Jims spoken out quite a bit about this, he does it in one of his last specials (unsure which one, one of the last two)
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
America, Colleges, Comedians and 'Safe Spaces'
- Thread starter ReplacementPelican
- Start date
Jims spoken out quite a bit about this, he does it in one of his last specials (unsure which one, one of the last two)
Punching up, punching down is an idiotic concept.
Famous and hilarious.
That's the key difference here. Famous. I've got friends who Tour and have the same schtick as Tosh, some are even funnier, but they haven't been on TV. They've been trying to break into the college circuit for years and get shot down because it's "too much" (despite not being as much as Tosh or Jeselnick).
Trust me. There is a difference between the two. Famous comedians get away with considerably more, and if you don't believe me, attend a few Open Mic's in your city (if you're in a big city) and wait for the hecklers to come out. I deal with them all the time here, despite saying very tame things by comparison (and I even try to make sure my "edgy" stuff has social capital).
I wish I could remember which comedian it is but he said a reason for the filtered content is because, when he was trying out for colleges for bookings he had to go along to a convention where many university organisations were and perform for them, and if you didnt perform "acceptable" material, they would not book you, this is for lesser known comedians of course, ill try to find the article but its a very good insight into how difficult it is to be dirty.
Here is a very similar article talking about the struggles of not being famous and trying to work colleges with a restricted act
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-not-funny/399335/
lol, yea okay. Sure thing. Educate me, Plato.
Sure, but this all I have so far:
Why did the chicken cross from the playground on one side of the road to the playground on the other side of the road
To get to the other slide
pause for laugh
Heavy_D206
Member
I agree with you there, Fame will certainly let you get away with a lot more but also put a bigger target on your back if you do push the line too far. (Gilbert Gottfried comes to mind)
I've done numerous Open Mic's here in Seattle which is a very liberal city, however I feel like the Comedy scene here still appreciates and understands offensive humor as long as it's not outright racism or something offensive just for the sake of offending people.
As for getting heckled, I fucking love it and actually encourage it when I'm on stage. I eat hecklers for God Damn breakfast.
Side note, I love the rise in popularity of "Roasting" in Stand-Up as it allows for horribly offensive yet still well written material to be highlighted.
Crimson_Echidna
Banned
Because people have convinced themselves that they have to offer my unsolicited opinion whenever and wherever I want, regardless of the tone or context of the setting.
Hahaha, well i didn't mean to perform, just to watch! I mean, every one should try it, but just go watch and observe (and maybe laugh, but it's an open mic so probably not).
What does punching up even mean? What if you have a person who was born into wealth who has devoted their life to the betterment of people less fortunate. Fuck them because punching up. They happened to be born wealthy.
It is an insidious, illogical way to view individuals. Punch up, punch down logic is for morons.
The logic has no end because someone born into perceived privilege has no out. They could be the most generous and thoughtful person to ever walk the planet and still be a target because, completely out of their control, their parents happened to be wealthy. Or white. Or whatever.
Im not sure this is in any way an apt analogy or true
Yep. Can't stand the strain of liberalism that demands safe spaces. Want a safe space? Go to your room and shut the fuck up.
One of the big issues is that these people have co-opted liberalism. They aren't liberals. They are leftist authoritarians.
I see no way out of it, to be honest. This type of thinking has caught on in the US and it is very attractive. Any failures in my life can be attributed to the discrimination I have faced because of identifying markers X, Y, and Z. Personal responsibility doesn't exist. If I'm not happy, it is a failure of society.
I can be a student at fucking Yale and almost break down crying about a lack of privilege.
Aarglefarg
Member
Oh no, a private space where they don't have the same old BS shoved down their throats. The number of times they will hear your same old rubbish will go down slightly.
Journeywalker
Member
Of course not. Minorities face bigotry (soft, hard, and structural) every day. But at least, in the idealized college, the exposure to bigotry could be limited to the common areas and the Inequality Building. The common areas would have protections from harassment, shutting down, ad hominem, and threats, but would otherwise be open to any opinion, no matter how ugly. The inequality building would house the safe spaces for bigotry, hate, hypocrisy, deceit, ignorance, etc.
