You know those Hollywood executives, always putting their principles above the box office receipts.
There is still a lot of non-PC humor out there, and you ‘get away with it’ in one of two ways:
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The Post-PC satirization of Non-PC attitudes. This is stuff the Louis CK, and Tosh, and Jelsenik, and Rivers get away with. We all know they’re not racist or homophobic, and so, when they make a racist or homophobic joke, we laugh at not only the stereotypical humor, but also at those bigots who believe the stereotypical humor is real. “Yes, it’s funny that there are racists at there who would agree with you rather than laugh at the fact that it’s a joke!” You need to get “irony” for this to work.
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The Non-PC ‘jokester’ playing to a non-PC audience. This is typical of Rush Limbaugh, who, depending on the time of day, defines himself as a comedian or a straight-up political commentator. When he makes racists jokes(?) or comments, we can’t be sure if he really believes he’s making a joke or not… but most of his audience doesn’t care… they laugh at the joke because they believe in the stereotype. There is no extra level of irony of making fun of racists.
Now, here’s the confusing part: When there is comedy in a movie that is on the surface non-PC, which kind is it? The ironic type that doesn’t believe it, or the straight-up non-PC ‘humor’ which believes in the stereotype? It can be hard to tell. And even if it is the ironic type, if it’s a mainstream movie, does everyone ‘get’ the irony?
Take, e.g., All in the Family. While it was running, it was intentionally meant to be the ironic type of non-PC humor: “Hey, let’s laugh at the stupid bigotry of this bigot!” And yet, the producers were horrified to learn there was a sizable audience which didn’t get the irony… they saw Archie as the hero and as being the right-thinking one of the family.
And that’s the danger of trying to mainstream the ironic post-PC non-PC humor… there are going to be folks who don’t get the level or irony and will be offended, or, they revel in the non-PCness as straight up belief in all things non-PC.
(And anyone who thinks that they stopped doing non-PC humor in movies is living under a rock.)
Awesome post, Marley. I won’t waste space QFTing it, but great points all around.
This is incorrect. There have been dirty comics for decades. Buddy Hackett; Redd Foxx; Moms Mabley are just a few examples.
In clubs,not on tv.
In Ellin Stein’s That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick, a history of the Harvard/National Lampoon gang, she has a long description of the year it took to change Animal House from the original unfilmable script to something that could be put on the screen without offending audiences.
People get PC totally backward much of the time. Getting away with the use of nigger before the 1970s didn’t mean that humor was open; it meant that blacks were powerless. Mel Brooks used nigger to spoof the bigots, not to confirm them. He had a black writer - Richard Pryor, whose act was built around the word - but couldn’t use him as planned as the character because he was too controversial. Other black writers, directors, and actors were also reclaiming the word in the so-called blaxploitation movies.
That was the other side of PC. PC was designed simply to remind people that insulting people to their faces was not a good thing because it wasn’t polite. Black power and the subsequent oppressed minority movements were designed to remind the majority that insulting people to their faces had consequences, because they no long had all the power. The National Lampoon is an interesting example. Though supposedly non-PC, break-every-taboo humor, it was hard then - and much harder now - to figure out when they were spoofing bigots and when they were piling on. They changed humor from Marx Brothers-style attack those at the top to today’s style of attack everybody, even those at the bottom, maybe especially those on the bottom. That was humor from a place of privilege, which is non-PC but also a break from traditional folk humor, where the little guy used humor as the only weapon possible against the ruling classes. Humor ain’t simple.
What is acceptable and what is offensive changes constantly, but the changes come from every facet of society. Today’s mainstream comedy has zillions of times more sex humor and more body fluids humor than in the past, and that has nothing to do with PC. The word mainstream is important, because you could always find small pockets of acceptance. Mentioning Buddy Hackett, Redd Foxx, and Moms Mabley is irrelevant because they had to keep that style of humor to small nightclubs with accepting crowds. When they went on Ed Sullivan, they did totally clean humor for the masses. Comics still do different versions of their acts when they go on late-night network talk shows, because there is no one overall standard for humor. Some new types of humor are now allowable most of the time to most adults, but other types of humor remain off-limits. Offensive and PC overlap but are separate concepts.
This wasn’t right. The Hays Office wasn’t imposed by the government, but it was created by the movie industry in response to public pressure and official censorship by local governments. You can read these for yourself and decide if you think this is as bad as people complaining about things like racial stereotypes. This also shows how wrong aceplace57 is in assuming that people just started complaining about movies in 1990.
Spot on. And I think many (not all) of the people who wish we could go back to that era and that people would “lighten up” or “be less sensitive” or whatever at least unconsciously pine for a return to the days when white men were more dominant than they are now.
