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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Rude Pundit - Note to Comedians: Stop Whining About Political Correctness at Colleges
This week, in a course the Rude Pundit is teaching this summer on Italian radical playwrights Dario Fo and Franca Rame, we read a short play titled "The Rape." It is a monologue told in present tense from the perspective of a woman who is kidnapped, raped, and tortured before being left on the side of a road. A harrowing piece, "The Rape" is all the more so because Rame herself, who performed it, was the very victim whose torment she is narrating. We discussed the monologue openly and sensitively, all appalled at the vivid descriptions, all admiring of the courage it took for Rame to perform it.
The Rude Pundit constantly teaches things that might upset students. He regularly teaches the play Blasted by Sarah Kane, which might be called "artsy torture porn." He does this because the plays shake the students out of their complacency. They have to confront something that is not just words on a page but also bodies on a stage. He talks about religion, gender, race, and more. He doesn't fear his students; he didn't before he was tenured. He admires, supports, and appreciates them. Well, most of them. (By the way, he also teaches Shakespeare.)
The only time he can remember a class discussion actually becoming something disturbing had nothing to do with these more graphic plays. Several years back, at another university, we were talking about A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, specifically the scene where Stanley rapes Blanche. A contingent of students believed that Blanche was "asking for it." A significant group of men and women said that, because she was flirting with Stanley and flaunting her (performed) femininity, she deserved to be raped. Some students vocally disagreed, but the pro-Stanley group held firm.
What can you do in that situation if you're the professor? Dr. Rude Pundit could have shut the whole thing down, told the asking-for-it students that they were wrong and that such thoughts had no place in a classroom. He could have jumped into the fray, taken the side of the anti-rape students, and crushed the other side. Who learns shit in either of those cases? All students get from those approaches is that politically correct professors will silence you.
Instead, this professor attempted to understand where they were coming from, not to validate their point of view (his aghast face probably had betrayed any attempt to pretend he was being objective), but to really figure out why they would say that. It came down to their limited comprehension of gender dynamics, of how Blanche was asserting power from her powerlessness, of how Stanley used the most brutal way possible to strip her power. The conversation was fascinating, and, while they could have been lying to please the teacher, more than a few had changed their minds by the end. (Let's not even get into a discussion here about how disturbed he was that several women in class were fine with Blanche being raped.)
Students could have complained. They could have said that they felt unsafe. They could have said that the Rude Pundit had no business even entertaining the appalling opinion of part of the class.
But they didn't. And you know why? Because the vast majority of students at the vast majority of campuses aren't concerned with political correctness, a term that seems to have come to mean, "Wait, you mean I can't do black voice, flit my hands gayly, and slap a female's ass?" for straight white men. Most students the Rude Pundit has taught, most students the Rude Pundits friends and colleagues have taught, most students period, across the nation, coast to coast, don't go to places where political correctness is considered beyond "Everyone is equal, and that actually means something. Now get over it."
Jerry Seinfeld, whose Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is a damn funny online show, has become a conservative hero this week for complaining about "creepy" political correctness on college campuses. Like Chris Rock before him, he refuses to perform at colleges because, as he told ESPN radio, kids on campuses "just want to use these words.Thats racist; Thats sexist; Thats prejudice. They dont know what theyre talking about."
Even if we accept this as true, that college students (and faculty) have knee-jerk reactions and are too ready to organize a protest through Facebook and march on a Seinfeld show, so what? Seinfeld and Rock and, yes, even Larry the Cable Guy are comedians, people who supposedly want to push the edge of what is acceptable. How about, instead of whining about it, you confront it? How about you bravely go into the campuses that might most have a problem with your "gay French king" joke (which, c'mon, a little easy) and you fuckin' put it out there?
When speech police on the right censored Richard Pryor, he didn't bitch about it and only play to friendly audiences. He went out and became bigger than ever. When the actual police shut down Lenny Bruce, he went to his death fighting for his right to say, "Cocksucker" to adults in a club. He didn't just adjust his touring schedule.
But here's what Seinfeld, et al would find out if they'd stop listening to the poor comedians who got a few people upset at some campus: people protest things. And then those people speak. And then everyone's life goes one. They'd also discover, maybe to their chagrin, that at most campuses around the United States, most students are fine with letting you speak and moving on. They want to try to pass their classes, work their jobs, pay their bills, and live their lives.
(Note: The Rude Pundit has been reading Kirsten Powers' book The Silencing lately, and all this ludicrous alarmism needs to be separated from the cases where people are actually silenced, not merely inconvenienced by the voices of people who haven't been heard enough. No one is taking food out of the mouth of Seinfeld's kid.)
(Note to the Note: He'll review Powers' book soon.)
(Note not relating to the other Notes: This isn't about trigger warnings or other things. It's only about speech and political correctness. He'll deal with that stuff another time. Perhaps when he reviews The Silencing.)