Why should your room be a safe space? If we're saying anything goes, why don't I follow you around 24 hours a day with a trombone?
Congratulations, you're not a liberal. You're a libertarian. Liberals are about equality of opportunity. Libertarians dream about fantasy lands without structural racism, tribalism, and consolidation of power.
Journeywalker
Member
Sorry, DP
A target of what though? Silly jokes? Compared to being targets of violence, harassment and an overall poorer quality of life? I'm sure minorities and poor people wish it was only about jokes.
There's a discussion to be had about everything in comedy being fair game, (I tend to agree with that) but the logic goes that people who are at a disadvantage would be better served if on top of having a myriad of problems, they weren't also being made fun of.
Comedians shouldn't focus exclusively on disadvantaged people or make them the majority of their punchlines.
It ultimately is a comedian's prerogative choosing what to make the focus of their comedy and shouldn't be silenced, but people also have a right to protest and speak out against them.
tearsintherain
Member
There was a documentary last year that discussed this very topic among a LOT of comedians, "Can We Take a Joke"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgKCKPls5no
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edduIlBFXMo
My kids have gone through college the past few years, my two daughters graduated a few years ago and my son is in his final year. Its definitely overblown on the internet, and most colleges are just fine and support a diversity of opinions but there are some "snowflakes", to use a overused term, that feel that anything that offends them should not be allowed to be said anywhere on campus and they are extremely loud and vocal. They are a tiny, tiny minority just like idiots who say awful things on twitter/etc but because they are so crazy it gets played a lot on the media, especially right wing "liberal arts college degrees are worthless" sites. Colleges have always been liberal hotbeds because its basically filled with people who don't work and have very little responsibility and are very academic and thats fine, but in the past few years there has been a more insidious "if you don't share our opinions, you can get the fuck out" movement by both faculty and students.
There are definitely consequences to this culture, Mizzou for example had huge protests 2 years ago over racism and privilege, and a lot of parents and prospective students got turned off. Enrollment at the university is down 35% and they've had to fire staff, shut down buildings, etc. Same thing has happened at a few other universities where the administration basically forgot their students are still basically children and need some rules and guidance, and their job isn't to fulfill every desire and whim of the students.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/university-of-missouri-enrollment-protests-fallout.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgKCKPls5no
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edduIlBFXMo
My kids have gone through college the past few years, my two daughters graduated a few years ago and my son is in his final year. Its definitely overblown on the internet, and most colleges are just fine and support a diversity of opinions but there are some "snowflakes", to use a overused term, that feel that anything that offends them should not be allowed to be said anywhere on campus and they are extremely loud and vocal. They are a tiny, tiny minority just like idiots who say awful things on twitter/etc but because they are so crazy it gets played a lot on the media, especially right wing "liberal arts college degrees are worthless" sites. Colleges have always been liberal hotbeds because its basically filled with people who don't work and have very little responsibility and are very academic and thats fine, but in the past few years there has been a more insidious "if you don't share our opinions, you can get the fuck out" movement by both faculty and students.
There are definitely consequences to this culture, Mizzou for example had huge protests 2 years ago over racism and privilege, and a lot of parents and prospective students got turned off. Enrollment at the university is down 35% and they've had to fire staff, shut down buildings, etc. Same thing has happened at a few other universities where the administration basically forgot their students are still basically children and need some rules and guidance, and their job isn't to fulfill every desire and whim of the students.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/university-of-missouri-enrollment-protests-fallout.html
Perhaps you'd be so kind as to explain my views to me since I consider the concept of equality of opportunity to be paramount to my entire political belief system.
Pick any beliefs at random and tell me why I hold them.
Journeywalker
Member
I thought you agreed to the claim that there should be no safe spaces, which is pretty libertarian. If I'm wrong, please explain.
