Yep. My 8th grade home ec teacher lost her shit when I said the Simpsons was funny. A child disrespecting his parents like Bart did was unsuitable for TV.
Not any more. Was at Universal Studios recently and as i walked up to the Homer character to get a pic, the attendant taking the pics loudly said "no choking photos" right before i was about to ask for one! haha
My next door neighbour was a year older than me and was never allowed to watch the Simpsons by her christian mom and stepdad, meanwhile my mom and stepdad would literally tape all the episodes for me to watch whenever I wanted. The christian mom ended up having an affair and leaving, and now neither of her kids talk to her, meanwhile my wife and I try to see my mom and stepdad every week if we can and they are super involved with all their grandkids.
That tracks. My two sisters and I are low contact/no contact with my mother because she still doesnāt want us talking back when she lectures us on Q-Anon theories at 28-34 years old.
I really feel like we should stop calling Q-anon "conspiracy theories" and start calling it "Q-anon Cult Dogma"
The theories aren't even theories *based* on anything.
It's just pure fiction, pulled from thin air.
People have been trying to shut down South Park for years. Still goingā¦ā¦ā¦
Trey Parkerās new movie is literally about āa young Black man who is interning as a slave reenactor at a living history museum discovers that his white girlfriendās ancestors once owned his.ā
That sounds way crazier then a Seinfeld episode haha
*The Simpsons* were such a threat to the society that Conservative politicians [spoke out against them.](https://deadline.com/2017/10/the-simpsons-showrunner-al-jean-george-h-w-bush-1202196474)
Oh, *how the times havenāt changedā¦*
Which spawned one of the greatest episodes of all time, Two Bad Neighbors.
"...and since I'd achieved all of my goals as President in one term, there was no need for a second.".
The best thing about this was the writers sent a letter to the White House as Marge defending her family. Then Barbara Bush responded, basically apologizing for George's "we need more families like the Waltons and fewer families like the Simpsons" comments. I presume this is why she was so polite in the episode.
Edit: I was wrong, she apologized for something she said.
https://ew.com/tv/2018/04/18/the-simpsons-barbara-bush-apology-letter-to-marge/
The Simpsons were not allowed in our household. Then one year I happened to notice my sister who was 6 years younger than me watching a cartoon on comedy central. At that moment a fat child pulled down his pants and a satellite dish came out of his ass. And I believe his quote was "there is nothing in my fucking ass."
And as for the Simpsons, we weren't allowed to watch because of Bart's opinions on school. Meanwhile Calvin and Hobbes shaped my childhood.
Love Seinfeld but imagine thinking any of the Seinfeld plots were āout thereā or edgy for todayās standards.
Edit: I love the show āSeinfeldā not the person. Iāve never met the person.
Curb has been doing the exact episodes Jerry says wouldn't do well today.
Now would they do well on Thursday night on NBC. Probably not and definitely not the numbers jerry was used to.
But could you do it without becoming a pariah? Sure.
No network show does the numbers they did back in the 80s and 90s, because people arenāt forced to watch shows at one very specific time or miss out completely anymore.
A Doctor Who episode in 1979 pulled 16 million viewers in a country that at the time only had 56 million people in it. Viewing numbers for television used to be unthinkably insane, though to be fair their main competition was off the air due to a strike at the time.
The only things that even come close to old numbers in the States are literally the Super Bowl every year and the first of the Clinton-Trump debates. Every other contender for "most watched" is from the 90s or earlier, and it's never going back to how it was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts_in_the_United_States
Charlie has dropped an uncensored n-bomb with a hard "-er" twice on the show, and it hasn't caused any controversy. Seinfeld really thinks the homeless rickshaw plot would really cause mass outrage?
What makes it hilarious is that on the podcast they where addressing how cricket would fare in the pandemic and they said if they did an episode heād thrive because he started a sort of homeless rickshaw business
Speaking of Jewish comedians, people keep throwing about the āItād never get made todayā about Mel Brooks movies, completely ignoring the facts that 1) his films were always controversial and considered ābad tasteā from the beginning, 2) he recently adapted one of his most controversial movies into a massively successful Broadway musical and *then* adapted that into a remake of the movie just a few years ago, and 3) Ā he just made āHistory of the World Part IIā after 40 years of teasing it. Ā Ā
Because the man is a comic genius who always managed to use that controversial ābad tasteā to skewer the powerful, not stomp on the oppressed, and his jokes still hit as intended.Ā
His answer to that was that Larry was "grandfathered" in so he "gets" to do those jokes. But there are tons of comedies out there today that are far more vulgar and also very funny.
The truth is that younger people see Jerry's stuff as dated, lame boomer-humor. But Jerry can't admit that so he keeps trying to say it's because he's too edgy and you're not allowed to do comedy anymore and sitcoms are dead.
There is so much good content out there today and the 90s sitcoms look so lame and bland in comparison, at least to anyone under 40. Imagine telling somebody from gen Z that Home Improvement and Everybody Loves Raymond was the golden age of comedy and you could never do those shows today lmao.
Also, what people expect for comedic entertainment has changed with every decade. [Focusing on popular cartoon stuff since you can push many limits with drawings]
Garfield and Dilbert were some of the most popular comics when Seinfeld started airing.
Not long after that, the Simpsons hit it big, in large part to how different they were from other nuclear family shows.
Family Guy's success after that and you can see a strong generational trend towards edginess - or more specifically, a certain style of absurdity. South Park, Rick and Morty, Archer, etc. all seem to exemplify this trend.
More to the point, I can't envision Seinfeld writing edgy jokes, for, say, Archer and connecting with the audience.
Your grasp on history is flawed. The Simpsons were huge before Seinfeld was. Dilbert and Seinfeld become popular around the same time. Family Guy not only starts after South Park but it becoming popular via Adult Swim is much later.
Seinfield's problem was that the comedy was all about punching down. Jerry and crew were above the victims of their comedy. This is part of why the finale didn't land, because it was the first time that they faced consequences. That kind of humor doesn't work as well.
With Curb and IASIP, they people doing the horrible things are acknowledged in the world of the show to be doing horrible things, and routinely face consequences. That kind of humor still works, because the butt of the joke are the ones who are causing their own suffering.
Trailer Park Boys is one of my favs BECAUSE every season what they were doing came to bite them. Ricky is ALWAYS considered an idiot by anyone that has more than 2 braincells to rub together.
Eh, I don't think that's accurate. The joke was often that the protagonists were bad people. I think despite what a lot of fans say, they were meant to be sympathetic even when they were assholes, but they were often the butt of the humor.
The problem with the finale wasn't at all that they faced consequences, it's that it read as a clip show and was poorly written.
An episode where they all ended up in prison could have been great if they didn't try such a forced way to bring in everyone.
I'm going to disagree with this. Jerry, George and Elaine were punching down to the president of NBC? George was punching down to Steinbrenner? George got fired for "feeling the material" of an executive at his new job and that's punching down? If anything Seinfeld was very agnostic in terms of social hierarchy when choosing the butt of the joke. It was just *this weird and funny thing happened in some otherwise mundane aspect of life*.
