In the early 90s it would have been hard to imagine that there would come a time when people longed for the double denim, grunge gloom and unkempt facial hair of Ethan Hawke’s “Reality Bites.” Even more unfathomable: that there would be any affection for anything about the nascent political correctness of that era with its penchant for words like “womyn” and other idealistic but often ill-conceived efforts to reimagine the dictionary.
And yet! In the wake of my 30th college reunion last month at Brown University, a notorious site for politically correct thinking in its day, these emergent PC accuracies feel almost cute in their relative harmlessness. Back then, word purification rituals were all experienced in good fun, or at least in good fun. “Thatch,” The Brown Daily Herald’s most popular comic strip, offered readers its wacky anti-hero, Politically Correct Man, immediately amended to Politically Correct Person, because “the world needs someone to guide it through these changes of role and gender. conflict, ‘time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall’. (His arch-nemesis: Insensitive Man.)
Even in its heyday, ’90s-style political correctness was at least as self-satirical as a movement to be reckoned with. With the exception of its most serious practitioners, strategically sequestered in semiotics departments and grad school dormitories, college students across the political spectrum viewed political correctness as a passing fad or an attempt at academic esotericism rather than real advice on how to behave in public. You could commit acts of linguistic gymnastics (denouncing, for example, “capitalist patriarchal hegemonic discourse”) if the spirit moved you, but hardly anyone thought you should.
Off campus, the culture seemed to agree. Carefree people of all ages walked around brazenly declaring anything slightly contrary to what they were about to say as “obviously politically incorrect”, strictly for laughs and without fear of verbal police harassment. Few would have bothered to report an unsavory term, partly because social media didn’t exist yet, partly because they were too busy with their own non-PC replica.
In 1992, two Harvard Lampoon alums, Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, published “The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook,” which mixed real terms of PC orthodoxy with fictional ones in a way that didn’t let you know which it was which Real or fake: assimilationism, carbocentrism, chemical drawbacks, heterosexual celibacy, humyn, chair?
Thirty years later, at Amazon, a customer gifted the book to concerned one star review, noting, “You’re going to have more trouble with this book than before.” These sensibilities are no longer a laughing matter. They are the material of moralizing retribution.
But in 1993, the year I graduated from college, we couldn’t understand so much censorship. That was the year Comedy Central introduced the political talk show Politically Incorrect, hosted by Bill Maher. Four years later, the show moved to network television — network television! – where ABC aired it until advertisers rejected comments Maher made about 9/11. The concern? Insufficient patriotism.
Expressing the opposite sentiment today, when simply referring to oneself as “American” is enough to be considered “imperialist”— is what can get you into trouble.
People have clearly lost their sense of humor.
A world without teasing is a world with a lot less fun. The relief offered by humor is also lost. The point of comedy is to take us where it’s most uncomfortable, to make us laugh at our foibles and excesses, and only the self-seriousness of contemporary political correctness practically begs for satire. Today we seem to confuse humor with seriousness.
Viewers of comedy shows are often forced to check their cell phones. Perhaps this is done to prevent illegal recordings, but it also prevents social media outbreaks over off-color pranks. This is certainly wise. The idealistic suggestions of the early 1990s were transformed first into judgment guidelines and then into hard rules whose violations merit severe punishment. This leaves little room for wordplay, either to elicit a laugh or make a deeper point.
What faint laughter is left? Today, critics of PC’s pedantic excesses can be even more strident than their defenders. Mocking political correctness (efforts not to offend) is one thing; telling offensive jokes (efforts intended to offend) is another. In right-wing media outlets like Fox News and The Daily Caller, the tone is more anger and derision than ridicule and smiles—they’re attacking the enemy rather than acknowledging their own foolishness.
On the other side of the political spectrum, some critics recoil at today’s political correctness, but it’s no coincidence that sensitivities remain about who can make fun of what. “The Thanksgiving Play,” a satire of performative white progressivism by playwright Larissa Fasthorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, opened on Broadway in April after becoming one of the the most produced plays in America The play pokes fun at a group of four white guys in all their contentment and preoccupied anxiety as they try to put on an uplifting school play about Native Americans that doesn’t include a single Native American.
Some signs indicate that when it comes to political correctness, fatigue may be setting in. In a 2020 Pew survey, 57 percent of Americans he said that people today are too easily offended by what others say. But the difference between those on the left and those on the right in those who think people should be careful to avoid offending others with their speech was a significant 42 percentage points.
In an angry and deeply polarized world, some people apparently mistake the ability to poke fun at themselves by providing ammunition to the opposition. Human laughter is a great unifier, which may be another reason why the wider culture seems so keen to avoid it.
Even in the 1990s you could feel the darkening mood of the country as PC advocates became increasingly saddened in their messianic determination. In a “Thatch” strip, PC Person wields his latest book-o’-dogma, “How to Argue the PC Way,” which then smacks the insensitive man over the head. “Chapter 1,” explains PC Person . “If you don’t like what someone has to say, don’t let them say it!”
In the semi-serious preface to “The Politically Correct Guide and Handbook,” the authors noted, “Language is not only the mirror of our society; it is the primary force in ‘constructing’ what we perceive as “reality.” They noted that focusing on words like “should” meant avoiding the world as it is, and what the authors called the “distracting side.” issues like equal pay for equal work, eliminating unemployment, poverty and homelessness, improving education and reducing the influence of money in electoral politics.
Yes, by calling these pressing concerns “distractions,” they were being ironic. And yes, we were indeed distracted. But not, alas, for comedy.
