How the World Looks to a Religious Hysteric with Dark and Weird Imaginings

From Hot Air's quotes about political correctness and comedy (worth perusing), this bit of florid lunacy from a tremulous sexual hysteric, a Mx. Lindy West.

Beloved funnyman of yesteryear Jerry Seinfeld (ask your parents!)

First of all, this is ageist. Second of all, I don't get this claim that a guy who has one of the biggest internet shows is no longer relevant. Third of all, let's get back to that ageism again -- this idea that if it happened before the year 2000, it never existed.

Finally, let's look at the picture of one Mx. Lindy West.

I don't know how old she is; all i can see is how she looks. Her apparent age. I'm just going to say Mx. Lindy West looks way too old to be dropping "ask your parents" jokes.

[Seinfeld] took to the airwaves this week to offer his hoary wisdom on the state of modern comedy. A plague is upon us, he warns. Harmless jokesters and joy-bringers are literally being figuratively strangled by the long, thin goblin-fingers of "political correctness" (which is a fancy term for "not treating people who are already treated like garbage like garbage"), even though all they were trying to do was just say anything they want to, the way they always have, without ever being questioned or criticised by known killjoys such as "people of colour" and "women", and with zero regard for the institutionally oppressed groups upon whose backs their industry has been stepping for generations in the service of shallow, straight white dude "catharsis". Is that so wrong? Jerry Seinfeld, hero, is here to say "yes"; yes, that is so wrong....

Nowadays, because of Twitter and electric mail, you get the brain gestapo completely up your underpants if you so much as publicly fantasise about making a black media personality your erotic slave. Or if you produce an innocent web series with an almost-entirely white, male cast, only 20 years after you were criticised for doing the exact same thing with your sitcom. The PC police might not know what "racism" is, but Seinfeld does, and it certainly isnt either of those things. And yet the PC death-grip on comedy is so fierce that Seinfeld has only managed to accrue $820m so far. The horror.

This unfairness, as you can see, is bad for fairness; it is bad for the constitution in some way, I’m sure; and it is bad for college students who are probably really clamouring for the vintage observational stylings of Jerry.

Again, Mx. West: You are way too old to be dropping "vintage" put-downs with such aplomb.

Have you mixed up your medicines, dear?

Now comes the hysterical bit:

What Seinfeld is reacting to is not the shrinking, ossifying death of comedy, as he seems to believe; it is the vibrant, expansive unfurling of comedy, and the multitude of growing pains that come along with it....

I used to think it was a given that, at any comedy gig I attended, I’d have to grin through a number of brutal jokes about my gender: about beating us, about raping us, about ranking us, about reducing our already dehumanised existence to a handful of insulting stereotypes. And I went ahead and grinned -- because, I thought, that’s just how we joke.

I went to a lot of comedy shows the early 00's. It became a hobby of mine. After 9/11, I got into the habit of just going to a comedy show on a Thursday night. (Weekends get too drunk and packed with tourists.)

There is no reality from which this quavering Church Lady draws the idea that comedy shows were places were comics would joke about beating and raping women.

I'll tell you where she's getting it from: From where all quivering religious maniacs get their list of paranoias and panics from: Fantasy. The dark, ugly, sexually bent swirl of bad chemicals and early development trauma from which all religious lunatics draw their ghastly funhouse mirror view of reality.

She has literally no idea at what might be said at one of these (trigger warning) "Comedy Clubs," and so darkly fantasizes about it like Koran-gripping, sweating sheikh.

Why, it must be a place where rough men with rude and misshapen penises talk about beating and raping women. In fact, perhaps the "comedian" on stage actually agitates to get a Rape Party going...

When people don't know about something -- as this joyless, humorless zealot clearly does not -- they are free to fantasize into that thing all their private anxieties, phobias, and unacknowledged sexual kinks. Thus the mysterious places that are teenagers' parties-- a source of real anxiety for parents -- become, without any evidence, places of competitive debauch in which "Rainbow Parties" are held and girls are given colorful jelly-braces for each sexual perversion they engage in.

This sexually-panicked Holy Warrior thinks that comedy clubs were once -- before her Social Justice Warrior jihadists cut some throats -- places where it was just a given thing that male comics would crack all those Great Jokes about beating women, raping them, and "dehumanizing them."

You know, all the old Classics we no longer use.

She has plainly little experience in comedy clubs, or, I imagine, with laughter generally. Her knowledge base on this comes from rumors she's heard from other people with no actual experience but lots of grievances and hatred, added to her own Rocky Road mix of wet fear and sexual paranoia.

These people are insane. Like all quivering-eyed puritans and crusaders before them, they see a Dark World, swimming with wickedness and demonic influences, in desperate need of the cleansing fires of their Most Holy Arsons.

And like all puritans and crusaders before them: They're the ones that we must put to the flaming piles, if we ever want to live a moment in peace, free of their manias, paranoias, and weird sexual fantasies.

Heads up on video from Jim Treacher.

posted by Ace at 12:27 PM

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