Can College Kids Take a Joke?
Chris Rock has stopped performing on college campuses, he said in a recent interview, because college audiences are getting "way too conservative."
"Not like they're voting Republican," he said in an interview with Frank Rich published in Vulture. "But in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody."
Could Rock be right? I find the possibility disturbing, since I enjoy topical humor.
I marvel at comedians as varied as Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Dick Gregory, Freddie Prinze and Joan Rivers who managed to make us laugh about race, gender, religion, ethnicity and politics while dancing on the edges of our touchiness.
But Rock detects a new uptightness in today's campus audiences. He blames a social culture that has taken hypersensitivity overboard as we try to protect kids from insults and other painful realities of life -- like race relations.
The youngsters are "raised on a culture of 'We're not going to keep score in the game because we don't want anybody to lose,' " Rock said. "Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can't say 'the black kid over there.' No, it's 'the guy with the red shoes.' You can't even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive."
For example, the issue came up when Rock was asked about a protest that tried to cancel HBO host Bill Maher's December commencement speech at the University of California, Berkeley.
More than 4,000 people signed an online petition to cancel to protest his views on Islam which, among other indignities, he has called "the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will (expletive) kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book."
I strongly disagree with Maher's smearing of an entire religion for the crimes of its radical fringes. But I also disagree with those who think silencing him would be a sensible response.
As Maher put it, "Whoever told you you only had to hear what didn't upset you?"
...continued
(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
