" is probably something like the Hangover, which just mines outdated stereotypes & slurs for laughs. Just a sign of society moving on really (as much as Todd Phillips likes to cry about it, I feel his inability to adapt to the comedy landscape is really just a failure of the imagination). I thought the 21 / 22 Jump Street movie addressed this issue quite well it seems the shift took place sometime between the two releases
But I'm not sure how many things are really outright taboo. For example, I've also heard people say that Heathers couldn't be made today--can't be threatening to blow up a school--but it was actually staged as an off-Broadway musical not all that long ago.
Borat is racist, it's not 'satirical' and that's ok, the world's complicated. It's also ok to hide behind 'satirical' as everyone does, except when you get picky on movies you personally don't think are 'satirical'
Hollywood's inability to deal with kissing is academically interesting. Currently combining sarcasm with the 'correct' actions they are told to follow. It's a dangerous path towards the religious moralism we left behind in the 60's, but perhaps I fear change.
The idea nothing is happening is incorrect.
Blackface being problematic isn't something we just figured out in the last 12 years, and people trying to do something funny with it anyway isn't new either.
I still don't quite get how they managed to get a movie centered around a character in black face made, even though it was obviously a parody.
FWIW It's Always Sunny is, I believe, considered the longest running live action sitcom. Longest running sitcom overall is The Simpsons.
The Simpsons is most definitely a sitcom, just one that happens to be animated.
If you opened a textbook on mass media, it might have a definition of sitcom that is more culturally relevant.
A square is also a rectangle.
I guess soap operas don't count?
I'm not sure it's our job to keep adding qualifiers to the OP's bold statement that "Simpsons is not considered a sitcom, but it is the longest running show, period." until it's finally accurate.
In any case... PBS' Nova is 47 years old. Frontline is 37. I believe those are aired in prime time. And they are "not considered a sitcom" either.
I think the problem is that a lot of the humor in Airplane has aged like sour milk - it's not a comedy made to stand the test of time. Consider "Blazing Saddles", which does not suffer from this problem nearly as much and is 6 years older. I could see it getting made today just fine with a few tweaks.
And Blazing Saddles is the poster child for "could not get made today" arguments.
Blazing Saddles was the poster child for that when many of the movies that argument is now made about were made, too.
Because its the kind of movie that could never be made, except that it was. And if there was a Mel Brooks-in-his-prime now, the modern equivalent (which, presumably, Blazing Samurai this year will not be) could get made today.
That's not the biggest change:
Not any different than the very common older, white racist character in sitcoms today. They're funny! Not because racism is funny, but because the unacceptability of their racism is funny.
Yes, the kind of comedy it has is very tied to the immediate social context for commercial viability, both as to the what it is lampooning (late-70s disaster films) and how.
The broader template of Airplane! (broad take-it-to-11 parody of recently popular film patterns) because it was itself the pattern for its own flood of films in the 2000s (Scary Movie, Date Movie, Superhero Movie, and several sequels to Scary Movie).