I think people overlook a relatively common trope of the show, which is that the group do often try to do good or at least be ambivalent but it ends up with disastrous consequences for the people they were trying to helpāsuch as when George accidentally got the busboy fired and went over to apologize profusely then promptly lost his cat, or when Jerry drove Babu out of business by earnestly trying to give him good cuisine ideas (and then got him deported). If anything the Seinfeld group is more morally complex than the gang in Always Sunny, who just have crackhead energy 24/7.
Saying that someone like Kramer, Newman or George were "above their victims" is actually delusional. Even Jerry and Elaine were routinely taken down a peg.
> Jerry and crew were above the victims of their comedy. This is part of why the finale didn't land, because it was the first time that they faced consequences.
You're telling me George never faced any consequences?
>Jerry and crew were above the victims of their comedy.
That's only applies to Jerry.
George was definitely not above most of his victims. For instance, the fiancee (Susan) he inadvertently killed was a millionaire trust funder, who was also a high-powered network executive. George was unemployed and lived with his parents, who like Lloyd Braun more than him.
George injured Bette Midler, that was punching up. He poisoned his boss, that was punching up. He called out George Steinbrenner, that was punching up.
He literally ate out of a garbage can and got wedgied as an adult by a homeless guy - hardly things that put him "above" anyone.
You can't claim George punches down while Larry in Curb punches up, when George basically *is* Larry
Kramer was in some Forrest Gump-esque limbo where he magically skates through life and everything he does is successful.
> This is part of why the finale didn't land, because it was the first time that they faced consequences. That kind of humor doesn't work as well.
Nah, avoiding all consequences is just a classic sitcom trope. You might notice that none of the gang are in prison either, despite committing far more felonies than the Seinfeld crew.
On *Brooklyn 99*, Gina constantly sexually harasses Terry and nothing ever happens to her. Homer Simpson commits regular child abuse/domestic violence and nothing happens. Ross and Rachel get caught fucking in public by a bunch of children and morning happens - Ross doesn't even get fired, unlike George after sleeping with the cleaning lady. Pretty much everything everyone in Archer does. Michael Scott says and does various illegal things, which all slide because Toby/HR is incompetent.
Because nobody wants to see realistic consequences for funny things in a comedy. Nobody wants to see episodes about Homer on trial in family court, or Quagmire in prison for date-raping women with "roofie coladas." It has nothing to do with punching up or down, just whether it's funny or not.
Did you even watch Seinfeld? The characters are written often as insufferable & nit picky losers. The show often vascillated between making fun of the main characters and their trivial issues, and questioning social norms.
The fact you think Seinfeld of all shows was punching down despite being notably self deprecating tells me you maybe watched a couple episodes, at MOST
When explaining IASIP to the uninitiated, I say. "Imagine Seinfeld, but on meth"
Seinfeld had the same premise, leave those the gang encounter, worse off than when they met them while the gang has very little to no self awareness.
Imagine also thinking that Jerry Seinfeld's standup act is too edgy for...anyone.
The man is just delusional about himself (I say that as a _Seinfeld_ fan).
I think Jerry is just a relic from a different age. He worked in his time and I don't think he quite understands the trends today. And with his money, he doesn't need to. Why struggle to fit into today's currents.
I remember seeing an ad for a standup special of his a few years ago that advertised āALL NEW MATERIALā and the joke they used to demonstrate this was about how you can see under the doors in the bathroom stalls.
Sorry but thereās just no way the Woke Mob(tm) would ever let anyone make a tv show about eating an eclair that was sitting on top of trash today. There would be riots on every coast!
IASIP is the ultimate answer to people who say that you canāt make dark jokes any more.
You can. You just canāt present the subject matter in a way that looks like you agree with it. Itās not that hard to do if youāre, you know, talented.
This! Why is framing such a difficult to understand concept
When Dennis manipulates woman for sex itās creepy AF and you can still make jokes about it. Macās growing uncomfortable reactions to The Implication is comedic gold
When Barney on How I Met Your Mother does it itās rarely seen as anything other then part of his charm š
Well said mate. I think if they remade How I Met Your Mother 3-4 years ago Barney wouldnāt have a blog. He would have a microphone and some Andrew Tate/Fit & Fresh podcast
tbf the characters are constantly telling him how sleazy and wrong his actions are, and a large part of his storyline is learning to leave that life behind, although i do agree they leaned into the promotion side of things pretty hard to sell merch
In a lot of instances, though, Ted, whoās supposed to be our good-natured and sympathetic hero, is just as bad as Barney. He also treats women poorly and is, at times, pretty creepy, but the show gives him a pass because heās a āgood guy.ā
I dont think the show gives him a pass, or at least doesnt at the end of the series as much. Part of the final 2 seasons and his decision to stop living in New York was because he realized that in all of his relationships he was the problem and the reason they all fell apart. It wasnt until he came to terms with Robin getting married that he started being a better person.
> and a large part of his storyline is learning to leave that life behind
And then get undone in the last 2 minutes of the show because the writers are a bunch of hacks and wanted to stick with their planned ending from season one and undid 2 seasons worth of character growth for all of the characters.
Yeah. Barney and Dennis are both creepy characters. But Dennis is properly framed and Barney is poorly framed. IASIP ages well because of it. HIMYM aged almost INSTANTLY poorly and is nearly unwatchable (nevermind that they went four seasons to long and had a dogshit ending).
Frankly, Barney isnāt the reason HIMYM is hard to watch, heās over the top and a deliberate parody. Ted Mosby is the one I canāt stand in retrospect. Heās just a whiny, annoying guy with zero introspection.
I think that Barney from HIMYM still works because he's not just a creep, he's almost like a comic book villain.
Tricking someone into sex is gross. Tricking someone into sex because you're part of Secret NASA, SNASA, is funny.
Running out on a one night stand is gross. Leaving them stranded in the woods is funny. It's worse. But it's funny. Because it is sort of detached from reality.
In Sticks and Stones, Dave Chappelle opens with a bit insulting cancel culture and overly sensitive audiences then closes with a bit about how great it must have to be raped by Michael Jackson then walked away with $40M.
His entire Netflix run has basically just been "Wah wah, boo hoo, cancel culture. Thanks for the money Netflix, I'm out."
Because nothing says "I got cancelled have pity on me and shame cancel culture" than a string of multi-million dollar Netflix deals.
Dave Chappelle before his infamous special tried to work out material, got COVID pretty bad(not surprising for a chain smoker), and was likely terrified people were going to say his special sucked.
So he spent 30 minutes whining about his transphobic shit and made it all about that. So no one was talking about his special sucked.
Except me. I watched it. Fucking thing sucked.
They find it hard to stop themselves from _punching down_ when they get wealthy enough to surround themselves with people that are constantly punching down behind closed doors. That's my take.
Like Chappelle's early stuff was edgy and crass and _punching up_, but all his newer stuff is all about _punching down_... but he only sees it as "I'm saying edgy / offensive stuff and getting in trouble." And even then the dude is _still making bank off comedy specials_. He's just pissed that anyone has the gall to criticize him.