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2015/06/note-to-comedians-stop-whining-about.html
dembotoz
(16,849 posts)Spose Seinfeld is PC shy because of the guy who played Kramer?
Never understood or thought the show was that funny
SidDithers
(44,228 posts)thanks, as always, for posting, meegbear.
Bit of a different tone to this one, and my respect for TRP grows even more.
Sid
Kalidurga
(14,177 posts)Also liberals aren't the PC police anyway. That is an authoritarian stance and liberals are not authoritarians.
Jester Messiah
(4,711 posts)Kalidurga
(14,177 posts)Nye Bevan
(25,406 posts)riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)I don't think it will happen again.
But make no mistake at least six DUers (the one who alerted and the five who voted to hide) have a problem with the rude one.
JaneyVee
(19,877 posts)They were probably in diapers by the time Seinfeld ended.
zentrum
(9,865 posts)Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)I think RP the OP should, if he feels such things are required, get up on a comedy stage and do his 20 minutes himself. Instead the OP cites a series of plays the newest of which is 20 years old and the authors of which are all dead, buried and no longer contending with the critical voices. The most recent of those playwrights died from suicide which I feel compelled to add some people think was prompted in part by the rather strong reactions to some of her works. Of those writers, only one was known for actually getting up on a stage and performing the work and she did so 30, 40 years ago.
How often have you produced a Kane play in full on a stage at your school, Professor Rude? I mean, not you acting in it, that's far too much to expect, but with your name as director?
daleanime
(17,796 posts)"comics not there to serve the students." So you think the students should service the comics?
Now of course Jerry is free to accept, or not, the student's money, but since he feels the need to take shoots at the students that makes him perfectly fair game for the Rude One.
Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)crowds or to take on the role of teacher. Note, the OP is a teacher does not seem compelled to take on the role of comic.
Did I suggest that the OP has no right to criticize Seinfeld? No I did not. I do suggest that the OP is claiming that talking about established theatrical literature in a classroom is the same as being a performer delivering their own work live on a stage. This is why I asked if the OP actually performs or directs the works he cites as classroom materials.
I just don't think of artists as people who have to do as they are told. Comics are there to get laughs, people speak of 'comic timing' but that's not all in the delivery. Timing also has to do with selection of venue, set and setting.
Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)attacks from the community should have been against her perpetrator and those who defend the perpetrators heinous actions. Always it's attack the victim viciously! That's the point of the RP.
How ridiculous and horrendous it is for the community to re attack the victim after the initial attack!
Attack attack attack! That's all a large population of people support is attack! Blame the one who is attacked! Not the attacker! Malicious gossip, shaming, outcasting that's what the victims are met with if they talk, even they don't talk the community knows and attacks. The attacks become unbearable for the victim, the shaming, the blaming, the shunning it all becomes to heavy to carry.
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)unlike other comedians who actually have to work for a living you don't have to figure out how to make your material work for "kids these days", you just tell those unruly snot faced punks to get off your lawn.
goldent
(1,582 posts)as the next means to shock their elders. Maybe the guys will grow their hair long too
nil desperandum
(654 posts)is no longer relevant to a lot of younger college age students.
It's interesting he made that comment because he was not ever a comic whose material was very confrontational and uncomfortable. He is one of the tamer less interesting stand ups as a consequence of that sort of "delicate dance around controversy" for me when compared to others who tend to make social commentary part of their routine regardless of the comfort level of the audience.
Seinfeld is indeed becoming a crotchety old curmudgeon and is no longer the cool young comic he once imagined he was, that recognition is probably far more discomfiting than any sense of PC policies interfering with his tame comedic stylings on the difficulties of standby air travel...
Controversial stuff indeed!
geardaddy
(24,931 posts)It's not like Seinfeld is a Louis C.K. or a Colin Quinn.
deutsey
(20,166 posts)(I personally don't find Larry TCG all that funny, but others do) they're no where near the same league as Pryor or Bruce (or Carlin or Hicks, et al.).
That isn't intended as a put-down. There are many comics like Rock and Seinfeld who know how to craft stand-up that sells tickets. Pryor and Bruce wanted financial success, but they were part of a smaller group of comics driven, imo, by something much deeper than fame and money, something that compelled them to go out on stage and engage people with their truth-telling comedy.
Paladin
(28,276 posts)Grow up, Seinfeld.
Johonny
(20,894 posts)I'm pretty sure he can do a 30 college tour if he wanted to. I imagine most people aren't offended by "Why does my washing machine take my socks?" jokes. It seems to me he just doesn't want to meet young people at all. His comment of not wanting to interview a cross section of American society on his online show reads to me that Jerry doesn't want to meet people too outside his comfort zone. Once again he has 800 million dollars so he can totally do whatever he wants. A luxury most college students can't afford. If he wants to stay in his safe zone then fine, but I'm not sure why he thinks I'm so interested in knowing it.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)while everyone else is whistling and saying he's the voice of a generation
but enough about Rude