“If it’s offensive and not funny, then it’s not a joke.” So says Jerry Seinfeld, who knows a thing or two about the topic at hand.
Seinfeld offers this observation in a new interview with the New York Times. “What did you make of James Gunn, the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ director, getting fired for his old Twitter jokes?” the interviewer asks. “I didn’t read the jokes, but if they’re jokes, it doesn’t matter,” says Seinfeld. “I guess Roseanne Barr thought she was being funny, but it wasn’t funny — and if it’s offensive and not funny, then it’s not a joke. But any comedian that doesn’t understand that dynamic, you’re finished anyway.”
Asked earlier in the interview whether he had ever apologized for a joke, Seinfeld replied, “No. Jokes are not real. People assume that when you say something that you believe it. It’s purely comedic invention. You know, I do this whole bit about Pop-Tarts and how much I love them. I don’t love Pop-Tarts. It’s just funny. It’s funny to say it, so I say it.”
Recall that poetry editors of The Nation recently begged their readers’ forgiveness for publishing a “disparaging and ableist” poem. In a New York Times op-ed, the magazine’s former poetry editor, Grace Schulman, rightfully discerned in their gutless decision “the backward and increasingly prevalent idea that the artist is somehow morally responsible for his character’s behavior or voice.”
In his contention that “jokes are not real,” Seinfeld seems to be getting at something similar. Lost on the police of political correctness is the purpose of certain art, which is not to lecture but to entertain. As “Saturday Night Live’s” Michael Che recently lamented, the Left is increasingly convinced that entertainment must also lecture. This is, perhaps, at the heart of Barr’s downfall as well — the seasoned comedienne was also blurring those lines, just from an underrepresented side of the debate.
Per Seinfeld’s logic (“If it’s offensive and not funny, then it’s not a joke”), not all attempts at humor constitute jokes. To be a joke, by this Seinfeldian definition, something must be funny, and for something to be funny, it mustn’t be offensive. But the Left’s definition of “offensive” is so much broader than the rest of the country’s that it explains why hypersensitive liberal campuses are struggling so mightily to hire comedians that actually tell jokes. Seinfeld’s assertion that jokes must be funny assumes that this judgment is rendered by the masses, not by administrators at Emerson.
To put it simply, we’re taking jokes way too seriously. And if you think Jerry Seinfeld must love Pop-Tarts because he keeps going on about them, perhaps you’re part of the problem.
