Hilariously enough, you really are proving the authors point, by freaking out over the use of two words and using that to dismiss the author.
Kurt Metzger has this story about a person like you. He was in a club in New York telling this joke that starts off with “Anybody here in favor of gay marriage?”. The audience goes crazy, and he responds by saying “well not me. I’m against gay marriage” and then goes from there using humor jujitsu to make the arguments against gay marriage look ridiculous. Anyhow, he’s doing this joke in a club one night and get the the point where he does the “well not me, I’m against gay marriage” at which point the girl in the front row grabs a drink off a table - not even her drink, but somebody else’s drink - and throws it at Kurt. Shocked, he goes, “what did you do that for!?!”, to which she responds “YOU’RE AGAINST GAY MARRIAGE!!” At which point he says the only thing you can say in a situation like that: “You didn’t even let me finish the joke!”
Btw, that’s also an example of the sort of “offensive” humor
the PC crowd can’t tolerate.
I think it’s because many people are never taught critical thinking, and have very poor rhetorical skills. The same applies to me, but I do at least try.
From my limited experience in two community colleges, they seem more like expensive daycares for adult children. The people who do best in the community colleges I went to are either foreign students who are actually there to get a valuable and practical education (technical degrees, business degrees, agriculture etc), or the old timers (the 40+ crowd) who are coming back after years of work experience and are taking the opportunity seriously and have the experience to follow through.
I tried really hard to do well, but I couldn’t hack it. There was just too much weed and booze around, and too many people to just chill out and smoke cigarettes with while chatting, and the place was so unstructured that I couldn’t hack it and not end up wasting all my time there.
I have the opportunity to go back now, but I don’t think it’d be a good idea. I did eventually get a technical degree, but even that feels like it might have been a waste of time and money, seeing as I wasn’t able to land a job with a W-2 for two years after getting it, even though it was relevant to my field. The only solace is that I wasted my cash-on-hand, rather than racking up debt that would stalk me to the grave.
Today’s college kids grew up during a decade when America was extremely conservative and dissension was not okay, and when schools were reduced to underfunded test-administration centers/daycares (both in part thanks to our esteemed leader, who engineered both the war on terror and NCLB). They are, as a group, unaccustomed to being challenged in pretty much any way. Combine this with the fact that colleges have become increasingly corporatized, and the economic realities of a college education (life-long debt) have led colleges to focus more on tangible but trivial material benefits to students rather than less tangible ones (i.e. building rock climbing walls rather than paying permanent faculty members to improve the quality of instruction) to help dupe students into attending, and, yeah, current undergrads seem to be a relatively sheltered and easily-bruised bunch.
Attending a university at present. If there is anything that is all too true about colleges, this is it. It’s all about the amenities over the education, and there are parents who, no joke, will use phrases like “the college experience” with a straight face in reference to what they want for their children. Fuck them, their kids, and the station wagon (I think they’re called “crossovers” now) they rode in on. College is treated like a commodity, and while professional academics will gasp and cover their mouths when I say this: It is one. Academics simply haven’t gotten the memo that they’ve lost long before they’ve had a chance to fight.
At least knowledge as a commodity is definitely a losing prospect, since buying something one doesn’t understand doesn’t truly benefit one’s self. Affiliations make a poor substitute for it.
Wasn’t Seinfeld or someone complaining about this recently? I think what’s tough when talking about something like this is that one man’s (or woman’s) harmless joke is another’'s trigger. So while there probably IS a problem with universities not wanting to have to deal with complaints in a mature manner, this could easily be used to justify saying anything.
Frankly, what I’ve always found funniest (as an adult) is comedy that stings, not because it’s outrageous, but because it takes something that’s true and turns it into a joke so that we can process it better. The best example I can think of right now is probably not the best example overall, but black comics who have not done the tired “black people do it this way/white people do it this way”, but have just made jokes about their experiences have really opened my eyes about the inequalities we still face. (Obviously before the blacklivesmatter movement made it apparent everywhere) Because it’s part of a comedy routine - that’s why I happened to be in a place to listen to it. Dave Chapelle or Key and Peele have some great examples of that in some of their sketches and standup routines.
Nah, when I freak out I go on much longer than that, and usually use profanity for emphasis. Using the term “thought police” to refer to people who are picky about political correctness is an existing meme, and it’s associated with pretty dumb ideas.
