The Atlantic‘s Caitlin Flanagan is one of my hate reads, because in her sweaty-palmed obsession with Kids These Days and the contents of their underwear drawers/chatrooms, she turns up in some interesting venues. As when reporting how “Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke“:
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 (NACA), 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.
For the comics, the college circuit offers a lucrative alternative to Chuckle Hut gigs out on the pitiless road, spots that pay a couple hundred bucks and a free night in whatever squat the club owner uses to warehouse out-of-town talent. College gigs pay easily a grand a night—often much more—and they can come in a firecracker string, with relatively short drives between schools, each hour-long performance paid for (without a moment’s ugliness or hesitation) by a friendly student-activities kid holding out a check and hoping for a selfie. For all these reasons, thousands of comics dream of being invited to the convention.
The colleges represented were—to use a word that their emissaries regard as numinous—diverse: huge research universities, tiny liberal-arts colleges, Catholic schools, land-grant institutions. But the students’ taste in entertainment was uniform. They 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…
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. To understand this change, it helps to think of college not as an institution of scholarly pursuit but as the all-inclusive resort that it has in recent years become—and then to think of the undergraduate who drops out or transfers as an early checkout. Keeping hold of that kid for all four years has become a central obsession of the higher-ed-industrial complex. How do you do it? In part, by importing enough jesters and bards to keep him from wandering away to someplace more entertaining, taking his Pell grant and his 529 plan and his student loans with him.
But which jesters, which bards? Ones who can handle the challenge. Because when you put all of these forces together—political correctness, coddling, and the need to keep kids at once amused and unoffended (not to mention the absence of a two-drink minimum and its crowd-lubricating effect)—the black-box theater of an obscure liberal-arts college deep in flyover territory may just be the toughest comedy room in the country…
… Trying to explain to these kids any of the fundamental truths of stand-up—from why it’s not a good idea to hold a comedy show in the cafeteria during lunch hour, to why jokes involving gay people aren’t necessarily homophobic—is a nonstarter, and only serves to antagonize the customers. The logic problem is also responsible for the fact that many of the comics at the convention weren’t very funny, and several of those who were funny didn’t get much work, despite garnering huge laughs and even standing ovations.
A young gay man with a Broadway background named Kevin Yee sang novelty songs about his life, producing a delirium of affection from the audience. “We love you, Kevin!” a group of kids yelled between numbers. He invited students to the front of the auditorium for a “gay dance party,” and they charged down to take part. His last song, about the close relationship that can develop between a gay man and his “sassy black friend,” was a killer closer; the kids roared in delight, and several African American young women in the crowd seemed to be self-identifying as sassy black friends. I assumed Yee would soon be barnstorming the country. But afterward, two white students from an Iowa college shook their heads: no. He was “perpetuating stereotypes,” one of them said, firmly. “We’re a very forward-thinking school,” she told me. “That thing about the ‘sassy black friend’? That wouldn’t work for us.” Many others, apparently, felt the same way: Yee ended up with 18 bookings—a respectable showing, but hardly a reflection of the excitement in the room when he performed…
Bringing great artists to colleges is not NACA’s mission. Its mission involves presenting for potential employment on American campuses a group of entertainers whose work upholds a set of ideas that has been codified by bureaucrats. And in the comedians’ desperate attempts to grasp the realpolitik of the college market—and to somehow reverse engineer an act catered to it—you could see why stand-up is such a singular form: it is mercilessly ineffective as agitprop.
Because the inclination to hold a convention in Minneapolis in February is not widely shared, the convention center was largely deserted and dystopian. Homeless men, some wearing hospital gowns and ID bracelets under their parkas, slunk quietly inside to keep warm, although if they panhandled or menaced anyone they were bounced back onto the urban tundra by security guards. Vast expanses of the structure loomed in all directions, and empty escalators wheeled ever upward. During the day, “educational sessions” on topics of inexpressible tedium—“Wave Goodbye to Low Volunteer Retention”—droned on, testament (as are the educational sessions of a hundred other conferences) to the fact that the growth field in higher education is not Elizabethan literature or organic chemistry but mid-level administration.
All of this was enlivened—mightily—by the fact that the doors of the main auditorium regularly swung open for two-hour variety shows. These shows were like episodes of America’s Got Talent—jolly and sparkly, sometimes diverting and sometimes wearisome—but in contrast to the lectures on volunteer retention, the gloomy convention center, and the gelid metropolis beyond, they came to seem like examples of the highest reaches of human achievement, and it was not mere journalistic zeal that had me thundering down the main aisle to grab a good seat for each new showcase.
The kids in the audience belonged to their schools’ student-activities committees, and had thus been appointed the task of picking the paid entertainment for the next year. I found them, as a type, to be cheerful, helpful, rule-following, and nerdy. They were also—in the best sense of a loaded word—inclusive. “We don’t want to sponsor an event that would offend anyone,” Courtney Bennett, the incoming president of the student-activities board at Western Michigan University, told me. The NACA kids were impossible not to like, although nothing about them suggested a natural talent for identifying original forms of artistic expression. They would cluster around their grown-up advisers like flocks of ducklings to powwow about the performers they had seen. Then, with the casual ease of people spending someone else’s money, they would use an app to blast potential dates to the artists they liked. These were the buyers, then: one half of the equation…
There were comics of Nigerian, Afghan Pakistani, Indian, Hispanic, and Korean–African American heritage. Some were very good. But others barely had the 15 minutes necessary for a showcase; it was hard to believe they would have the hour needed for college work. Many of these younger artists thought that if they could just get the gigs off this audition, they could then do their regular club act once they showed up on campus. They were mistaken. Tell a joke that upsets the kids, and the next morning the student-activities director is going to be on the phone: to your agent, to NACA, and—more crucially—to his or her co-equals at the other four colleges in the region that you booked…
Peale
Nope. Not gonna give Caitlin Flannigan the time of day. Although I see she’s taken to actually interviewing people rather than imagining people harmed by liberals and then quoting herself. I guess that’s a step up in her journalistic career.
JGabriel
Caitlin Flanagan:
George Bush got through 4 years at Yale:
There goes Flanagan’s thesis. College has been a resort (for those who choose that route) for a pretty long time. I mean, seriously, does anyone really think Bush got through Yale because of his interest in scholarly pursuit?
Joel
Sickboy’s universal theorem applies:
“So what you’re saying is, you get old, and you can’t hack it anymore?”
Derelict
The crux of the biscuit is up front: The infantilizing of the undergraduates. I have two nieces who are both heading into their second years in college. They are chronologically 20 years old, but emotionally somewhere around 13 years old. They have spent their lives coddled and cosseted, protected from anything that might even mildly offend them or make them question themselves and their beliefs.
And I wonder how they will survive when they finally graduate into a world that really doesn’t give a fuck about their feelings. How will they fare when their boss hands them an assignment with a firm deadline, then rakes them over the coals for failing to meet that deadline?
A little exposure to things that make them uncomfortable now just might save them from complete emotional breakdown later.
bemused
@Derelict:
Do they know how to do their own laundry? At one kid’s entry into college, a parent asked in parent orientation session who would show their kid how to do his/her laundry. No lie.
Derelict
@JGabriel:
The “resort” aspect is highly dependent. For someone like Bush, grandson of a senator, son of a CIA director, legacy student, and highly connected, Yale or Harvard are definitely a complete skate. That’s been true since their founding.
Back when I went to college in the stone age, there was no “resort” aspect to any of it. You did the work and got the grades you earned. Dorms were spare, student services sparse. And all any of us wanted to do was graduate as quickly as possible so we could stop being desperately poor.
Derelict
@bemused: One does. The other, I don’t know.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
all this because old man Seinfeld threw a tantrum about his bad joke?
[Chattering] Thank you for coming.
I think Curb Your Enthusiasm made it pretty clear who was the Lennon and who was the McCartney on the set of his sitcom
sigaba
Kids can take a joke just fine.
It’s administrators and benefactors that get freaked out.
I don’t know, I went to college 15 years ago, to a very well-heeled private university, is it really common for a college to be booking live performance gigs on a regular basis? I mean like, what’s the pedagogical intent?
If we’re proceeding under the assumption, or at least the pretext, that these comedians and sword-swallowers are a part of education, yeah I can see why students, teachers, admins, busybodies would get upset at offensive acts. It just seems like people aren’t having very deep conversations about what a comic, hired and paid by a university, is supposed to be accomplishing.
FourTen
Holy crap, you are telling me that one generation has a low opinion of the next generation? Stop the freakin’ presses.
Moreover, this ongoing lament from cons about PC campus culture hurting the touring comedian circuit is just another attempt for humorless scolds to make everyone as miserable as they are.
sophronia
Let’s hire some comedians who tell jokes about Jesus, and we’ll see how fast the PC-lamenters are on the phone to their Congresspeople screaming about it. It just depends on who is getting their ox gored today.
jl
Never heard of this person before.
Skimmed through the piece. It is long.
The whole thing is about the crisis in the college comic circuit?
I didn’t even know that was a thing. I never saw one at my campus ‘resorts’..
muddy
Caitlin Flanagan was on Bill Maher’s show last night, and the 2 of them were congratulating themselves on how much cooler they were than the stupid young people who don’t know how to have a good time.
I don’t think school-sponsored events are generally cutting edge, are they? Isn’t it meant to be middle-of-the-road pablum by definition?
Brachiator
My nephew is a junior at a pretty good college. He has more problems with professors pushing a conservative party line than he does with students looking to be protected from unpleasantness.
My niece is an entering freshman at another college. She already has no fucks to give.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@muddy: Whaddayoo got against Dane Cook?
Christ, Caitlin Flanagan and Mary Matalin on the same show? Maher needs therapy.
jl
@muddy:
The decline in a previous generation’s middle-of-the-road pablum has been a continuing existential crisis of our sacred civilized heritage for several thousand years.
muddy
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: My FF button got a workout.
srv
@Derelict: Be a good uncle and order a copy of Jonah’s Liberal Fascism for both of them.
muddy
@jl: I know, why can’t they be into something new and shocking, like punk?
Peale
@sigaba: lol. I find this complaint odd coming from Caitlin, since her usual conclusion is for kids to give up anything pleasurable and do nothing but study. Especially public school kids, who shouldn’t have any courses but reading and math and heaven forbid something like after school clubs.
gogol's wife
Our students do their own comedy shows. And I don’t believe they are terribly tame, either. We never have professional comics come to campus.
David Koch
She was on Bill Maher last night.
She was whining about political correctness, sounding like Trump, saying society is lost because liberal millennials reject humor based on sexist, homophobic, and racist stereotypes.
She was a real glibertarian crank.
JGabriel
Even if the above quote is apocryphal, it illustrates the truth that elders have been complaining of the rudeness and disrespect of the young for, not just centuries, but millenia.
Only in an America dominated by ugly Conservative rhetoric for three – four decades could we reach a point where elders complain that the today’s youth are just too respectful to the sensitivities of others.
Which raises the question: What the fuck has happened to our elders?
(Answer: Republicans and Fox News.)
thefax
@sigaba: “It’s administrators and benefactors that get freaked out.”
Every time I read a story like this, I want to shout this comment from the rooftops. Students are no more coddled or easily offended than they ever were. Administrators, on the other hand, are so worried about possible angry phone calls from (bill-paying) parents that they often take a zero-tolerance approach to any potentially offending speech. Students are easy to blame, but college administrators are the problem.
Smiling Mortician
I’ve been teaching college for 25 years.
@sigaba: is correct: Kids can take a joke just fine. . . It’s administrators and benefactors that get freaked out.
All those student-activities kids seeking lukewarm entertainment are doing it under rules created by bloated layers of student-services administration and self-important donors & trustees.
Overall, the general population of students at my state school are significantly more willing to talk about tough issues and even explore them through *gasp!* indecorous humor than they were a decade or two ago.
muddy
Flanagan and Maher also thought it was very silly that colleges would have farm-to-table programs for the student food too! How useless and silly!
Of course there was also hilarity between the two over her first name, ho ho ho, Call me Bruce, says Caitlin. Yes, you two are way cooler than college students with that slicing wit.
FourTen
ooo, story time! No one past their first year went to any of these school sponsored events, outside of a contextual “headliner” (like when Matthew Sweet played my school), once you are out of your shell a little you swap the campus movie night and the comedy show of the month for a night of D&D….uhhh…i mean drinking and picking up chicks!
JGabriel
@Derelict:
I would posit that the youth Flanagan is critiquing, those who can afford to attend entertainment conventions, are probably from a similar upper-crust (or at least upper middle class) milieu.
FlyingToaster
@bemused: That’s a bizarre question.
My 7-year-old knows how to read labels and sort laundry, and is currently tasked with sorting and grouping all family socks. In 2 months, she adds towel folding to her agenda. By the time she hits middle school, she will know how to do everything but iron (I only iron sewing projects, honestly).
My nephews each have taken/will take their turn at age 12 doing the family wash (and with 5 boys, that’s a real chore).
@sigaba: I went to a land-grant college 30 years ago, and we certainly had comedians booked. And authors, and one-man-shows (Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain was amazing) and bands. The comedians were generally milquetoast, because midwestern land-grant college, duh.
Peale
@JGabriel: the elders realized that if they didn’t blame the kids for watching too much porn and smoking too much weed, people might notice who was actually smoking, drinking and fornicating and decide that maybe the kids should run the show.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@
Ah, she knows her some funny! she’s the Richard Cohen of the Atlantic.
Peale
@muddy: God. Is she still on her high horse about gardening in schools? It’s been like a decade long quest to pummel Alice Waters for no reason. For programs that don’t cost very much, that the students enjoy and learn from, that have been around since the 1930s. Yes, she’s decided that new age hippies are behind a plot to make kids farmers…although the hippies turn out to be bureaucrats from state departments of agriculture.
Villago Delenda Est
@FourTen: Should have stopped the presses when Plato had the same complaints.
Villago Delenda Est
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Well, that really tells us all we need to know about what she thinks is “funny”, because Richard Cohen certainly demonstrated his expertise at it when Colbert used his fellow Villagers as punching bags.
Mike G
@sophronia:
This. I suspect the sensitivity to religious or political upset is significantly higher at monocultures like BYU or Liberty University than at Big Beer State U, no matter how much Flanagan wants to proclaim this a problem with liberalism. This sounds like another case of the proudly intolerant whining that the tolerant aren’t tolerant enough.
sigaba
@Smiling Mortician:
Right, so why do they even do it in the first place? Do they just have money sloshing around to hire bland stage acts, the blander the better? Is it like some need to create student amenities for the brochures, like the fitness center?
What sort of lesson is this exactly? “Students: your school and your future workplace will cater to your every material, spiritual, entertainment and social need.” Like, if you’re in college, and you want to see a comedian, buy cable, or go to a club; don’t wait for the board of trustees to sign off on some ersatz Dane Cook’s motivational sermon, packaged as “an evening of comedy, music, and issues.”
So, yeah, I understand why students would complain about a racist comic at a university function — the students are in hock up to their nose paying for their units this semester, and this is how the university spends the money? The whole business about microagressions or political correctness just seems like a red herring.
NonyNony
@FlyingToaster:
It comes as no surprise to me, since I teach college students.
The thing to keep in mind though is that it isn’t all of them. It isn’t even most of them. In my large midwestern university I generally run across one or two a year who are old enough to be in college but have been so poorly taught by their parents that they just cannot handle the day-to-day activities of living.
But yes – some parents seem to think that it isn’t their job to teach their kids anything and that it’s the school’s responsibility to do it all – including how to do laundry, cook small meals for sustenance, and live under a budget. None of this is new either – there have always been these parents who have treated their kids like that (at least for the last 20 or so years – that’s all I have direct experience with).
Peale
@sigaba: actually students after awhile do tune it out, although they don’t buy cable…they…ummm…have figured out ways around that.
Anne Laurie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yup. But the hipsters who fund the Atlantic pay to send her out to places like the NACA conference (in Minneapolis in February, so I guess she’s annoying to have around the office) so she has topics beyond “what we talked about at Sally Quinn’s last dinner party.”
ThresherK (GPad)
The NACA’s goal is to mollycoddle infantile students and hidebound, oversensitive bureaucrats?
Flannigan needs to learn the first thing about what goes into Texas textbook approval. She will lose her shit.
FourTen
@Villago Delenda Est: You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if he really did say that, and that Socrates said it about him.
JGabriel
efgoldman:
True story: The first time I ever heard Carlin’s 7 Words You Can Never Say On Television routine was in the 70’s on – yes, you guessed it – TV. Specifically, HBO – northeast Pennsylvania was the test area for HBO before it went national, so we had it early.
smintheus
The real problem with college kids is passed right by: They spend student activity fees like drunken sailors. Has been true for at least 50 years. Since the ’60s college kids’ eagerness to overpay for bands has been one of the biggest inside jokes in the industry.
Problem was and is that college students have almost no means to control what their supposed ‘representatives’ do with their fees, much less get colleges to reduce those fees. The kids who work to put themselves through college are the ones who are least able to attend any of these heavily subsidized events. Basically, the richer kids are mooching on the poorer ones.
Villago Delenda Est
Back when I was a college student, Steve Martin came to my campus before he was a big deal.
He took the entire audience down from the Erb Memorial Ballroom to the food service area to place an order for french fries for the entire audience. Then he changed it to ONE french fry.
Villago Delenda Est
@smintheus:
Well, this is pretty much the case in our entire society, without regard to age. The 1% are parasites.
smintheus
@Brachiator: Exactly. When I was a student in the late ’70s at Brown, the only prof ever to promote his political agenda in class was a right-wing jerk. Never heard a peep from all of the leftists supposedly destroying academia.
FourTen
@sigaba:
That’s it right there, recall the snit-fit the cons put on when students began rejecting NeoCon speakers (and the honorariums they get) at their graduations. They are sore about it still.
Villago Delenda Est
@Anne Laurie: Four words for Caitlin Flanagan from the great TBogg: “Shut up, stupid lady.”
Brachiator
@Mike G:
Not necessarily. A group of professional comedians talking about this on the FilmDrunk Frotcast podcast note that every professional comedian knows that you have to know your room and gauge how comedy smart they are, and that you have to do this especially for college students. But the issue seems to be context and emotional maturity, not just an atmosphere of political correctness. And it’s not all college students. You don’t want so many in the audience missing the joke or else the energy gets sucked out of the room. But you can have this problem with any venue, not just college campuses.
But in any case, it’s not that mormons or any single group with a lack of a sense of humor.
You can listen or download here:
http://filmdrunk.podbean.com/e/frotcast-253-inside-out-jerry-seinfeld-rachel-dolezal-with-laremy/
Villago Delenda Est
@FourTen: Prime example: war criminal Condaleeza Rice at
PrincetonRutgers.(They’re both in New Jersey, after all…)
trollhattan
@efgoldman:
Also, too, there were the Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley teevee appearances and their “party records”, which were a whole different thing entirely. Set your hi-fi on fire, those would.
Kathleen
@Anne Laurie:The Atlantic’s idea of “diversity”.
smintheus
@Villago Delenda Est: Yep. And colleges have been rigged for decades to drive this home. The sh)t I regularly took from condescending rich kids while working on campus jobs was an eye opener.
jl
@Peale:
” God. Is she still on her high horse about gardening in schools? ”
A sign of a pompous fake intellectual for me is that kind of contempt for practical education.
What the hell is wrong with stuff like that in schools? They need a lot more of it.
You can teach people plenty that way.
I remember reading Richard Feynman talking about how he would show students ordinary events of daily life and ask them to explain the physics. He said it was the best way to find out quickly if they really understood physics. He said Fermi had the same trick.
RSA
Flanagan should just come out with it: Whom does she think it’s okay to offend, in a university-sponsored event paid for by students?
jl
@RSA: students running the campus veggie garden, apparently.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
Oh hell, yes.
Here’s prime Redd Foxx, You Got to Wash Your Ass
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uldt6Y-CE3s
He pauses to tell a heckler, “this ain’t the Merv Griffin Show. Bend over and I’ll drive you to Dallas”
muddy
@Peale: Oh, is that what it was? They said it like it was just a program to get fresh local produce into the cafeteria. We have that in grade schools, so I didn’t see what the issue was.
trollhattan
Anybody in the region who can comment on this?
Obstruction of justice seems career-limiting for a state’s top law enforcement official. Also, too, Judge Rebar is about the coolest judge’s name, ever.
gogol's wife
@trollhattan:
Okay, are we going to get into another discussion of Rusty Warren?
bemused
@FlyingToaster:
Yes. It’s something you don’t forget. We parents weren’t at the parent orientation, too busy building bunk beds in a postage stamp size dorm room for two at Mich Tech, but heard from our kid’s h.s. classmate’s mother who did. She heard the parent ask about laundry facilities and would there be any instructions to the freshman how to use them, do their laundry. She said the other parents were silent but rolling their eyes at each other.
smintheus
@trollhattan: Absolutely weird, almost pointless stunt by Kane – if she did engineer the leak of grand jury info. A real shame, because she has been successful as a thorn in the side of the corrupt Republicans running the state.
sm*t cl*de
“Numinous“? Does Flanaghan have any idea what the word means, or was it just a suggestion from her on-line thesaurus?
