I don't know why I'm bothering to wade in on the "college kids are too PC to understand humor anymore," pseudo-controlversy, but there are a couple things I want to parse.
First, the idea of humor as necessary counterweight to one's own pride and hubris seems to be a little bit dead on certain segments of the left. There is this sense, especially among lefty types who seem grimly determined to have a firmer grasp of "what's going on" than everyone else, that it is known who the villains are (them) and it is known what is punching up (punching away from them) and what is punching down (punching down towards them) and that comedy acts should then comfortably re-affirm what it is they already know to be true. The kind of people who love the Onion until it hits too close to home in other words. So I do agree that there is kind of a generally obnoxious sense that for the educated left, the court jester could not possibly point out something uncomfortable that they are already not keenly aware of and have formed all the opinions that everyone has all decided are correct. Leaving me to wonder if comedy on campus is supposed to be something not so much laughed at as nodded along with sagely.
Yes, those are the sins of corporations. Yes, those are the sins of patriarchs. Yes, those are the sins of the majority and a rigged system. Well done comedy man, you checked all the right boxes.
Which is all to say, of course some members of the left are sometimes over-the-top in their preening self-regard, lack of personal humility and generally annoying "know-it-all" self-righteous attitude. Hey, it happens to the best of us. The good news is it's a nice reminder how much we have in common with the right sometimes!
That said, some caveats.
One, I'm not sure how much of a plague this really is. While yes I think the left could use some kind of lessons in not repeating the sins attributed to conservatism without the slightest hint of self-awareness, this certainly isn't all leftists and may not even be enough people to warrant the press coverage. There are lots of very nice liberal types who are willing to entertain a comedian who doesn't 100% line up with their values. The left contains multitudes. My "sense of things" written out above is just that, "a sense of things" and should not be considered worth more than the paper it's printed on. But I certainly don't think it's a dire emergency, I just want some people to tone it down with the self-righteousness and the un-ending purity crusades from time to time.
Two, it's not really true that kids these days hate comedy. Louis C. K. is filthy and pushes all kinds of boundaries and college kids love him. True, he generally seems to punch in the direction they want to see comedians punching, but that doesn't make his work sometimes very challenging (see his most recent SNL monologue for some of that! Ooph, that was hard to sit through). But, "comedians" contains multitudes too. And it IS true that some comedians are hacks who rely on tired stereotypes that more and more people don't find too funny anymore. There is a growing sense of extreme exhaustion with the traditional lack of accountability for sexist, racist, and seemingly unaccountable patriarchs who all remain firmly at the helm of so much of our civilization and so comedy that just seems to reinforce the idea that "boys will be boys" (i.e. unaccountable to anyone else) is getting less and less play. And I can't say I blame anyone for being tired of a lot of those tropes.
I don't know if I have the wherewithal to parse this much further tonight, but there does seem to some mic grabbing going on, as who gets to define what is and isn't funny. And I get it, there is power in humor. There is power in who gets to decide who and what is worthy of ridicule and therefore who it is acceptable to treat poorly. Humor is a powerful tool in normalizing cultural stories about who the heroes and villains are in a given age. True power is exposed in who and what are considered beyond the pale to joke about. So while I understand the urge to keep comedians from punching towards oneself and one's allies who are perceived as vulnerable, and therefore to be protected, a movement that can't laugh at it's own foibles is in really dangerous territory.
Maybe we should focus less about laughing at other people, and focus more on laughing at ourselves.
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