Nintendo Kid posted:

When was the last time Seinfeld was edgy? 1982?

Jerry Manderbilt posted:

These conservatives sure love to blame liberals for keeping them down instead of taking personal responsibility for, well, anything.

FuzzySkinner posted:

He was kind of bland.

Larry David was the man who made that show run.

OxySnake posted:

Seinfeld was edgy? Granted I only ever knew him from the TV series, but I always thought he was as edgy as someone like Mitch Hedberg. Just sort of weird random thoughts that might tip toe up to the line of the most easily rustled but ultimately harmless.

big mean giraffe posted:

Pretty much. And his show was better than Seinfeld.

Mr Interweb posted:

Yup, that was an amusing one. Clearly couldn't have had anything to do with his movies bombing or anything like that.

Redeye Flight posted:

Seinfeld has to be viewed in the lens of the time. When it came on there was no show like it--television was full of shows like General Hospital, where the whole cast was very buddy-buddy, the whole thing had feel-good outcomes and there might even be a moral to an episode. Seinfeld was the pioneering "show about nothing". A show in its own words with no hugs and no lessons learned. A show where everyone was self-interested and where they might do a whole episode of just trying to get a seat at a restaurant, as opposed to actually pursuing some kind of story with a purpose.

It doesn't look so edgy nowadays because it's become the norm. Shows like It's Always Sunny have taken the concept and gone over the next line in the sand. At the time, Seinfeld was like nothing else on television and it pioneered a whole movement in sitcoms as we know them today.

Media Matters posted:

More Bad News For Rush Limbaugh

Which bulletin was worse, though? The news in April that he was being dropped by WIBC in Indianapolis, a booming talk powerhouse that played home to Limbaugh's radio show for more than two decades, or the news this week that the talker's new address on the Indianapolis dial is going to be WNDE, a ratings doormat AM sports station that has so few listeners it trails the commercial-free classical music outlet in town?

"There's no way iHeartMedia would've placed Limbaugh on an owned Sports station if the company had any other affiliation options in the market," noted RadioInsight when the news broke on Tuesday. "But when everyone one else says no and you need to save face, options become limited."

...

Here's a perfect example. In April, Bloomberg's Mark Halperin conducted an awkward interview with Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz, asking the Hispanic candidate about Cuban food and if he'd answer at least one question in Spanish. Limbaugh immediately castigated Halperin's Q&A on his show, but nobody seemed to pay much attention to his complaints.

Fast-forward one week and syndicated conservative columnist Ruben Navarrette lodged similar complaints about the interview. (i.e. "This was bad journalism, bad form, and bad manners.") Except this time the complaint went viral and Helperin was quickly forced to apologize.

At BuzzFeed, a writer marveled at how Halperin's controversial interview[of Ted Cruz] had gone unnoticed for nine days. But it hadn't gone unnoticed. Limbaugh highlighted the interview right away. It's just that nobody cared about the talker's critique at the time.

...

That same desperate scenario[as Indianapolis] is playing out in Boston, where Premier hasn't been able to find a new home for Limbaugh. This, after WRKO announced it was dropping the show. One station owner recently told the Boston Globe that Premiere had offered the Limbaugh show four times, and four times the station turned it down.

Fact: Years ago station owners lined up for the chance to pick up Limbaugh's powerhouse program.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/06/05/more-bad-news-for-rush-limbaugh/203898

Nintendo Kid posted:

I was talking about Jerry himself, not the show. His actual standalone comedy is hardly edgy, ever.

Redeye Flight posted:

Ah, fair 'nuff. I don't know jack about Jerry's comedy.

FuzzySkinner posted:

I have had a comedian/radio dude on twitter tell me how he sides with the GOP a lot because the "LEFT" is pro censorship in regards to how Comedy is handled now.

Same with Steven Crowder saying similiar garbage.

The thing is though. I don't think people who are pro-censorship/anti-comedy know a political ideology. They just exist. Like, there's plenty of people on the right that if you told a joke that was not to their liking? Their pile onto it and then try to make moves to have you shut up.

Deep Hurting posted:

Show me a comedian who self-identifies as a Republican, and I'll show you a comedian who's either dead, not funny, or Michael J. Nelson.