Feck. She wouldn’t be able to write a paragraph if you took away her parenthetical dashes.
EriktheRed
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Gotta admit, though: I thought Caitlyn was quite a pretty woman.
James E Powell
@Derelict:
Whenever I hear these stories, it’s always nieces or nephews. Why is that?
Is there a corollary of Poe’s Law that applies to “These kids today . . . ” rants?
smintheus
@bemused: Presumably the deeper irony was lost on that parent, that these parent-orientation meetings exist primarily to separate helicopter parents from their kids for a few hours so the kids can start being independent of them – as a first step in getting the parents to leave and go home.
Starfish
@sigaba: It is common for colleges to have concerts. At the small women’s college in Mississippi, there was a Widespread Panic concert. I think that Widespread Panic does really well on the college circuit.
At the private university in Massachusetts, it was a Bob Dylan concert.
I don’t remember any concert’s in Colorado, but I was a graduate student then. I did get to go see Ann Coulter, Nina Hartley, and David Irving (holocaust denier) speak on campus. (I basically went to anything that was going to be potentially super controversial and horrible.)
dmsilev
@bemused:
One of my favorite memories from college (mid 90s) was being in the dorm laundry room and one of my fellow dorm residents turned to me and said “the light on the washer labeled ‘load unbalanced’ is on; what does that mean?”.
(even if you are a laundry neophyte, the machines in the dorm had instructions glued to the fronts, so no excuses…)
sigaba
@Starfish: I get speakers, Ann Coulter and David Irving are supposed to be at least compelling.
I don’t know, now that I think about it George Clinton did a show my senior year; I was just tuned-out of all that stuff (I was doing a work-study job and only had a scholarship for 4 years, so perhaps this proves smintheus’s point).
? Martin
My anecdotal experience is my kids and their friends. It’s not that they can’t take a joke, but they seriously do not find this stuff funny.
It’s difficult to push race and gender lines with them, because they don’t find the state of race and gender relations to be good at all and they just don’t find it to be a joking matter. And this isn’t the first generational problem that comedians run into. I didn’t find nigger jokes to be very funny when I was a teenager, but people my parent’s age didn’t see the harm – things were clearly better in the 70s and 80s than they were in the 50s, so they saw the joke against the backdrop of much better race relations so it was obviously a joke to them. I was born in ’68. Things were better by the time I grew up, so I didn’t see the contrast and so it was just full-on racist to me (which is was, but which make the joke completely unfunny to me.)
We now have an african american president, same-sex marriage, and a new sensitivity (except within the GOP) on gender issues. Jokes that seem harmless to me occasionally land with deafening silence on my kids. Then we have a conversation, I apologize for being a dick, and recalibrate. They are dead serious about trying to make things better. I can’t overstate how toxic the GOP seems to everyone my kids’s age – even the kids of the evangelical and military parents – all liberals. I asked my son if he knew anyone his age that he’d suspect to be conservative, and he gave me this ‘are you fucking kidding me?’ look.
Brachiator
@James E Powell:
Well, in my case, my niece and nephew are the ones currently attending college.
apocalipstick
@sigaba: My daughter’s college (the cliched “private liberal-arts college”) did indeed book a near-constant stream of performers, but part of that was because the school was in a fairly small town and also because a big part of the school’s mission was to expose the students to many different experiences.
Oh, and the line about bands delivering perfect covers is a real tip-off; most bands that play colleges actually perform originals. Many of them actually use colleges as the foundation of their career.
rikyrah
EXACTLY
………………
Jeet Heer
@HeerJeet
Rubio, Huckabee & Santorum prefers that women die rather than get abortions but Trump is the biggest misogynist in the politics?
Joel
@sigaba: I would totally pay to watch Irving waterboarded.
dexwood
Then there is my nephew, a college grad this year, in France this week, son of Tea Party wackos who sheltered and shaped him at every turn, or so they think. The kid’s a liberal-leaning hippie with a great head on his shoulders and a keen sense of justice. He is more independent than they credit him, more tolerant than they will ever be, and the reason for a smile on my face when I see him.
