Comedy Isn't Supposed To Make You Clap

In the beginning, there was political correctness. And...well, it was okay. 

Gone are the days when we called disabled people cripples and retards. Gone are the days when we thought of sexual harassment as harmless "banter." Gone are the days when racial minorities only appeared on screen as cliches and stereotypes. 

Political correctness isn’t perfect, but it helped us make genuine progress towards seeing each as human beings. 

And then, as with almost everything touched by 21st-century social justice, we went too far. 

A few days ago, I found a beautiful example of how we've gone too far as a comedian talked about a recent gig:

I was doing these jokes about trans people vs people in wheelchairs four weeks ago…and I could see out of my peripheral vision in the middle of the jokes, there’s a young woman in the front row who's in a wheelchair...she’s laughing her ass off. She’s slapping her knee, she can’t feel it, but she’s slapping her knee. She’s having a great time. […]

So when the joke was over, I asked her, “Just out of curiosity, was anything I said in that joke offensive?” 

And still laughing, she was like, “No, no, no. It was so fu**ing funny. And I want to thank you for including me."

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The great irony of 21st-century inclusion is that it encourages us to exclude people. Except in this case, we do it in the name of "kindness."

Gone are the days when we could joke with each other without fear. Gone are the days when we considered intent before taking offence. Gone are the days when it was safe to see each other as individuals instead of identity groups. 

Because somewhere along the way, we turned the most sensitive, narcissistic, easily offended people among us into the arbiters of acceptability. We deranged our language to "protect" minority groups from arbitrarily offensive words. We decided that a comedian like Dave Chappelle telling jokes about anybody who wasn't a straight white male was "punching down."