Comedy on College Campuses

It used to be a major American art form for white actors to cover themselves in make-up and pretend to be black. This persisted for roughly a hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. What a golden age for comedy that must have been!

As recently as the 1970s we had shows like Three's Company, that was in large part centered around some very hoary stereotypes of homosexuals. Those were good times. Too bad we have all those politically correct buzzkills nowadays to protest that real gay people rarely act the way they were portrayed on that show.

Lately there's been a lot of chatter over the idea that college students are too PC to appreciate comedy. Comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock have declared that they won't play college anymore, because the students are too conservative in their tastes. This has caused some hand-wringing in certain quarters, but I'm not sure what the scandal is supposed to be. Why is this a sign of social dysfunction and not just another example of different strokes for different folks? People disagree about what's funny. So what? And is it not a bit pompous for a comedian to say there's something wrong with the audience for not liking his act?

Looking for guidance, I read this article by Caitlyn Flanagan, published at The Atlantic. Flanagan plainly thinks she's stumbled onto a juicy story here, but I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to be worrying about. Worse, Flanagan's article suffers from several internal contradictions that make it hard to determine her point.

For example, the article is called, “That's Not Funny! Today's College Students Can't Seem to Take a Joke.” Early on we read this:

[T]hey 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.

Okay. But then what am I to make of this?

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.

Apparently, then, many college students have no trouble at all taking a joke. Representatives of 18 schools booked him for their campuses. But two students from one Iowa college didn't care for him, so that must be the real story. Truly civilization is imperiled because two Iowa college students didn't like a comedian's act.

Then there's this:

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.

She's onto something there. Higher education is beset by all sorts of problems, and many of them stem from the fact that administrators (and many parents as well) view students solely as customers to be made happy, and not as, well, students.

But how am I to square this with the entire rest of the article? If the problem is that universities are too much like resorts, then the solution is to spend less time and money deciding what entertainment to bring to campus, and more time strengthening academics. Flanagan seems to think the problem is that school's need to find better comics.

Flanagan also has definite ideas about what's funny and what's not:

If your goal were simply to bring great comics to a college campus, it would be easily accomplished. You would gather the school’s comedy nerds, give them a budget, and tell them to book the best acts they could afford. But then you’d have Doug Stanhope explaining to religious kids that there's no God, or Dennis Miller telling an audience of social-justice warriors that France's efforts to limit junk food in schools are part of the country's “master plan to raise healthier cowards.” You would have, in other words, performers whose desire is not to soothe an audience but to unsettle it, performers who hew to Roseanne Barr's understanding of comedy: “I love stand-up. I'm totally addicted to it,” she once said. “It's free speech. It's all that’s left.”

But basing your comedy on ancient, clichéd stereotypes of French people, or anyone else, is not “unsettling.” It's just boring and not funny. Or so it seems to me, at any rate. I guess not being an admirer of Dennis Miller make me part of the PC brigade.

And do I really need to point out that freedom of speech does not entitle you to a booking on a college campus?

If we were talking about instances of comedians routinely being booed off the stage or shouted down at college campuses, then there would be a story here. If students were being told who they can and cannot listen to in their dorm rooms, then we could use words like “repressive” to describe it. As it is, however, Flanagan's story is simply that colleges with limited funds and diverse student bodies try not to bring comedians to campus who are likely to offend large segments of the campus. Is that so terrible? Also, students are less impressed than they used to be by crude, racial humor. That sounds like social progress to me.

Political correctness is a real problem on campus, but nothing in Flanagan's article is a manifestation of it.