I'm (not) a PC

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t perform on college campuses anymore. And I can’t say I blame him.

 

In a June appearance on “The Herd with Colin Cowherd,” a show on ESPN radio, Seinfeld revealed his aversion to playing for college crowds: The students, he said, are too politically correct, throwing around PC terms with often reckless abandon.

 

“They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist,’ ‘That’s sexist,’ ‘That’s prejudice,’” said Seinfeld. “They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

 

Now, if this were an edgier comedian – a Bill Maher, for example, or a George Carlin – you might look at a comment like that and say, “Well, his material is pretty avant garde, so I can see why people might take offense to his show.” But this is Jerry freakin’ Seinfeld we’re talking about here. His edgiest material is about airplane peanuts. He makes Jimmy Fallon look like Andrew Dice Clay. If his act was any more sanitized, you could use it to clean the lids on emergency room toilet bowls.

 

So when the King of Clean says that college students have become too PC, you start to wonder if maybe he has a point.

 

Political correctness started off with good intentions. The goal of the whole movement was to scale back on terms and labels that certain groups might find offensive, and on its surface, that seems noble enough. Aside from certain rodent-haired windbag presidential candidates (and the columnists who mock them), who wants to purposefully offend people? You’d have to be the twerpiest of twerps to get up in the morning and think, “Okay, I’m going to shower, make myself an omelet, and go out and insult an Asian guy! It’s gonna be a productive day!”

 

At some point, though, things started to get a bit silly. I was in middle school when I first became conscious of the politically correct movement. Certain words and terms, language I’d been using for the whole of my short life, started being replaced with their play-it-safe counterparts. Some of these linguistic changes made sense. At some point during my childhood, for instance, the term “stewardess” was supplanted with the more inclusive “flight attendant.” That’s a reasonable change. Not all flight attendants, after all, are women, and so any word capped by a gender-specific suffix isn’t very logical. Other outdated gender terms were also shelved, and rightly so; cavalier descriptors like “dame,” “filly” and “toots” have been justifiably shelved, stuffed way back in our collective culture closet next to the phonograph and the shockingly hideous beehive hairdo. You still occasionally hear a woman referred to as a “chick,” but usually by other women. Or else a man says it and is immediately given a ninja-style kick to the groin.

 

Other PC terms made less sense to me, even as a young teenager. “African American” is one of them. It’s confusing on a couple of different levels. Firstly, the very neutral-sounding “black person” contains nothing derogatory from what I can tell. It’s a simple descriptive term, like “tall,” or “bald.” Secondly, there’s the obvious problem that not all people of African descent are Americans. If you’re talking about a black American, then sure, “African American” is technically correct. But what about black people in Britain, or France – or for that matter, Africa? They’re definitely not African Americans. What PC culture has done is taken a word with no value judgment in its DNA – “black” – and inflated it, balloon-like, into a convoluted mess of extra, unwarranted syllables. And this is coming from a guy who makes his living based partly on word counts.

 

The term “senior citizen” is just as unnecessary. At some point, “old man” and “old woman” became offensive. I’m not really sure why. Seems to me the goal of each and every one of us is to eventually become an old person. It doesn’t take a MENSA-level genius to conclude that the alternative is premature death. I’ll admit, I always thought it would be kinda neat to have a really unique, attention-grabbing death story – “Did you hear about Jeff? He died wrestling a bear while parachuting from a gunned-down helicopter in the Ozarks!” – but I’d gladly trade that in for a good long run at this whole life thing. “Old” should be a badge of pride, not a source of shame. “Elderly” is an acceptable alternative, but “senior citizen” is a sterile, clinical term that’s had all its vitality sucked dry. Like the flavor from a butterscotch candy. 

 

Hey, zing! That right there was a joke, ladies and gentlemen.

 

A tame one, sure, and maybe you thought it was funny and maybe you didn’t. But if you actively found it offensive, then you are either 1) too easily offended, or 2) a millennial, which basically amounts to the same thing. Millenials – those young people born near the turn of the century – are the end product of decades of politically correct finger-wagging and language-tampering. Some words and phrases are indeed offensive, and that’s why political correctness in and of itself isn’t a bad thing; it seeks to mitigate unwarranted insult, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Where things went awry was in the level of degree. Now everything is considered offensive that isn’t dull, bland and safe. That’s a death knell for good comedy. And that’s what Seinfeld was talking about.

 

Carlin, one of my late, great heroes, once had a 10-minute bit about rape. In his act, he explained why joking about it was OK.

 

“I believe you can joke about anything,” he said. “It depends on how you construct the joke. What the exaggeration is. Because every joke needs one exaggeration. Every joke needs one thing to be way out of proportion.”

 

Spoken like a man who knew not everything should be taken seriously. I worry that subsequent generations may lose sight of that. What a sad, humorless world it would be if they do.

 

Which is all just another way of saying: Hey, kids. Take a joke.