Oh...you don't even know what punching up in humor means, do you? I mean, I get it, not a lot of people outside of comedy "get it", but your hostility is kind of silly.
Comedians think of "punching up" as "speaking truth to power". It has nothing to do with wealth, and everything to do with power. Punching down is making jokes about a person / demographic at their expense.
Example: Punching up is making jokes about banks or economic disparity between classes.
Punching down is making fun of gay people for "taking a dick in the ass" or some other juvenile stereo type.
Punching down is the easiest and most novel comedy one can write. It doesn't have lasting power.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=245425068&postcount=136
I'm all for people meeting and discussing issues they face in an environment where they can trust the other people that are there. Those types of groups are extremely helpful. As mentioned, I've benefitted from groups like that. But even if I hadn't, it isn't hard to imagine groups who face severe discrimination due to race or sexuality wanting to have places they can meet and discuss issues with an understanding of acceptance and privacy.
I can believe all of that and still think there are major issues exemplified in the attack on Allison Stanger or the insane childish ramblings in the Yale incident (the students sound like angry 5-year-olds throwing a tantrum to get their way), to name a few somewhat famous instances.
I agree completely with the video I posted earlier in the thread where Obama talked about the function of universities.
"It has nothing to do with wealth, and everything to do with power" is the dumbest thing I've read today. As if wealth and power aren't intrinsically tied together in the modern US.
That's what a safe space is though.
Counterpoint: Galileo was able to work on his theories because he had a safe space away from the church where he could perform his experiments and contemplate ideas without having to constantly address random people repeatedly asking him the same simple questions over and over or screaming about him being the devil.
Amibguous Cad
Member
Sure, but a riot's not a protest. What happened at Berkeley is much more akin to a coordinated harassment campaign than speech. It was not an attempt to counter Murray's speech with more speech, but to intimidate through threatening, and then enacting, violence.
FIRE runs a database, actually (and not all from the left, either)
https://www.thefire.org/resources/disinvitation-database/
Lesse... Kissinger in 2000 at UT was something I wasn't aware of, but the ones that have been making the most headlines have been Spencer, Milo, and Murray.
Brandeis said:
Brandeis is rolling in his grave.
Yeah, pretty much. When I was a younger SJ activist all safe space meant was "hey, maybe the gay straight alliance isn't the place to rehash Leviticus, and maybe we can at least have this one place where 'gay' isn't used as the most common insult?" I'm baffled by people who oppose them in this form (trigger warnings, too - what's wrong with accommodating people with PTSD with a quick warning?)
I mean, actually what AA tell you to do is not participate in a wide swathe of social life because your sobriety is more important than your social life. Which is generally good advice given the current situation, but remains a suboptimal and kinda shitty solution. Social mores could be considerably more supportive of people living in recovery (if you can tag your porn, you can tag your booze), particularly given the huge numbers of alcoholics and addicts living in our society.
Police officers have power, but they don't have wealth.
Anything else you want to ignorantly write off as stupid, furthering your appearance as a simpleton?
Journeywalker
Member
I'm pretty much in agreement with that, actually. I apologize for mis-reading the thread. The way I read it was:
Occam: (paraphrasing) Safe spaces are divisive and for weaklings. They can't deal with the real world.
AnAnole: Yep. Can't stand the strain of liberalism that demands safe spaces. Want a safe space? Go to your room and shut the fuck up.
Aytumious:
One of the big issues is that these people [PEOPLE THAT DEMAND SAFE SPACES] have co-opted liberalism. They aren't liberals. They are leftist authoritarians.
I see no way out of it, to be honest. This type of thinking has caught on in the US and it is very attractive. Any failures is n my life can be attributed to the discrimination I have faced because of identifying markers X, Y, and Z. Personal responsibility doesn't exist. If I'm not happy, it is a failure of society.
uncelestial
Member
So you went with "talk like a black person while attacking concepts that minorities invented to protect themselves," eh?
