Jerry Seinfeld Understated the Death of Comedy

“In Carlin’s time, it was edgy and cool to push back against the prudish ideas about obscenity, so playing with the boundaries of the metanarrative was practically encouraged (at least from audiences). Today, quite the opposite.”

“You can’t say hobo anymore. They prefer bum.”

This line, from Jerry Seinfeld’s new film Unfrosted, is not a scold. It is a punchline. Although it is not an especially funny punchline, it serves as an instructive example of the current state of comedy.

Today, comedians often gripe about not being able to say offensive things, but this is not exactly true. On podcasts, on stage, and between friends, they can generally say whatever they want and “get away” with it. However, it is also true that comedians cannot technically be offensive—not on their own terms and in keeping within the parameters of a joke. Instead, offensive statements now always exist within an inescapable metanarrative about political correctness. In other words, when comedians discuss a sensitive topic in a comedy setting, the topic of conversation always gets sucked into the broader topic of political correctness, leaving the original sensitive topic to merely be a footnote. The result is that political correctness has already won the war against comedy, regardless of whether or not comedians are ever allowed to say what they want.

Leading up to the release of Unfrosted, Seinfeld reignited the debate about political correctness in comedy during interviews with GQ and The New Yorker. His spiciest comment was that television comedy is dead thanks to “the extreme left and PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.”

This comment was mocked ruthlessly by innumerable editorials. The Daily Beast ran a headline, “Jerry Seinfeld’s Crotchety Whining About ‘PC Crap’ Comedy Gets It All Wrong.” According to the magazine Paste, “Jerry Seinfeld Is a Lazy Hack Out of Touch with the Real World.”