I’m writing a short essay on how political correctness limits the public expression of humor (working title: “The Decay of Laughing”). Certainly most people are aware of this limitation, and I could pull some examples from everyday life. However, I thought it would be best if I could point to some more public examples. Can anyone suggest a few?
If it’s not too late to tweak it, I think another option would be to show where political correctness has muddled humor and where it hasn’t, then compare the two to see if humor has a cancerous remora on it.
I love pollitical correctness. There’s a time when it’s good and warranted, for example, midgets. No, we’re not midgets, we’re dwarves. “Midget” has a connotation that “dwarf” simply does not (isn’t it also a medical distinction?) It’s bad, oh, say when it comes to “cannibals”. “Oh noooo”, they’d reply. "We don’t want to be called cannibals anymore, instead, we’re “engineers of human consumption”. That is a silly distinction to make, when, goddammit, you’re a cannibal. Get over yourself.
The Danish Mohammed cartoons?
Programs that once used “nigger” are now edited. In “Sanford and Son” ep “Fred Sanford, Legal Eagle,” Fred, acting as Lamon’t “counsel,” remarks to the judge on the preponderance of Blacks in the courtroom (and how Blacks are being singled out in traffic citations), originally said, “Look at all these niggers in here. There’s enough niggers in here to make a Tarzan movie.” No more, though.
The syndication package of the “Our Gang/Little Rascals” series is heavily edited, with some not being shown at all.
Also, an ep of “Hawaii Five-O,” in one of the later seasons, Danno (undercover as a skinhead/Aryan sympathizer) uses the word “nigger.” However, it has since been overdubbed with silence. (OK, that’s not comedy.) Another scene where he refers to another Black as “Rufus.” That still survives.
And many cartoons have been withdrawn so that they don’t offend someone. Likewise, may other surviving cartoons have been edited for your protection.
That wasn’t “PC”, that was insane religious fundamentalism.
A better example is the UK government’s proposed (I think) Racial and Religious Hatred Bill.
Early Warner Brothers cartoons like Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarves, and Red Hot Riding Hood.
In my opinion, one of the very, very few true examples of PC in which something is (a) clearly racist, (b) vastly entertaining, and (c) actually being unjustly censored.
The Amos and Andy TV show. While my impression of it may have been colored by the fact that I was a kid when I watched it, I don’t think it was terribly offensive or racist. While the characters were cartoonish and often foolish, they were generally no more so than the whites on The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy, and were often treated sympathetically. (Admittedly the character Lightnin’ was probably excessively stereotypical.) The characters were played by blacks, rather than whites in blackface. Although it was probably less offensive to blacks than the average Wayans brothers TV show, I doubt it could be shown today.
I’m not. I’m aware that many people go around repeating this as though it were true, but the fact that people go around mindlessly repeating things from talk radio doesn’t make those things true.
And how did political correctness affect them? They were printed anyway. In fact, they received extra publicity. And they weren’t really all that funny to start with.
That actually is a pretty worthwhile discussion point. I’ve never seen Coal Black (though based on what I’ve heard, I’d love to see it. It’s apparently quite a classic.) But I bet a lot of the jokes really would fall flat with a contemporary audience. Humor that’s predicated on old-fashioned racial views is likely just not funny to people anymore; we don’t exist in the same context, and so a lot of those jokes strike most people as just plain not funny. I don’t have to be offended at all by minstrel-show style humor in order not to find it remotely funny.
Still, it pains me that it’s now hard to find those classic cartoons. Withdrawing of that sort of thing from the market is one of those rare examples of something being literally hidden away out of fear of offending the audience.
Thank you all. I was also looking for examples (I know they exist, but can’t seem to dredge them out of the back room of my mind) of public figures who were sacked or at least lambasted by interested parties after making jokes of debatable offensiveness. Good point, too, LOUNE
One was former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz (good name, that), though some of his jokes were pretty offensive. (Though I’ve heard the Pope joke from any number of Catholics.)
Another was former Secretary of the Interior James Watt:
You’re not likely to find any Speedy Gonzales cartoons on tv anymore. They don’t want to risk offending Latinos. And many old Warner Brothers and Hannah Barbera cartoons have been edited to remove scenes that are now considered politically incorrect. Pretty much any scene showing blacks has been cut out, because the way black cartoon characters were typically drawn (the “huge lips” style) is now considered offensive. The censoring happened sometime after my childhood, so I’ve seen most of these cartoons in their original form. It seems to me that most of the censored scenes don’t revolve around racist humor (although a few did), it’s just the artistic style that got them cut.
A specific example of what Earl Snake-Hips Tucker pointed out: One of the Looney Toons I remember as a kid featured Sylvester in his never ending quest to capture Tweety. One of Sylvester’s gimmics was to come into the room dressed as a maid, speaking in a Swedish accent and pushing a vaccum cleaner. Tweety does something to make the vacuum explode, and after the explosion, Sylvester comes marching back into the room in the equivalent of black face, now speaking in a “Mammy” accent.
Last time I saw this cartoon as an adult, the aftermath of the explosion was omitted.
Apparently, it’s OK to stereotype Swedes but not African Americans.
You’re welcome. Also, you might wanna do a search on Youtube for “banned cartoons”. They’ve many very un PC cartoons from back in the day.
On a semi-related note, I interviewed a guy at a nursing home for a project for college and he was a cartoonist. He talked about how, back in the day, he used to draw “Chinese faces” on buildings, and it was funny. He explained the Chinese face as what you’d expect if you saw cartoons depicting Chinese people from that day: the big, pointy straw hat, small eyes, short, yellow, and buck teeth.
I wanted to bring up the fact that such things are frowned upon and that I wanted to get his take on how he felt about that, but it was for an American history project and wouldn’t have been pertinent.
You’re tuning in a paper specifically about how political correctness suppresses humor? Of all things, exploring the subject of suppressed humor should teach you the dubiousness of the “politically correct” epithet. Jokes have always been tempered to avoid offending contemporary sensibilities when they have a mass audience. Was it “political correctness” that got Mae West banned from NBC for her “Adam & Eve” sketch (sketch starts at 20 min)? What’s the point of labelling a specific set of modern sensibilities “political correctness”?
I bet if a black student were to attempt to turn in such a simple-minded, brainlessly partisan, completely un-thought-out paper for a class at Stanford, you’d be screaming “affirmative action!”.