South Park has been a success for the past 15-odd years, and is as non-PC as you like, and in a way that wouldn’t have been allowed any time before the '90s, at the earliest.
Another great example.
On YouTube I found the clip from Sixteen Candles where Jake and Ted talk about how Jake’s girlfriend Caroline is “passed out cold” and Jake could “violate her ten different ways if I wanted to”. (The relevant portion begins at 1:32.)
While this scene is meant to be humorous, the humor comes mostly from the Rat Pack-esque staging and the way nerdy Ted is acting like a sophisticated ladies man. It doesn’t seem like it’s even supposed to be funny in a naughty/shocking/edgy way that Jake – the movie’s romantic lead and the dream guy of the heroine Samantha – says he could be raping his girlfriend Caroline but is choosing not to because he’s “just not into her anymore”. Neither he nor Ted seem to consider having sex with a willing, conscious girl any different from having sex with the same girl when she’s passed out drunk, and it does not appear to me that the audience is meant to think otherwise.
Now imagine an alternate version of this scene where instead of saying that Caroline is passed out Jake says that Caroline is upstairs changing into “something more comfortable” and that she’d asked him to join her in the bedroom in a few minutes. The actual humor in this scene would be totally unchanged. A scene like this, where the leading man resists the temptation to have sex with a hot, willing, but unpleasant partner, would probably be a lot more acceptable to today’s audiences than a scene where he refrains from raping his unconscious girlfriend only because he’s annoyed with her…and I really don’t see the problem with that. The only thing that would be “lost” in this alternate version of the scene would be suggestion that rape is okay, which is a horrible message and one that John Hughes presumably didn’t even intend to be sending.
This!
People don’t want to see women being slapped around or Chinese people being “ah so Chinee.” Not even because it’s “not PC” but because it’s fucking lame.
It’s seriously creepy that someone would be pining for the good old days when Charlie Chan was just some good ol’ humor and all the women dressed like Daisy Duke (who actually could kick your ass anyway).
People want to see explosions, shooting, badass special effects and people with blue skin. There’s a TON of stuff in movies and TV now that would have made people faint in the post-Hays Code, pre-modern area of film.
There are women being raped like, every week on Mad Men and it wins all sorts of awards. If you’re missing shocking, hard-hitting or un-PC entertainment you are absolutely not looking hard enough.
Absolutely.
Anyone who thinks that art is less “free” now than it was in the 70s has his or her head in the sand. The fact that big Hollywood hits are subject to more scrutiny, focus groups, and marketing polish than the studio films of the past has everything to do with how much money is on the line, and nothing to do with culturally imposed rules.
In fact, I’d bet that today there is more of an audience for almost any kind of “non-PC” subject matter than there was in the 70s. And, it’s easier to deliver to that audience as well.
What stuff do you have in mind?
could you imagine a show in the 70s or 80s that literally glorified leading a life of crime and being a meth dealer
i don’t think so tim
Well, how is war portrayed in Saving Private Ryan versus other WWII movies?
Would your grandmother like Human Centipede?
IIRC Kids was a little bit, you know, racy.
You generally didn’t see James Bond getting his named balls whapped with a knotted rope in the “good old days” of Bond movies.
That’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about.
I don’t know that anyone would actually have fainted at this, but when I was a kid in the '80s I don’t remember ever seeing two gay teenaged boys enthusiastically making out on network television. LGBT characters weren’t totally absent from American network television in the '70s and '80s, but it was uncommon to have any in a major role and even less common to have a same-sex couple rather than just the one character. Even a family sitcom like Modern Family, in which two major characters are a stable, 30-something gay couple raising a child together, would have been pretty darn edgy in the '80s. (Wikipedia tells me that the first show on American network television to feature a same-sex couple was Hot I Baltimore in 1975, but that only lasted 13 episodes.)
And while popular, mainstream '80s shows like Cheers could have some pretty racy jokes, it’s my recollection that these tended to be more tame or at least more subtle than those on current shows like Two and a Half Men.
I have no idea how the word “named” got in there. I’m not on a phone or anything, and don’t think I meant to type “damned.”
Whatever happened, it is absolutely hilarious. Of course James Bond named his balls!
ETA: I know what it was…I meant to say “naked.” heh…
There was one incident several years ago of what would be best described as date rape on Mad Men, and it was supposed to make you hate the character that did it.
The point of it was to contrast the way we feel about it now with the way it would have been ignored or even approved of back in the day. That’s opposite of the point you think you are making.
But if it were some tight-eyed “politically correct” era, we wouldn’t be talking about rape at all, much less showing it on television and then discussing the morality of it later.