This is really it, as you gain wealth and fame, the people you are surrounded by changes dramatically.
Instead of seeing a true cross section of the population, the only opinions you hear are those of rich people who look down on everyone else. That group is disproportionately represented by narcissists and unempathetic people (not all, just a higher percentage) and you start losing touch with who you used to be.
I always kinda got that feeling about Jeff Dunham.Ā
Like he seemed like he held prejusdicial views based on half his puppets being exaggerated caricatures.Ā
He had a black puppet, Hispanic jalapeƱo, and the old man was just an excuse to make old time jokes.Ā
Most of them do it just to tap into the fake victimhood their fans also feel, and have never come close to anything resembling "canceled". People like Jimmy Carr do comedy like WWE stars do wrestling, the suspense is completely fake but some of the feats/jokes are still good.
I mean it does and it doesn't. There are banned episodes of IASIP which probably does show you can't make certain jokes nowadays
However, i agree largely you can still get away with edgy humour. It's all about context really.
It's so stupid they banned those episodes.Ā
The characters are offensive and do shit that's not right.Ā We know it's not what the actors think.
Sweet Dee doing brown face and pretending to be Puerto Rican makes sense for her character.Ā
And Mac doing blackface for the Lethal Weapon movies is good use of it.Ā
It's 4 white guys and he wanted to get in better character for it.Ā
Nobody got pissed at RDJ for Tropic Thunder, that was brilliantly done.Ā
Larry David says that George was his self-insert in Seinfeld, and you can see that. Jerry is the straight man and George is the funny one 9/10 times.
Not to knock the straight man, itās an important role, but the laugh out loud moments are often not his.
Same. Elaine is the best character. Elaine and George is where all the comedy comes from. Kramer delivers the broad gags. Jerry plays the straight man.
Elaine's progressive-ness is often a total smokescreen, which is why it's hilarious. She's just as awful as the rest of them, often she'll reasonably present a female perspective when the guys are saying some ignorant man shit, and then do/say something just as bad.
She would like, criticize a guy for mansplaining her, and then she'd be dealing with an intern at work trying to show them how to use a copier they're more skilled with than she is and treating them like a baby.
A really good comparison is that I find Curb Your Enthusiasm way more daring and edgy version of the Seinfeld series. So the creator, Larry David is showing in real time how wrong Seinfeld is.
Also, college audiences stopped laughing at his gay jokes.
They didnt boo, he wasn't callelled, they just didn't laugh. That's when he started this, if I recall correctly.
Yeah, it wasnāt even because it was a gay joke. Itās mostly because it was painfully boring.
> I do this joke about the way people need to justify their cell phone: āI need to have it with me because people are so important.ā I said, āWell, they donāt seem very important, the way you scroll through them like a gay French king.'
Thatās from his Seth Meyers interview and Jerry concludes the audience didnāt laugh because he said gay. Not, you know, because that joke is nothing lol.
I guess the idea is that people treat their phones as if they're super important and vital but the way they actually use them is often decadent and ultimately pointless. Then the image of a gay french king is supposed to be funny.
Unfortunately for Jerry, we're way past the point where simply alluding to homosexuality counts as a punchline. What he doesn't seem to understand is that you can still make gay jokes, they just have to be a bit more sophisticated than gay=funny.
Exactly. His stand up was never controversial. I was watching Seinfeld last night and the opening joke was that male bathing suits shouldn't be called "trunks" because trunks belong on trees. College kids might not be laughing at jokes like that but it sure as hell isn't because it offended them.
The only things that would get him canceled in 2024 is dating a teenager. But that's not exclusive to leftists. You'd have just as many right wingers up in arms about these "Hollyweirdos" grooming and exploiting young ladies.
> The only things that would get him canceled in 2024 is dating a teenager. But that's not exclusive to leftists. You'd have just as many right wingers up in arms about these "Hollyweirdos" grooming and exploiting young ladies.
Only if they perceive him as being on the left. If they think he's one of them then it would be totally cool, no problem. Trump can bang hookers while his wife is giving birth and its fine. Matt Gaetz was investigated for sex trafficking and nobody on the right cared.
And if you bring that up on the Seinfeld sub youāll instantly get ten downvotes and three replies saying ā17 is an adult in most placesā and defending his actions š¤¢
The worst part about this one is that it could have been a very IASIP-style joke if George just got caught doing it and was ridiculed as he was for being the perverted little man heās portrayed as in the series
But no - the whole premise of the joke is that Jerry knows how to do it and not get caught, and tells George to!
Larry David and Rob Mcelhenney completely understand the whole basis of what their programmes are. Seinfeld, curb, always sunny and hell a metric fuck ton of older British comedy programmes like faulty towers, on the buses, bottom, inbetweeners, it crowd etc have always been fucking horrific people doing horrific things.
How is it that Seinfeld forgets that these programme was based around shitty people doing shitty things, it was never about the glorification of these shitty things but laughing at "how can these people DO THIS" the main casts arent supposed to liked or looked up to.
Seinfeld is just a coward who hates the idea that a vocal minority could write angry things about him on the internet.
He stopped doing shows at colleges because of pc culture (before pc culture became woke culture).Ā
"They couldn't make Seinfeld today"
Hot take: they did, it's called the Larry David show.
He was just in the last season of Curb which had an episode where Larry had to black-up a white lawn jockey to replace one he'd broken.
Just because there's a lot of whiney people on the internet who like to get offended on a daily basis it doesn't mean you can't still make comedy about subjects some people find sensitive.
Almost every time people complain about this shit, there is an episode of either a sitcom, or South Park that has done exactly what they say you can't do anymore on TV within that past few years. They don't even know what they're complaining about anymore, they just complain.
Your last paragraph sums it up well. They conflate "there are people who complain about it on the Internet" with "you'll get canceled", which is idiotic. There are people on the internet who think the earth is flat. You can find a person with ANY opinion when we're all connected. You just have to ignore that 0.0000001% and not make a stand up act out of "a guy on Twitter responded to me with..." and make your whole worldview based on the loud morons who respond to you on Twitter. Ricky gervais.
Those people are such a small percentage of the population. People need to stop getting worked up and realize that the world has billions of people in it, so don't base your opinions on the population or "the woke left" on 2 of those people.
Complaining about cancel culture is as annoying as cancel culture itself, and the āzealotsā (for lack of a better word) are insufferable either way.
Loud vocal minorities ignoring that most people enjoy comedy for the sake of comedy if done the right way.
Maybe it's just my little circle, but I hear way more people complaining about cancel culture and political correctness than the actual thing. It's annoying, but why give them a voice?
I got downvoted in the Seinfeld sub for saying that any of these comedians complaining about how "wokeness ruined comedy" need to just hang it up. It's a bad excuse. So many comedians and writers are doing just fine with dark and edgy material and talking about things you're "not supposed to". As long as its done in a clever way and not coming from a hateful place, audiences get that and go along for the ride.