RepubAnon
@? Martin: reminds me of a history of “stage Irish” comedy, where the once-popular portrayals of Irish as drunken servants were, by the late 1800s, deemed offensive.
But then, everyone knows that only liberals are easily offended… if a conservative is offended by something, it is an additional offense to question their decision in any way…
JGabriel
? Martin:
This is the kind of story that makes me think the kids are, in fact, alright.
low-tech cyclist
So a bunch of washed-up comedians who probably lost any visceral connection with college students years ago, still want to make a quick buck off them. But since they don’t know their audience, they have no sense of what outrageous stuff the kids find funny these days, and what outrageous stuff the kids will simply find outrageous.
And they’re upset about that. (Insert piece from world’s tiniest violin here.)
And Caitlin Flanagan thinks this is a big enough deal to write thousands of words about. Well, consider the source.
And The Atlantic Monthly, for some reason, thinks this drivel is worth publishing. That is your problem.
apocalipstick
I wouldn’t call Chris Rock “washed up”. I would point out that no college is going to pay his fee. Seinfeld doesn’t avoid colleges due to political correctness; it’s because no institution is going to pony up his retainer or accommodate his private jet. Asking why millionaire or (in Sienfeld’s case perhaps) billionaire comedians don’t play colleges is like asking why U2 doesn’t play the student union.
Joel
@apocalipstick: If he’s not washed up, then he’s definitely getting wet. College-aged kids these days grew up with a Chris Rock that has appeared in a steady diet of terrible Sandler films. His TV show went off the air *15 years ago*.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Joel:
Uh, you haven’t been keeping up on Chris Rock lately, have you?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2784678/?ref_=nv_sr_1
He’s been doing a whole lot else between Sandler movies.
C.V. Danes
Ah yes, the kids with their bippity bip and their hippity hop. One thing I will say about the kids, though, is you gotta have a good story these days. God help you if you don’t have a good story.
apocalipstick
@Joel: Chris Rock makes some terrible choices as an actor (“Top Five” (which was his own project) and “2 Days in New York” are exceptions), but onstage with a mic in his hand, he’s still genius. He also exec-produced Kamau Bell’s show, so I wouldn’t call him doddering yet.
Liberal With Attitude
The real problem is right there in Caitlyn’s words, to the effect that [nowadays, unlike in our day]” a comic has to be funny, but deeply respectful of certain moral positions”.
But as I commented at the Atlantic itself- when in the history of human society has this ever been different?
Didn’t Martin & Lewis, The Marx Brothers, and every vaudeville comic who ever lived have a clearly understood list of Things That Must Not Be Mocked? Even Don Rickles, the “outside the box” guy of his generation, knew the code.
What bothers people like Caitlyn is just that the code is changing, and not to her liking.
Dan
@low-tech cyclist: Not a bunch of washed up comedians. The comedians that go to NACA are usually in there early to mid-twenties, either just starting out or just getting going in the business. They’ve got a little life experience under their belt, and that’s what they’re building their acts on. For you to dismiss their observations about their receptions on college campuses is just you talking out of your ass.
dan
their.
Matt McIrvin
@? Martin:
I’m trying to square this with all the survey statistics that say that today’s white kids are pretty much just as conservative, and almost as racist, as our generation (I was born the same year as you), and that all the seeming progress can be explained just by less of them being white. Maybe the experience of being in more diverse company just affects what’s considered socially acceptable to say in public.
Joel
@Dan: These guys aren’t entitled to their bread. They can earn it like everyone else. Comedy is hard work.
This isn’t exactly the Soviet Department of Jokes we’re talking abut.
Dan
@Joel: That’s different than what the other guy was saying about washed up comics.
Duane
JayPee
@? Martin:
This, exactly. Jerry Seinfeld’s stupid joke about smart phones and gay French kings. It’s a lazy joke based on a tired stereotype. It’s like “Bob Hope told the same shitty jokes until he was 80, why can’t I?” Boo hoo. Thank jeebus young people are looking for something new and aren’t willing to put up with your boring old jokes.
yammer
Long ago in another century, my college had Al Goldstein come to speak to a packed student union. Mostly talked about his then upcoming obscenity trial in Kansas City. The case was eventually thrown out after a few years of government harassment. This event would only be offensive to someone like Flanagan and her ilk (just love to use that word when the opportunity presents itself).