In your example, the comic made a controversial statement in order to play with and ultimately subvert its meaning, and the problem was that the audience didn’t hear him out. I did hear the author of this piece out. I read the whole thing and thought carefully about it. The author never subverts the idea that college anti-oppression ideology is an oppressive authority, she basically just writes a bunch of platitudes about free speech and tries to position anti-oppression PC as the bossypants that’s denying us the glories of unfettered freedom. There is no jiu-jitsu, just a clumsy effort to generalize about a subject she hasn’t given much thought to.
So I don’t say the author is dumb because I disagree with her ideas and want to dismiss them. There are plenty of smart people with ideas I disagree with, and I often enjoy engaging with them - sometimes on this very topic. But this author isn’t one, which is why I don’t really have much more to say.
Yeah, the article sounds like something you’d read on a College Republicans poster, along with all the straw dialogue from “liberal fascist millennials”.
Or, perhaps, drunk assholes are drunk, heckling assholes?
Comedy crowds draw attention-whores who want to be the story.
A lot of humor uses the offense at a tool to examine what is offensive. Sure, on the surface this joke is making fun of black people/gays/*something offensive, but it is using this, and your reaction to force you to examine whatever you found offensive. Jokes use offense as a social tool. Well, good jokes, at least.
They also can be a release valve, using offense as a source of breaking tension. Good jokes, at least.
Comedians, at their best, are our court jesters. They can say things most people cannot, because they wrap it in humor and irony. This gay joke isn’t making fun of gays, it making fun of intolerance. But it is now offensive, because… Every damn thing is offensive now. And offense is the worst sin imaginable today. Unless, of course, we’re offending people who don’t agree with us, and then it is funny. People in college are adults, they should be used to the real world by now. If someone says something they don’t like, leave the room, or, in the case of comedy, heckle them to hell and back.
no. comedy is not an interactive artform, hecklers ruin the show for everybody else. if you don’t like the comedy, you should leave. write a strongly worded tweet about it if you really need to, but don’t see why you should ruin everyone else’s night just because you can’t handle the outside world.
You do have a point. But then again, when I was first entering university (as a relative adult), I went to one of their “comedy mixers” starring Larry the Cable Guy, it was the most boring, banal, and idiotic night I ever spend in college. If drinks were allowed, I would have heckled him, just to keep myself from falling asleep. And judging from the glassy eyed, disinterested, chuckles from the young freshman audience, I probably would have been doing a public service.
It was offensive in its blandness. But then again, pretty much every non-academic college event was bland by design. Things got more interesting when clubs and groups were allowed to run with it, my favorite was the “gay in”, which involved the organized gay groups sitting around doing their homework, chatting with each other, and generally throwing the gay into peoples faces by just being completely normal. It was brilliant, especially when the few hardcore Christian protesters showed up (we respond to hate by being just people HARDER!). Nothing to do with the topic, but somewhat tangential moral; the further you get from bland, inclusive, college sponsored committees, the more interesting you get, and the more “useful” edge you get.
I think the big problem here is that we’ve created a generation that reacts to words and not ideas. Rather than pay attention to the ideas somebody is trying to communicate they react like a 5 year old going “YOU SAID A BAD WORD!”.
You saw this with reaction to Benedict Cumberbatch when he said “colored actors”. If you actually paid attention to what he was saying he was talking about how racist and discriminatory the system is, taking an anti-racist stance, but all these people instead of hearing that just heard the word “colored” and jumped all over him. It’s created an environment where people care far less about content and more about form. It’s a shallow, inherently close minded, conservative mind set masquerading as being open minded and liberal that is fueled by social media and the need of everybody to have an instant reaction to everything (as opposed to thinking about something, processing it, and then having a measured reaction).
And the rest of the generations focus more on reactionary twits than the people who laugh at “PC” while they themselves say racist/sexist/otherwise hateful shit.
Focus on being a better person, not on “the Millennials”.
It’s an exaggeration, but maybe not a gross exaggeration. Colleges keep on trying to compete with more and more student amenities. Midlevel administration grows and grows. Evaluating the growing ranks of non-tenured faculty almost exclusively* on student evaluations lets grade inflation creep ever higher and makes being non-challenging the safe position.
But it depends highly on the institution.
*: My institution has the gall to tell the students that they aren’t used in rehiring. In reality, they are almost the only thing they care about.
That article contained an interesting analogy between teaching critical thinking skills and cognitive behavioral therapy. I’m going to have to think on that for a while.