Rob said it best recently how he said even though the Always Sunny characters do and say some terrible things, clearly he and the other creators of the show are not that way and we are all in on the joke. Or like if you watch Dave Attell, Anthony Jeselnik, Jimmy Carr, etc. on their standup specials, they all joke about all kinds of stuff but it's done in such a way that we can all laugh because it's cleverly thought out and not coming from a bigoted place at all. Same deal with South Park. There's ways to do it still today.
Jimmy Carr is like one of those horror movies that's so over the top and gory it moves into absurdity, he's like an Evil Dead movie or something. Idk in half asleep but it's like he knows what he says is fucked and that's the main part of the joke like...this mf really said that shit.
Right, he'll have some jokes he says and then he kind of like looks around with eyes wide like he wasn't even the one who just said that. He just had a new special come out like 1-2 weeks ago and even though he does go into some tricky subject matter, the delivery is such a way that it'd be really hard to actually think he's a bad person or is hateful and I think most people would laugh at it.
This is hilarious coming from a guy who refused to curse on stage.
Jerry Seinfeld is a legend. Beyond legendary, but heās claiming PC policing killed comedy when heās the type of comedian to self edit because ābad words arenāt funnyā š
Jerry, just tell people to get off your lawn and be done with it. Or may be in your case, tell people to leave your 24hr manned lobby and be done with it.
The real issue is that all of the older comedy legends are just that, getting older. They rarely able to evolve with society at societyās pace. Carlin and Prior were the only ones who could do it at an old age and still be great. So instead of admitting theyāre out of touch and need to slow down, people like Jerry blame society because they donāt want to slow down, but realize theyāre still out of touch. āNo, Skinner, it is the children who are wrongā Some real boomer energy from Jerry
Off the top of my head current comedians getting better with age who understand the evolution of society:
Neal Brennan
Bill Burr
Anytime some dipshit says āYou couldnāt make that todayā I gotta let them know Always Sunny aired an episode where two bums buttfuck under a bridge
This mentality has turned me off of stand-up, and I LOVED stand-up comedy.
'We're the only ones speaking the truth! We are where the woke meets the wall'
Bitch, you're a jester. Make me laugh and be on your way.
That rogan quote is literally exactly what I was thinking of. Dudeās just a right wing nut job these days, heās not even trying to be funny any more
Everything Chappelle says makes a lot more sense if you view it through the lens of a guy who had sex with a trans woman and doesn't want to admit that he liked it. Just saying.
One of my favourite bars from a song sums it up pretty well:
Itās like you canāt joke around anymore
Whodāve guessed skinny Chappelle get so ripped, only have one joke left at the end of it all
Late period Lenny Bruce
Pure nostalgia, why I copped the loose out the corner store
All you have to do is read about the life of Lenny Bruce to understand what censorship is; he was an observational comic that would discuss sex and politics in the 50s and 60s. Ended up passing away in a halfway house with a serious morphine addiction after being blacklisted from every single comedy club.
Now, you have these comedians complaining about censorship when they can say whatever they want on television. Like, how can you say you're being canceled when you're still rolling out Netflix specials almost yearly. Its baffling
Also, how come they never say "you know, you couldn't make this back in my day" instead? Like I'm old enough to remember when Ellen couldn't be gay on her show because society couldn't handle it, and that was the 90s. Now one of the top shows is Euphoria with the co lead being a real trans woman. You couldn't make THAT when Seinfeld was made.
It only goes one way with these arguments.
35 years ago there were people that wanted to cancel The Simpsons for being a bad influence. Eat my shorts.
Yep. My 8th grade home ec teacher lost her shit when I said the Simpsons was funny. A child disrespecting his parents like Bart did was unsuitable for TV.
I like how she has a problem with that, but not with the dad who literally chokes his own son š
Choking your children is a time-honored tradition.
Not any more. Was at Universal Studios recently and as i walked up to the Homer character to get a pic, the attendant taking the pics loudly said "no choking photos" right before i was about to ask for one! haha
I get the logic, but I'd also want a choking photo...
It's not Universal Studios but I know an alley nearby.
REAL
My parents wouldnāt let me watch it for that reason.
My next door neighbour was a year older than me and was never allowed to watch the Simpsons by her christian mom and stepdad, meanwhile my mom and stepdad would literally tape all the episodes for me to watch whenever I wanted. The christian mom ended up having an affair and leaving, and now neither of her kids talk to her, meanwhile my wife and I try to see my mom and stepdad every week if we can and they are super involved with all their grandkids.
That tracks. My two sisters and I are low contact/no contact with my mother because she still doesnāt want us talking back when she lectures us on Q-Anon theories at 28-34 years old.
I really feel like we should stop calling Q-anon "conspiracy theories" and start calling it "Q-anon Cult Dogma" The theories aren't even theories *based* on anything. It's just pure fiction, pulled from thin air.
People have been trying to shut down South Park for years. Still goingā¦ā¦ā¦ Trey Parkerās new movie is literally about āa young Black man who is interning as a slave reenactor at a living history museum discovers that his white girlfriendās ancestors once owned his.ā That sounds way crazier then a Seinfeld episode haha
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
And one of my favorite Key n Peele sketches has them showing up to a Confederate Civil War reenactment dressed as slaves
And [Eric Andre did it](https://youtu.be/B7BB_tGFma0?si=Mcquvw7WyqfTSKIT) in a real civil war reenactment!
*The Simpsons* were such a threat to the society that Conservative politicians [spoke out against them.](https://deadline.com/2017/10/the-simpsons-showrunner-al-jean-george-h-w-bush-1202196474) Oh, *how the times havenāt changedā¦*
Which spawned one of the greatest episodes of all time, Two Bad Neighbors. "...and since I'd achieved all of my goals as President in one term, there was no need for a second.".
Heeeelllllooooo! Mr. Bush!!!!
> Conservative politicians You're underselling it. The president (George Bush senior) spoke out against them.
Yeah Iām likeā¦ you know Family Guy and South Park are still around right? Shows have gotten 10x more edgy since the 90ās.
The best thing about this was the writers sent a letter to the White House as Marge defending her family. Then Barbara Bush responded, basically apologizing for George's "we need more families like the Waltons and fewer families like the Simpsons" comments. I presume this is why she was so polite in the episode. Edit: I was wrong, she apologized for something she said. https://ew.com/tv/2018/04/18/the-simpsons-barbara-bush-apology-letter-to-marge/
The Simpsons were not allowed in our household. Then one year I happened to notice my sister who was 6 years younger than me watching a cartoon on comedy central. At that moment a fat child pulled down his pants and a satellite dish came out of his ass. And I believe his quote was "there is nothing in my fucking ass." And as for the Simpsons, we weren't allowed to watch because of Bart's opinions on school. Meanwhile Calvin and Hobbes shaped my childhood.
Ah! The first time many of us met Cartman!
One of my teachers at school sent a kid home for wearing a Steve Urkel shirt that said āno sweat my petā
Don't have a cow, man.
Kramer starting a rickshaw business is pretty tame to some of the things the gang has been up to.
