The Inevitable Poutrage

[TalkingDog]

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150804-comedy-in-the-age-of-outrage-when-jokes-go-too-far

Snip: Trevor Noah is one such comic. In March, he was appointed as the new host of The Daily Show, and the following day he was pilloried on social media because six out of the 9,000 Tweets he had posted were deemed sexist or anti-Semitic. Other comedians saw this response as part of a worryingly hysterical trend. Patton Oswalt argued that the kind of instantaneous liberal outrage heaped on Noah “is going to hurt the progressive movement in this country more than anything”. Jim Norton wrote a feature for Time, stating that Americans were addicted to the buzz of being offended. “Western culture as a whole,” he continued, “has become an increasingly reactionary mob of self-centered narcissists who all have their own personal lines drawn in the sand. A comedian is fine unless he crosses their particular line, which, of course, in the mind of a self-centered narcissist, is the only line that matters.”

What appears to be happening is that audiences are more sensitive than ever to perceived insults, and that they now have the technology to share that sensitivity with the world. In May, Louis CK talked about paedophilia in an opening monologue on Saturday Night Live, and he didn’t have to wait long for the inevitable Twitter backlash. Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, meanwhile, have said that college audiences have become too quick to condemn a joke as racist or sexist. Rock has gone further, telling New York Magazine that he has started to censor himself at gigs in case someone is recording him on their phone. Once upon a time, comedians could try out an edgy joke in front of a small crowd, and if it was greeted by gasps instead of laughs, they would know not to tell it again. Now, though, the edgy joke can be broadcast to an almost limitless number of people via social media, so comedians are forced to be more careful. “If you think you don’t have room to make mistakes,” said Rock, “it’s going to lead to safer, gooier stand-up.”

It’s a proposition that Jon Ronson examines in his new book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Over the course of three years, Ronson spoke to people who had been demonised for posting a single tasteless joke on Twitter or Facebook. The more he investigated, he says, the more he came around to the Patton Oswalt/Jim Norton point of view. “There’s a despicable ruthlessness coming from the ‘outrage’ camp which is destroying people’s lives,” says Ronson. “For every little bit of good it does for social justice, it does a terrible amount of harm. Twitter is like the Stasi: a surveillance network which declares war on behaviour that is considered un-Stasi-like.”

/snip

I'm outraged that he would call it Stasi-like. I'm pretty sure it's Liberal McCarthyism.

Conform or be shamed and shunned.

[tularetom]

1. Anybody here who has served on a jury can tell you

that it's infected DU as well.

[leveymg]

2. If you don't outrage someone, nobody's paying attention. For a comedian, that's death.

It's not that he was terribly offensive - Ronson just wasn't that funny.

[Fearless]

3. I think the bigger point here is Jon Stewart is irreplaceable.

[alarimer]

4. I'm sick of online shaming.

Here, they've been calling for the firing of that woman who post the pictures with the giraffe she killed. Sure, what she did was beyond the bounds of good taste, at least, but it is worthy of her losing her job? I have no idea, ultimately that's up to the employer.

Still, people who have posted here have been hounded out of their jobs because they posted something their (in this case conservative) employers didn't like. And most people on this board thought it was unfair.

But the whole thing stinks, no matter what side we're on.

Words do matter. And we have decided some words are worse than others. This board has standards. We don't use the "c" word or the "n" word, but I'll be damned if I'm going to care whether some comedian uses them or if someone uses them in a book or TV show.

I think it's a fine line between being edgy and being offensive for the sake of being offensive. The latter is pointless and crass.