The 70-year-old comedian and television kingpin Jerry Seinfeld has come out to repudiate his original accusations that comedy was being suppressed by the “extreme left and PC culture.” Seinfeld once complained in a 2019 interview with ‘The New Yorker’ of the impact that political correctness was making on the comic world. He wrote that comedic actors were increasingly wary of offending people, and that TV became more sterile and less funny.
“This is the result of the extreme left and PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people,” Seinfeld told The New Yorker in April 2019. He blamed this cultural shift for the decline in TV comedies like Cheers and All in the Family. According to Seinfeld, the fear of offending people stifled creativity and ruined the comedic process.
The post-mortem odes by Seinfeld became widely read and became part of a larger debate on the comedy genre and its place in political correctness. Even his former ‘Seinfeld’ co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus got in on the act, stating she appreciated the anti-political correctness backlash, but found it a “red flag” that hinted at something else.
But Seinfeld no longer views the situation in this manner. Seinfeld apologized for the comments Wednesday on the podcast of comedian Tom Papa’s Breaking Bread. ‘The “extreme left”, I said, has monopolized comedy. I said so. Not at all,” he confessed. Seinfeld explained his new worldview by saying that “great comedians embrace a changing culture, and still come up with something to make everyone laugh”.
“You can’t say certain words, whatever they are, about groups. So what? The accuracy of your observation has to be 100 times finer than that, to just be a comedian,” Seinfeld remarked. He retracted his criticism, saying that the “extreme left” had not harmed comedy as he previously suggested.
Seinfeld caused similar trouble when he declared to ESPN in 2015 that he no longer performed at colleges due to their p-c culture. He offered an anecdote of his teenage daughter accusing him of being sexist as a sign that the young were no longer sensitive enough. But that’s also something Seinfeld talked about in his recent podcast performance, explaining that he still plays colleges and has no issue playing for kids.
Seinfeld’s shift of tune reflects the dynamic within the debate over free speech, political correctness and comedic satire. Where he once chalked up politics to inhibiting comics, he now thinks there’s a place for good comics in all cultures.
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