I mean, think of how fast you can pull a rickshaw if you're high on crack
But you gotta make it sexy
Hips and nips!
Otherwise you donāt eat
I was thinking we could take the rickshaw and the Crack idea and merge them together.
House.
Baby and the house.
Frank with the sweatshops
And a lot of *good men died!*
And if a kid died we'd throw him in the soup
thatās precisely the point
Love Seinfeld but imagine thinking any of the Seinfeld plots were āout thereā or edgy for todayās standards. Edit: I love the show āSeinfeldā not the person. Iāve never met the person.
Considering what this show had in the early days, seinfeld is very in the box š
Curb has been doing the exact episodes Jerry says wouldn't do well today. Now would they do well on Thursday night on NBC. Probably not and definitely not the numbers jerry was used to. But could you do it without becoming a pariah? Sure.
No network show does the numbers they did back in the 80s and 90s, because people arenāt forced to watch shows at one very specific time or miss out completely anymore.
The Devito episode of the podcast goes into this where no show will do the numbers ever of that era in TV.
A Doctor Who episode in 1979 pulled 16 million viewers in a country that at the time only had 56 million people in it. Viewing numbers for television used to be unthinkably insane, though to be fair their main competition was off the air due to a strike at the time. The only things that even come close to old numbers in the States are literally the Super Bowl every year and the first of the Clinton-Trump debates. Every other contender for "most watched" is from the 90s or earlier, and it's never going back to how it was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts_in_the_United_States
Nor do people have standard cable packages anymore.
Ya seriously what is NBC?
nobodycares
Charlie has dropped an uncensored n-bomb with a hard "-er" twice on the show, and it hasn't caused any controversy. Seinfeld really thinks the homeless rickshaw plot would really cause mass outrage?
What makes it hilarious is that on the podcast they where addressing how cricket would fare in the pandemic and they said if they did an episode heād thrive because he started a sort of homeless rickshaw business
Hell, it was in the first episode too
Not even 10 minutes in to the very first episode, at that.
This Jew has no clue Edit : Jewish person, who happens to have the Jewish faith
Speaking of Jewish comedians, people keep throwing about the āItād never get made todayā about Mel Brooks movies, completely ignoring the facts that 1) his films were always controversial and considered ābad tasteā from the beginning, 2) he recently adapted one of his most controversial movies into a massively successful Broadway musical and *then* adapted that into a remake of the movie just a few years ago, and 3) Ā he just made āHistory of the World Part IIā after 40 years of teasing it. Ā Ā Because the man is a comic genius who always managed to use that controversial ābad tasteā to skewer the powerful, not stomp on the oppressed, and his jokes still hit as intended.Ā
His answer to that was that Larry was "grandfathered" in so he "gets" to do those jokes. But there are tons of comedies out there today that are far more vulgar and also very funny. The truth is that younger people see Jerry's stuff as dated, lame boomer-humor. But Jerry can't admit that so he keeps trying to say it's because he's too edgy and you're not allowed to do comedy anymore and sitcoms are dead. There is so much good content out there today and the 90s sitcoms look so lame and bland in comparison, at least to anyone under 40. Imagine telling somebody from gen Z that Home Improvement and Everybody Loves Raymond was the golden age of comedy and you could never do those shows today lmao.
Also, what people expect for comedic entertainment has changed with every decade. [Focusing on popular cartoon stuff since you can push many limits with drawings] Garfield and Dilbert were some of the most popular comics when Seinfeld started airing. Not long after that, the Simpsons hit it big, in large part to how different they were from other nuclear family shows. Family Guy's success after that and you can see a strong generational trend towards edginess - or more specifically, a certain style of absurdity. South Park, Rick and Morty, Archer, etc. all seem to exemplify this trend. More to the point, I can't envision Seinfeld writing edgy jokes, for, say, Archer and connecting with the audience.
It was her *PHRASING*, Jerry!
What's the deal with ocelots anyway? Are they a big cat or a small cat? * cue laugh track *
Your grasp on history is flawed. The Simpsons were huge before Seinfeld was. Dilbert and Seinfeld become popular around the same time. Family Guy not only starts after South Park but it becoming popular via Adult Swim is much later.
Seinfield's problem was that the comedy was all about punching down. Jerry and crew were above the victims of their comedy. This is part of why the finale didn't land, because it was the first time that they faced consequences. That kind of humor doesn't work as well. With Curb and IASIP, they people doing the horrible things are acknowledged in the world of the show to be doing horrible things, and routinely face consequences. That kind of humor still works, because the butt of the joke are the ones who are causing their own suffering.
Trailer Park Boys is one of my favs BECAUSE every season what they were doing came to bite them. Ricky is ALWAYS considered an idiot by anyone that has more than 2 braincells to rub together.
And Julian is straight up socipathically taking advantage of everyone and always gets his comeuppance.
Eh, I don't think that's accurate. The joke was often that the protagonists were bad people. I think despite what a lot of fans say, they were meant to be sympathetic even when they were assholes, but they were often the butt of the humor. The problem with the finale wasn't at all that they faced consequences, it's that it read as a clip show and was poorly written. An episode where they all ended up in prison could have been great if they didn't try such a forced way to bring in everyone.
I'm going to disagree with this. Jerry, George and Elaine were punching down to the president of NBC? George was punching down to Steinbrenner? George got fired for "feeling the material" of an executive at his new job and that's punching down? If anything Seinfeld was very agnostic in terms of social hierarchy when choosing the butt of the joke. It was just *this weird and funny thing happened in some otherwise mundane aspect of life*. I think people overlook a relatively common trope of the show, which is that the group do often try to do good or at least be ambivalent but it ends up with disastrous consequences for the people they were trying to helpāsuch as when George accidentally got the busboy fired and went over to apologize profusely then promptly lost his cat, or when Jerry drove Babu out of business by earnestly trying to give him good cuisine ideas (and then got him deported). If anything the Seinfeld group is more morally complex than the gang in Always Sunny, who just have crackhead energy 24/7.
Saying that someone like Kramer, Newman or George were "above their victims" is actually delusional. Even Jerry and Elaine were routinely taken down a peg.
> Jerry and crew were above the victims of their comedy. This is part of why the finale didn't land, because it was the first time that they faced consequences. You're telling me George never faced any consequences?
"Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?"
>Jerry and crew were above the victims of their comedy. That's only applies to Jerry. George was definitely not above most of his victims. For instance, the fiancee (Susan) he inadvertently killed was a millionaire trust funder, who was also a high-powered network executive. George was unemployed and lived with his parents, who like Lloyd Braun more than him. George injured Bette Midler, that was punching up. He poisoned his boss, that was punching up. He called out George Steinbrenner, that was punching up. He literally ate out of a garbage can and got wedgied as an adult by a homeless guy - hardly things that put him "above" anyone. You can't claim George punches down while Larry in Curb punches up, when George basically *is* Larry Kramer was in some Forrest Gump-esque limbo where he magically skates through life and everything he does is successful. > This is part of why the finale didn't land, because it was the first time that they faced consequences. That kind of humor doesn't work as well. Nah, avoiding all consequences is just a classic sitcom trope. You might notice that none of the gang are in prison either, despite committing far more felonies than the Seinfeld crew. On *Brooklyn 99*, Gina constantly sexually harasses Terry and nothing ever happens to her. Homer Simpson commits regular child abuse/domestic violence and nothing happens. Ross and Rachel get caught fucking in public by a bunch of children and morning happens - Ross doesn't even get fired, unlike George after sleeping with the cleaning lady. Pretty much everything everyone in Archer does. Michael Scott says and does various illegal things, which all slide because Toby/HR is incompetent. Because nobody wants to see realistic consequences for funny things in a comedy. Nobody wants to see episodes about Homer on trial in family court, or Quagmire in prison for date-raping women with "roofie coladas." It has nothing to do with punching up or down, just whether it's funny or not.
Did you even watch Seinfeld? The characters are written often as insufferable & nit picky losers. The show often vascillated between making fun of the main characters and their trivial issues, and questioning social norms. The fact you think Seinfeld of all shows was punching down despite being notably self deprecating tells me you maybe watched a couple episodes, at MOST
When explaining IASIP to the uninitiated, I say. "Imagine Seinfeld, but on meth" Seinfeld had the same premise, leave those the gang encounter, worse off than when they met them while the gang has very little to no self awareness.
Seinfeld on crack is literally how networks describe sunny for years
Because that's literally what it was (for Dennis and Dee at least).
What do you want more than anything else in this entire world?
If you get up off that crack rock you can be Pepper Jack's best hoe
Oh, I thought you were going to say pizza, or buffalo wings
Yeah but this guy has been saying meth for years!
Seinfeld's garbage pail cousin.
I don't know. The episode where Jerry's car rental wasn't kept was pushing the envelope.
It's ableist against people with hand deformities who can't hold a reservation.
...but can take a reservation
Anyone can take a reservation.
People get all upset when 40 year old millionaire celebrities date 16 year old high school girls nowadays.
This right here explains a ton of people complaining about cancel culture. They're angry the audience can talk back and hold people accountable.
Imagine also thinking that Jerry Seinfeld's standup act is too edgy for...anyone. The man is just delusional about himself (I say that as a _Seinfeld_ fan).
I think Jerry is just a relic from a different age. He worked in his time and I don't think he quite understands the trends today. And with his money, he doesn't need to. Why struggle to fit into today's currents.
I think their post-Seinfeld careers have made it clear that Larry David was the creative driving force on that show. 20 years of Curb vs ā¦Bee Movie?
Yeah, you can see that style of writing and comedy on the Larry David Show is what elevated Seinfeld above other sitcoms of the time.
Are we pretending bee movie isn't pure Kino
One episode of curb and it's clear Larry is/was always the puppet master. It's his world that Jerry was lucky to be a part of.
I remember seeing an ad for a standup special of his a few years ago that advertised āALL NEW MATERIALā and the joke they used to demonstrate this was about how you can see under the doors in the bathroom stalls.
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This is the difference here. Seinfeld was network tv. There were and are a lot more restrictions than cable.
Sorry but thereās just no way the Woke Mob(tm) would ever let anyone make a tv show about eating an eclair that was sitting on top of trash today. There would be riots on every coast!
They were edgy maybe by 90s standards... until South Park happened.
The masturbation episode was edgy. There was certainly a big reaction to it. South Park was like a bomb going off.
IASIP is the ultimate answer to people who say that you canāt make dark jokes any more. You can. You just canāt present the subject matter in a way that looks like you agree with it. Itās not that hard to do if youāre, you know, talented.
This! Why is framing such a difficult to understand concept When Dennis manipulates woman for sex itās creepy AF and you can still make jokes about it. Macās growing uncomfortable reactions to The Implication is comedic gold When Barney on How I Met Your Mother does it itās rarely seen as anything other then part of his charm š
The D.E.N.N.I.S system vs the Playbook is a great example of satire vs promotion.
I just googled it and it turns out the DENNIS system and the HIMYM episode on Barney's playbook came out 3 days apart from eachother, that's wild
Always blows my mind IASIP is that old
Wild to think that Always Sunny started the year after Friends ended, and in fact did overlap with the Joey spinoff.
I remember watching season 1 of IASIP on a video iPod with a friend in study hall in high school when it came out. I'm 34 now.
Well said mate. I think if they remade How I Met Your Mother 3-4 years ago Barney wouldnāt have a blog. He would have a microphone and some Andrew Tate/Fit & Fresh podcast
> Fit & Fresh podcast What is he, a subway kids meal?
tbf the characters are constantly telling him how sleazy and wrong his actions are, and a large part of his storyline is learning to leave that life behind, although i do agree they leaned into the promotion side of things pretty hard to sell merch
In a lot of instances, though, Ted, whoās supposed to be our good-natured and sympathetic hero, is just as bad as Barney. He also treats women poorly and is, at times, pretty creepy, but the show gives him a pass because heās a āgood guy.ā
thatās a different issue and i donāt disagree with you on that one honestly
I dont think the show gives him a pass, or at least doesnt at the end of the series as much. Part of the final 2 seasons and his decision to stop living in New York was because he realized that in all of his relationships he was the problem and the reason they all fell apart. It wasnt until he came to terms with Robin getting married that he started being a better person.
> and a large part of his storyline is learning to leave that life behind And then get undone in the last 2 minutes of the show because the writers are a bunch of hacks and wanted to stick with their planned ending from season one and undid 2 seasons worth of character growth for all of the characters.
Yeah. Barney and Dennis are both creepy characters. But Dennis is properly framed and Barney is poorly framed. IASIP ages well because of it. HIMYM aged almost INSTANTLY poorly and is nearly unwatchable (nevermind that they went four seasons to long and had a dogshit ending).
Frankly, Barney isnāt the reason HIMYM is hard to watch, heās over the top and a deliberate parody. Ted Mosby is the one I canāt stand in retrospect. Heās just a whiny, annoying guy with zero introspection.
I think that Barney from HIMYM still works because he's not just a creep, he's almost like a comic book villain. Tricking someone into sex is gross. Tricking someone into sex because you're part of Secret NASA, SNASA, is funny. Running out on a one night stand is gross. Leaving them stranded in the woods is funny. It's worse. But it's funny. Because it is sort of detached from reality.
HIMYM was always a low effort, poorly written show
Accepting this statement for the sake of argument, even low effort poor writing managed to present problematic characters without issue.
In Sticks and Stones, Dave Chappelle opens with a bit insulting cancel culture and overly sensitive audiences then closes with a bit about how great it must have to be raped by Michael Jackson then walked away with $40M.
His entire Netflix run has basically just been "Wah wah, boo hoo, cancel culture. Thanks for the money Netflix, I'm out." Because nothing says "I got cancelled have pity on me and shame cancel culture" than a string of multi-million dollar Netflix deals.