(Avatar quote)
Alexander DeLarge
Member
Let me know when there's enough people using space spaces to fill an auditorium. Also, I think it's pretty pathetic that university students in the Western world aren't debating anymore. Especially at events with Q&A sessions. Don't like a speaker? Show up and debate.
Aarglefarg
Member
Add up a lot of the people who go to religious groups, support groups, a whole lot of clubs...
If you think I was "talking like a black person" that's on you.
Does this forum have like an approved list of things only people of certain races can say? What if I'm mixed race? Am I just fucked?
Psychoward
Banned
Nonsense, private universities especially are thousands of dollars in tuition alone and bigotry has no positive and directly goes against most college's mission statements. As an LGBT student I've faced bigots regularly in and outside of college. If a student is regularly going against the code of conduct and can't at least keep their homophobic opinions to themselves then the school should take action, if it continues to happen even after warnings or punishments I don't understand why expulsion would be a bad idea. In fact I'm sure that's how some campuses in theory operate. There are ways to learn how to combat bigotry without me being called a faggot just for wearing fitted clothing. Like oh I don't know a "safe space". The college ideal has been to broaden our horizons and learn new things, not be called slurs to the point where it negatively affects one's mood or work ethic in the hopes that we'll somehow develop a magical power to stop any bigot from being bigoted anymore.
Alexander DeLarge
Member
I suppose those are technically safe spaces but I wouldn't put them in the same category of "Milo and Ann Coulter are coming to my campus and I don't feel safe because there's going to be an extreme right-wing lynch mob roaming around" safe spaces that pop up.
LinkAndEpona
Banned
Indeed.
We just had a huge ass topic regarding this bullshit as well.
I graduated my Undergrad in 2012. We had just moved past the OWS protests which left the occupied spaces destroyed with garbage, used needles, and fecal matter. The BLM protests and uproar against Trump had some cars torched and of course the local businesses got fucked.
Hell, a family friend of mine just graduated with a B.S. in Mathematics from Mizzou. He is white and lucky to have not been assaulted. No way he is going to be able to go there for gradschool.
Psychoward
Banned
Oh spare me. Coincidentally the only person I know who goes to Mizzou is a raging bigoted garbage human being. But yes it's the white people in Missouri that have to be worried about their safety. It sounds like he needs a safe space, he couldn't even go to school he was so much of a snowflake! Sad!
Amibguous Cad
Member
I'm really not sure why people can't distinguish between academic discourse and harassment are two different things. It does mean we have to make a normative judgement as to what has academic merit and not, but we make judgement calls like this all the time. I'll stick to examples about homosexuality since I'm queer myself.
A professor of theology should be allowed to teach about Aquinas on Natural Law, including the bit about why this proves homosexuality is immoral and instrinsically disordered. That doesn't make the campus any less of a safe space for me. Sociologists should be able to report controversial findings, if it turns out homosexuals are more promiscuous or more prone to mental disorders or any other any other negative stereotype about gays. Medical ethicists should be willing to examine frankly the actions of the gay community when the AIDS crisis hit, concerning the lack of closure of bathhouses. Should researchers find that gay marriage has harmed the social fabric in any way, their findings should be published like anything else. My feelings aren't more important than the University's search for the truth.
And that can all happen, and you can still have a code of conduct that expels anyone that calls me a fag. You can even make a distinction between "x, y, and z in this version of theology means homosexuals go to hell," and someone yelling the same thing in anger at a bar. There are edge cases, certainly, but this is a reasonably firm and commonsense distinction.
Yes. There's a difference between silencing opinions and allowing white supremicists to have events on your campus. The later is a legitimate safety concern for minority students. Milo in particular was using his campus events to target specific individual students and try to ruin their lives.
Psychoward
Banned
The funny thing is the right pretends that these code of conducts have never existed until recently with the "rise" in "safe spaces" just to shit on higher learning even more, when repeat harassment has always been a case for a punishment since before I was born.
