PC FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE, PART 5,292,339.
OK, so what's the latest "waah, everyone's politically correct" glurge... oh Christ, it's Bruce Bawer. First he bitches about how Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, and Chelsea Handler are all making fun of Republicans when they should be, I don't know, marching around in prison stripes going "Rawr, I'm Hitlery Klintoon and I killed Benghazi." (I'm kind of shocked at his focus on female comics -- I thought beating them up was a straight wingnut obsession. He even goes on about "the odious Lena Dunham," normally a tell. Maybe he's had conversion therapy? Or perhaps he just knows what his audience craves.)
Then he gets to the meat: He used to like this English comedian Jimmy Carr because "he seemed utterly indifferent to audience sensitivities and wasn’t remotely political." Sounds good to me too! So Bawer went to see him in Oslo, and at the show Carr got into the local Muslim situation. But to Bawer's dismay:
Carr’s line was that Norwegians are being inhospitable [to Muslims]. Sitting there listening to this, I couldn’t help reflecting that in his own country, the kind of policies he was promoting have made things even worse than they are in Norway — they’ve quashed speech freedoms, turned more and more urban areas into no-go zones...
Yeah whatever buddy. But here's the worst part:
I was appalled by Carr’s glib, PC drivel. But I was pretty much alone. Almost the entire audience, which consisted not of the kind of ordinary, hard-working Norwegians who oppose mass immigration but of affluent-looking, snappily dressed, patently urban 20-somethings (I didn’t see a single non-white face)...
An all-white audience in Oslo! There's a switch.
...laughed and applauded lustily.
They were laughing at something Bruce Bawer didn't agree with! That's double PC!
Plainly, these kids were the spawn of the privileged, pro-immigration left-wing elite and will soon join that elite themselves.
I don't know why Bawer didn't climb on stage like Kenneth Mars in The Producers and yell "You are the victims of a hoax!"
(Carr, I surmised, has advisers at his tour stops who know his demographic and know exactly what kind of material will get them going.)
Wow, he does material he thinks the audience will enjoy. And him a comedian! Is there no end to the PCness?
Eventually Bawer pretends he has an aesthetic case against Carr too ("instead of the tight, snappy sets I’d seen on TV, what I saw was terribly padded-out, including a lot of uninteresting back-and-forth with audience members...") but really he's pissed because they weren't making the jokes he likes -- you know, like that Achmed the Dead Terrorist Guy. But Jeff Dunham is still touring with Achmed -- why not go see him, or Larry the Cable Guy? Why so pissed that other people like different jokes?
The answer is that the people who yell the loudest about political correctness think "other people being open-minded" means "other people agreeing with me." And nothing makes these pecksniffs madder than to hear people laughing and find out that the joke's on them.