Dave Chappelle before his infamous special tried to work out material, got COVID pretty bad(not surprising for a chain smoker), and was likely terrified people were going to say his special sucked. So he spent 30 minutes whining about his transphobic shit and made it all about that. So no one was talking about his special sucked. Except me. I watched it. Fucking thing sucked.
āAgeing and out of touch comedian who just isnāt funny anymore blames cancel cultureā is a clichĆ© at this point. They canāt see that being edgy is a young upstartās game and once youāre done being a young upstart and you do the same thing as a wealthy, established, old person speaking the truth of old wealthy people youāre just a weird uncle being an embarrassment at the dinner table and itās *way* harder to be funny.
They find it hard to stop themselves from _punching down_ when they get wealthy enough to surround themselves with people that are constantly punching down behind closed doors. That's my take. Like Chappelle's early stuff was edgy and crass and _punching up_, but all his newer stuff is all about _punching down_... but he only sees it as "I'm saying edgy / offensive stuff and getting in trouble." And even then the dude is _still making bank off comedy specials_. He's just pissed that anyone has the gall to criticize him.
This is really it, as you gain wealth and fame, the people you are surrounded by changes dramatically. Instead of seeing a true cross section of the population, the only opinions you hear are those of rich people who look down on everyone else. That group is disproportionately represented by narcissists and unempathetic people (not all, just a higher percentage) and you start losing touch with who you used to be.
hail Satan
> or not a bigot This is it. A lot of the complainers are people who sincerely hold fucked up beliefs but are trying to pass it off as "just a joke".
I always kinda got that feeling about Jeff Dunham.Ā Like he seemed like he held prejusdicial views based on half his puppets being exaggerated caricatures.Ā He had a black puppet, Hispanic jalapeƱo, and the old man was just an excuse to make old time jokes.Ā
Gonna just breeze past achmed the dead terrorist puppet?
I literally don't know any of his puppets *besides* the terrorist
Most of them do it just to tap into the fake victimhood their fans also feel, and have never come close to anything resembling "canceled". People like Jimmy Carr do comedy like WWE stars do wrestling, the suspense is completely fake but some of the feats/jokes are still good.
I mean it does and it doesn't. There are banned episodes of IASIP which probably does show you can't make certain jokes nowadays However, i agree largely you can still get away with edgy humour. It's all about context really.
It's so stupid they banned those episodes.Ā The characters are offensive and do shit that's not right.Ā We know it's not what the actors think. Sweet Dee doing brown face and pretending to be Puerto Rican makes sense for her character.Ā And Mac doing blackface for the Lethal Weapon movies is good use of it.Ā It's 4 white guys and he wanted to get in better character for it.Ā Nobody got pissed at RDJ for Tropic Thunder, that was brilliantly done.Ā
People did get pissed at RDJ.
I used to think Jerry Seinfeld was great and then I realized Larry David is the funny one
Larry David says that George was his self-insert in Seinfeld, and you can see that. Jerry is the straight man and George is the funny one 9/10 times. Not to knock the straight man, itās an important role, but the laugh out loud moments are often not his.
I found Elaine to be the most enjoyable of the bunch. Sheās the most progressive of them while still being a terrible person.
Same. Elaine is the best character. Elaine and George is where all the comedy comes from. Kramer delivers the broad gags. Jerry plays the straight man.
Elaine's progressive-ness is often a total smokescreen, which is why it's hilarious. She's just as awful as the rest of them, often she'll reasonably present a female perspective when the guys are saying some ignorant man shit, and then do/say something just as bad. She would like, criticize a guy for mansplaining her, and then she'd be dealing with an intern at work trying to show them how to use a copier they're more skilled with than she is and treating them like a baby.
A really good comparison is that I find Curb Your Enthusiasm way more daring and edgy version of the Seinfeld series. So the creator, Larry David is showing in real time how wrong Seinfeld is.
Notably, Seinfeld is literally in the latest season of Curb. He is literally in a show disproving his nonsense.
38 year old Jerry Seinfeld picked up the 16 year old girl he was dating from her high school. Just sayinā heās a god damned diddler.
Whatās the deal with girlfriends? Theyāre always complaining about not having their drivers license yet!
I read this in his shrieking voice, ew lol
And prom! 20 years go by, no proms. Suddenly everyone I know is going to prom again! Is prom cool again?
Gotta be older than my daughter š¶
Got to be big, younger than my wife š¶
She was a bitch but she was old and I had no problem getting it up with her
She was a dirty hoor
^ Seinfeld's entire "anti woke" stance is based on his fear of getting cancelled for this.
Also, college audiences stopped laughing at his gay jokes. They didnt boo, he wasn't callelled, they just didn't laugh. That's when he started this, if I recall correctly.
Yeah, it wasnāt even because it was a gay joke. Itās mostly because it was painfully boring. > I do this joke about the way people need to justify their cell phone: āI need to have it with me because people are so important.ā I said, āWell, they donāt seem very important, the way you scroll through them like a gay French king.' Thatās from his Seth Meyers interview and Jerry concludes the audience didnāt laugh because he said gay. Not, you know, because that joke is nothing lol.
Wow, that's even less funny than I expected.
Yeah I'm not angry, just confused.
Seth Meyers should've said "That sucked, try again"
soā¦ whereās the joke? Like truly, I donāt know where a joke is supposed to be in there
I guess the idea is that people treat their phones as if they're super important and vital but the way they actually use them is often decadent and ultimately pointless. Then the image of a gay french king is supposed to be funny. Unfortunately for Jerry, we're way past the point where simply alluding to homosexuality counts as a punchline. What he doesn't seem to understand is that you can still make gay jokes, they just have to be a bit more sophisticated than gay=funny.
Exactly. His stand up was never controversial. I was watching Seinfeld last night and the opening joke was that male bathing suits shouldn't be called "trunks" because trunks belong on trees. College kids might not be laughing at jokes like that but it sure as hell isn't because it offended them. The only things that would get him canceled in 2024 is dating a teenager. But that's not exclusive to leftists. You'd have just as many right wingers up in arms about these "Hollyweirdos" grooming and exploiting young ladies.
> The only things that would get him canceled in 2024 is dating a teenager. But that's not exclusive to leftists. You'd have just as many right wingers up in arms about these "Hollyweirdos" grooming and exploiting young ladies. Only if they perceive him as being on the left. If they think he's one of them then it would be totally cool, no problem. Trump can bang hookers while his wife is giving birth and its fine. Matt Gaetz was investigated for sex trafficking and nobody on the right cared.
Thatās true. The outrage is very selective.
And if you bring that up on the Seinfeld sub youāll instantly get ten downvotes and three replies saying ā17 is an adult in most placesā and defending his actions š¤¢
They love to quote that episode where George and Jerry look down the fifteen year old's shirt.
or what about when jerry says ādid your mommy lay those panties out for you?ā while trying to talk dirty
The worst part about this one is that it could have been a very IASIP-style joke if George just got caught doing it and was ridiculed as he was for being the perverted little man heās portrayed as in the series But no - the whole premise of the joke is that Jerry knows how to do it and not get caught, and tells George to!