Go_Ly_Dow
Member
College/ University is a place to learn, debate, argue and to be challenged. Focus should be on critical thinking and high quality academic learning. For the most part I don't agree with safe spaces. Of course a place of support should exist for actual victims of crime and disabled students etc.... But segregation of people by gender, race, skin color and so forth will just increase the divide in those small bubbles amongst people. It just creates us Vs them mentality where people fester and stew in a victimized mindset with no actual discussion or greater exploration into the roots of an issue.
It's always entertaining when you guys find an "ally" and then you come out of the wood works with the hyperbole.
More_Badass
Member
That's exactly what the purpose is. Not about hiding away and stewing "in a victimized mindset", but discussion and exploration on concerns, issues, struggles, among peers from a uniquely shared foundation of knowledge and experience
Go_Ly_Dow
Member
That's good then. I just don't agree with silencing people who have a different ideological standpoint or different skin color for no good reason. Perhaps in a traditional safe space or discussion area what you mentioned is how it is. But I've seen plenty of examples of modern cultural Marxism growing in certain campuses, where the foundation of knowledge is purely ideologically driven from one perspective. That perspective is seen as the be all and end all. It's authoritarianism and not liberalism.
Journeywalker
Member
If expressing a bigotted opinion is against the code of conduct, they should enforce it. But I'd encourage schools to consider removing those provisions. I'd argue that public universities cannot legally punish students for expressing their world view, no matter how backward.
Part of broadening your horizons is challenging your assumptions, challenging the assumptions of others, and trying to empathize with people that grew up in different conditions. A lot of Americans grow up in homophobic households. Take a moment to imagine yourself with the privileges that come along with being straight. Think about what it would take to convince yourself to let go of what was hammered into you for 18 years. Some argue that people with privilege don't deserve empathy, but that limits your ability to make them conscious of that privilege.
I think it's worth it for the common areas to be as open as possible to all world views. Calling someone a "faggot" is not expressing an opinion, it's harassment, which should never be allowed. But if someone holds up a homophobic sign, you can't just expel them. That would have a terrible chilling affect, and you're left with an American who's resentful of academia and voting with a shitty world view. That American has babies that grow up with shitty world views, who are consequently shamed and expelled from college, leading to more resentment and skepticism of academia. Ultimately, the lack of engagement leads to dehumanization and an inability to even agree upon what the pertinent facts are. It's bad now, but it will only get worse if colleges are all safe spaces.
uncelestial
Member
Journeywalker
Member
Please define Cultural Marxism. I'm familiar with its use as a smear against progressives in Nazi Germany, claiming they were part of a Judeo-communist conspiracy.
JesseEwiak
Member
I mean, have you considered that Dane Cook & Dave Attell are both pretty old and one note and were considered hacks back then? As for Sarah Silverman, she's seems more concerned with acting and political work than comedy gigs.
The actual truth is that there a lot of comedians getting old and blaming college kids for being 'snowflakes' as opposed to college kids not wanting to hear old men telling old men jokes. I mean, Eddie Murphy Raw was a great comedy routine. It was also racist, homophobic, etc. In 2017, I'd home the 2017 version of Eddie Murphy could be just as funny without all the gay jokes.
Adapt or die. Regan, Gaffigan, and other older comics have.
Go_Ly_Dow
Member
Advocating for equal outcome over equal opportunity.
To me, a good example of a safe space is an AA meeting.
People complaining about it is just like "why can't I got there and debate that they are worthless bums who will never be anything in life because of their weak will?"
The notion that people who seek a safe space should be on debate-mode 24 hours is insane.
"people who feel they are being harassed and need a place to talk about it, please come to our meeting. Ps: your harasser will probably be here and you will have to debate them why harassing you is wrong. See you at 7!"
People complaining about it is just like "why can't I got there and debate that they are worthless bums who will never be anything in life because of their weak will?"
The notion that people who seek a safe space should be on debate-mode 24 hours is insane.
"people who feel they are being harassed and need a place to talk about it, please come to our meeting. Ps: your harasser will probably be here and you will have to debate them why harassing you is wrong. See you at 7!"