I have been saying for a long time that progressives ruin everything. If something is fun and enjoyable, these people will find a way to spoil it with their fixation on wokeness. Take comedy, for example. Over the years, we have seen numerous attempts to cancel famous comedians and to scold the rest of the public for thinking they are funny. It seems that they wish to destroy the art as we know it and recreate it in their own unfunny image. But can they succeed?
The thought came to me when I came across a Babylon Bee interview with comedian John Cleese of Monty Python fame. Cleese, who has been a vocal critic of wokeism, pointed out that the political correctness foisted upon the nation by the progressive crowd is having a “disastrous” impact on comedy.
During the conversation, which took place at FreedomFest in Las Vegas, he noted that progressives are threatening the future of comedy. “The woke people seem to have no real understanding of meaning because a word or a phrase — what its meaning is — depends on its context and not on its dictionary definition,” Cleese explained.
When asked if comedians have the freedom to be funny in 2022, Cleese replied, “No.”
Later in the discussion, he said that the animus against comedy coming from the hard left is stifling creativity, which can only occur in an “atmosphere of freedom.” He continued:
“But I think it’s particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you’re not checking everything you say critically before you move on. What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you’re going because you’ve never been there before. That’s what creativity is—you have to be allowed to build. And a lot of comedians now are sitting there and when they think of something, they say something like, ‘Can I get away with it? I don’t think so. So and so got into trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that.’ You see what I mean? And that’s the death of creativity.”
Cleese added:
“So I would say at the moment, this is a difficult time, particularly for young comedians, but you see, my audience is much older, and they’re simply not interested in most of the woke attitudes. I mean, they just think that you should try and be kind to people and that’s no need to complicate it, you know?”
The comedian later told Fox News that wokeism enables the “critical mind” to take over the creative and that these two elements are “definitely in opposition to each other.”
“You can do the creation and then criticize it, but you can’t do them at the same time. So if you’re worried about offending people and constantly thinking of that, you are not going to be very creative. So I think it has a disastrous effect,” he explained, also lamenting the reality that “everything is more politicized now.”
Unfortunately, it seems Cleese has hit the proverbial nail on the head. Everything is being politicized – especially comedy. You can’t watch a late-night show without being subjected to a lengthy diatribe about how horrible Trump and his supporters are. Comedians risk cancelation if they happen to tell a joke that upsets the woke crowd, and this is the problem.
High-profile comedians like Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, and others have frequently come under fire for not following the rules laid out by the woke Sanhedrin. But, despite billions of attempts to cancel them, their careers remain intact. In fact, they have thrived under the attacks.
But Chappelle and Burr have long-established careers. They have been around for decades and people love both of them. Nobody wants to see their careers end. In short, they are uncancelable.
However, younger up-and-coming performers do not have this luxury. They can’t afford to take the risks that Chappelle can. It would be far easier for the Cancel Culture Community to put an end to their careers because they lack the clout necessary to withstand a barrage of crybullying from progressives. This means that the future of comedy as we know it is in great peril.
If comedians are cowed into performing routines that are acceptable to the hard left, the artform will suffer. Everyone knows that the far-leftist progressive crowd is not funny – at least not intentionally so. America will be forced to watch woke comedians get on stage and lecture the rest of us about how racist/sexist/transphobic we are as they seek to earn clapter instead of actual laughs. In short, the progressive crowd will have brutally murdered comedy as an art form.
Of course, this is not a foregone conclusion. Yes, the threat of cancelation is real, but in the end, it is the audience who decides which performers will attain success, not the purple-haired feminist who scours the internet every morning to see what she is supposed to be offended by for the rest of the day. But this won’t matter unless enough people are willing to drown out the woke crowd when they start whining about offensive jokes. We have to be louder than they are, or else the only comedy specials available will be Amy Schumer telling us about her sad sex life.