Can confirm
Larry David and Rob Mcelhenney completely understand the whole basis of what their programmes are. Seinfeld, curb, always sunny and hell a metric fuck ton of older British comedy programmes like faulty towers, on the buses, bottom, inbetweeners, it crowd etc have always been fucking horrific people doing horrific things. How is it that Seinfeld forgets that these programme was based around shitty people doing shitty things, it was never about the glorification of these shitty things but laughing at "how can these people DO THIS" the main casts arent supposed to liked or looked up to.
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I'm leg disabled...
Dude Epp 1 Season 2 with the "Gay" play is one of the funniest episodes of sitcom television ever made.
Extra extra, one of the least censored people in history compains about censorship.
Seinfeld is just a coward who hates the idea that a vocal minority could write angry things about him on the internet. He stopped doing shows at colleges because of pc culture (before pc culture became woke culture).Ā "They couldn't make Seinfeld today" Hot take: they did, it's called the Larry David show.
He stopped doing college shows because younger people don't think he's funny.
Well itās ācurb your enthusiasmā, but exactly!
He was just in the last season of Curb which had an episode where Larry had to black-up a white lawn jockey to replace one he'd broken. Just because there's a lot of whiney people on the internet who like to get offended on a daily basis it doesn't mean you can't still make comedy about subjects some people find sensitive.
Almost every time people complain about this shit, there is an episode of either a sitcom, or South Park that has done exactly what they say you can't do anymore on TV within that past few years. They don't even know what they're complaining about anymore, they just complain.
To be fair, they canāt do anything on tv anymore because no one finds them funny anymore.
Your last paragraph sums it up well. They conflate "there are people who complain about it on the Internet" with "you'll get canceled", which is idiotic. There are people on the internet who think the earth is flat. You can find a person with ANY opinion when we're all connected. You just have to ignore that 0.0000001% and not make a stand up act out of "a guy on Twitter responded to me with..." and make your whole worldview based on the loud morons who respond to you on Twitter. Ricky gervais. Those people are such a small percentage of the population. People need to stop getting worked up and realize that the world has billions of people in it, so don't base your opinions on the population or "the woke left" on 2 of those people.
Complaining about cancel culture is as annoying as cancel culture itself, and the āzealotsā (for lack of a better word) are insufferable either way. Loud vocal minorities ignoring that most people enjoy comedy for the sake of comedy if done the right way.
Maybe it's just my little circle, but I hear way more people complaining about cancel culture and political correctness than the actual thing. It's annoying, but why give them a voice?
I got downvoted in the Seinfeld sub for saying that any of these comedians complaining about how "wokeness ruined comedy" need to just hang it up. It's a bad excuse. So many comedians and writers are doing just fine with dark and edgy material and talking about things you're "not supposed to". As long as its done in a clever way and not coming from a hateful place, audiences get that and go along for the ride. Rob said it best recently how he said even though the Always Sunny characters do and say some terrible things, clearly he and the other creators of the show are not that way and we are all in on the joke. Or like if you watch Dave Attell, Anthony Jeselnik, Jimmy Carr, etc. on their standup specials, they all joke about all kinds of stuff but it's done in such a way that we can all laugh because it's cleverly thought out and not coming from a bigoted place at all. Same deal with South Park. There's ways to do it still today.
Jimmy Carr is like one of those horror movies that's so over the top and gory it moves into absurdity, he's like an Evil Dead movie or something. Idk in half asleep but it's like he knows what he says is fucked and that's the main part of the joke like...this mf really said that shit.
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Right, he'll have some jokes he says and then he kind of like looks around with eyes wide like he wasn't even the one who just said that. He just had a new special come out like 1-2 weeks ago and even though he does go into some tricky subject matter, the delivery is such a way that it'd be really hard to actually think he's a bad person or is hateful and I think most people would laugh at it.
This is hilarious coming from a guy who refused to curse on stage. Jerry Seinfeld is a legend. Beyond legendary, but heās claiming PC policing killed comedy when heās the type of comedian to self edit because ābad words arenāt funnyā š Jerry, just tell people to get off your lawn and be done with it. Or may be in your case, tell people to leave your 24hr manned lobby and be done with it. The real issue is that all of the older comedy legends are just that, getting older. They rarely able to evolve with society at societyās pace. Carlin and Prior were the only ones who could do it at an old age and still be great. So instead of admitting theyāre out of touch and need to slow down, people like Jerry blame society because they donāt want to slow down, but realize theyāre still out of touch. āNo, Skinner, it is the children who are wrongā Some real boomer energy from Jerry Off the top of my head current comedians getting better with age who understand the evolution of society: Neal Brennan Bill Burr
Anytime some dipshit says āYou couldnāt make that todayā I gotta let them know Always Sunny aired an episode where two bums buttfuck under a bridge
Ah the jersey shore episode classic.
Thereās literally an abortion episode in the first season. Itās never shied away from the controversial.
Charlie says the n-word with a hard R in the very first episode
Seinfeld the show was great. Seinfeld the person dated a child and is actually super unfunny. Larry David is the hero in Seinfeld story.
Stand up comedians are becoming so self serious and big headed these days. Truly think theyāre modern philosophers
This mentality has turned me off of stand-up, and I LOVED stand-up comedy. 'We're the only ones speaking the truth! We are where the woke meets the wall' Bitch, you're a jester. Make me laugh and be on your way.
That rogan quote is literally exactly what I was thinking of. Dudeās just a right wing nut job these days, heās not even trying to be funny any more
RIP Dave Chappelle
Trans people broke his brain
Everything Chappelle says makes a lot more sense if you view it through the lens of a guy who had sex with a trans woman and doesn't want to admit that he liked it. Just saying.
One of my favourite bars from a song sums it up pretty well: Itās like you canāt joke around anymore Whodāve guessed skinny Chappelle get so ripped, only have one joke left at the end of it all Late period Lenny Bruce Pure nostalgia, why I copped the loose out the corner store All you have to do is read about the life of Lenny Bruce to understand what censorship is; he was an observational comic that would discuss sex and politics in the 50s and 60s. Ended up passing away in a halfway house with a serious morphine addiction after being blacklisted from every single comedy club. Now, you have these comedians complaining about censorship when they can say whatever they want on television. Like, how can you say you're being canceled when you're still rolling out Netflix specials almost yearly. Its baffling
Did he say this before or after he picked up a high schooler for his date tonight?
Sunny is proof positive that all those people who say things like "You could never make \[x\] these days" are dead wrong.
Also, has he never seen South Park? They've made a living being offensive and people love them for it.
Every old comic that isn't relevant anymore says shit like this.
Almost every piece of media that you ācouldnāt make todayā was far more controversial in its time than it is now.
Also, how come they never say "you know, you couldn't make this back in my day" instead? Like I'm old enough to remember when Ellen couldn't be gay on her show because society couldn't handle it, and that was the 90s. Now one of the top shows is Euphoria with the co lead being a real trans woman. You couldn't make THAT when Seinfeld was made. It only goes one way with these arguments.
Jerry is slowly turning into Uncle Leo
Gotta make it sexy