Modern Conservatism and a good sense of humor are pretty much mutually-exclusive.

FuzzySkinner posted:

The thing is though. I don't think people who are pro-censorship/anti-comedy know a political ideology.

computer parts posted:

I guess someone doesn't like Frasier.

Chris Rock Interview posted:

What do you make of the attempt to bar Bill Maher from speaking at Berkeley for his riff on Muslims?

Well, I love Bill, but I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative.

In their political views?

Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.

When did you start to notice this?

About eight years ago. Probably a couple of tours ago. It was just like, This is not as much fun as it used to be. I remember talking to George Carlin before he died and him saying the exact same thing.

Animal-Mother posted:

The woman who built the Daily Show with Jon Stewart used to run a comedy club and would throw comedians offstage if she considered their jokes sexist, racist, homophobic, etc.

FuzzySkinner posted:

I kind of feel that a lot of the jokes in that category are loving lazy if you really think about it, thus the laughs are not nearly as rewarding.

beatlegs posted:

Hey cranky old guy comics: the minute you start having contempt for your audience is the minute you stop becoming funny.

RoanHorse posted:

Related: I tried to explain content advisory repositories and trigger warnings to my (leftist) father and he went off about how movies would have to have 'TW: Violence, Gore' on any of their promotional material up to and including their title if anything was ceded to the people that want trigger warnings, and that was somehow wrong. I tried to then explain that we already had a ratings system that mandated exactly that and he had no problem with that before I framed the issue as mentally ill and downtrodden people trying to avoid content that unsettles or triggers them.

He had an entire rant about how if he were to make a series of photos involving dead dogs, and he posted it on the internet, you would be a fascist if you shared it with any warning about their being dead dogs in it. He elaborated on this, saying it would be made for exactly the people that wouldn't want to see dead dogs in their daily life, and despite my well-reasoned protestations that that would be a hosed up thing to do (showing images of dead dogs to people you don't personally know without any warning) he surmised that it was a perfectly acceptable hypothetical course of action and I was just being a dumb fascist for saying otherwise.

The 'PC' problem is literally just people being old fucks that don't realise the world doesn't work the way it did yesterday (or the day before).

computer parts posted:

I guess someone doesn't like Frasier.

Screaming Idiot posted:

Ah, yes, incisive political commentary from a comedian whose best known work involved cross-dressing and screaming "spam" at the top of his lungs.

mr. mephistopheles posted:

Yeah, Louis CK is all the proof anyone should need that PC whining is just the sad crying of people whose material became Irrelevant years ago. Nobody gives a poo poo if you're offensive as long as you're funny at the same time. Simply being offensive isnt comedy anymore.

Radish posted:

I do think that people with conservative beliefs have been led to believe that colleges oppress them and encourage them to react aggressively to it instead of try and think about something other than what they've been indoctrinated with as children. The last time I saw Fox News while eating lunch at a restaurant it was two women talking about how republicans on campus are a persecuted minority and what can we do about fixing this.

Vargatron posted:

Somebody linked an article on my Facebook page recently which basically was an essay by a college professor who noted that the current generation of college students offend easier and are less receptive of new ideas. He mentioned how he has been doing the same lecture on subjects like abortion and Affirmative Action for more than a decade but now students are issuing bad evaluations to him. The main point of his article was that he do an exercise where students had to debate the opposite of their beliefs and students would just implode over having to do this. Basically kids are going to college so set in their ways that they never look at opposing views and just block out everything that doesn't agree with their current worldview.

Granted, some of this article could be summed up as "bloo a bloo social norms are changing".

Gravel Gravy posted:

Eliminating critical thinking in public schools seems like a good start.

Klaus88 posted:

Phone posted:

This is a thing by the way. I think that the phrasing used is that promoting critical thinking in the classroom leads people/children to question and rebuke authority.

Radish posted:

I do think that people with conservative beliefs have been led to believe that colleges oppress them and encourage them to react aggressively to it instead of try and think about something other than what they've been indoctrinated with as children. The last time I saw Fox News while eating lunch at a restaurant it was two women talking about how republicans on campus are a persecuted minority and what can we do about fixing this.

Klaus88 posted: