(This post was written by the inimitable Sandy Shedd.)
College is about growing up.
There, I said it. We can all go home now. Had to work myself up to saying anything at all.
Wait, shoot, I started at the ending. Let’s get there.
To be sure, there is a certain “campyness” that goes along with attending Sometimes I Feel Like The World’s Tiniest Liberal Arts School, earning a Top Notch Education with a whole host of Highly Qualified Peers, located in Nobody Cares, Massachusetts. But once we peel away some cheerful layers of things like weekly snack breaks, a dining hall establishment that makes you paper-bagged lunches of PB&J, Frosh Revue (guilty as charged), and Mountain Day, the fundamental reason for higher education, especially in the liberal arts, is to stretch oneself just a little bit further.
Read more, learn more, see more, figure more things out, experience people/places/things that you haven’t yet or wouldn’t otherwise. You know, become a person.
Which is why I’m troubled by recent attempts by Berkeley students to block HBO Comedian Bill Maher from speaking at commencement, and by the reasons that comedian Chris Rock no longer performs stand-up comedy at colleges, and (let’s take some ownership here) the fact that a crop of weirdos doing theatre and (yes, tasteless, vaguely threatening) comedic traditions (again, guilty) were the ones that Williams College chose to highlight in their efforts to create a “safe space” and say “Look, all the hazing, we ended it!”
Rock spoke about some recent controversial jokes about 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, and more that were included in his SNL host monologue. During an interview with New York Magazine writer Frank Rich, Rock said that he’d stopped scheduling performances for colleges because college students had become “too conservative”:
“Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised in the culture of ‘We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.’ Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say ‘the black kid over there.’ No, it’s ‘the guy with the red shoes.’ You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”
–emphasis added
I had two reactions to this. The first was–thank you. Somebody said it! We have become so concerned with everyone’s safe space that this safety comes at the expense of growth. Comedy, satire, and the like have been used throughout recorded history as tools to introduce, inspire, and hash out actual discussion of The Way Things Are. Silencing jokes that might make us uncomfortable simply because we don’t want to be uncomfortable seems equivalent to burying our heads in the sand on the beaches of Never Neverland; we don’t want to do any growing, thank you very much.
Then, like 10.5 seconds later, my second reaction–well now wait just a damn minute. How would I feel, if I were the target of such comedy, if I were a member of the population feeling marginalized or unsafe. Feeling safe in one’s space is a pretty basic human right. And, truth time, I don’t know what that sort of targeting feels like. I don’t have to carry around my marginalization with me at all times: I’m white and a student in New England.
Thought experiment: if I changed the scenario in my head, and imagined that Bill Maher was being blocked from delivering a Berkeley commencement address due to some insensitive anti-feminist comedy, would I agree with the Berkeley students?
Optimistically, no. Optimistically, I’d be able to see the value in having someone like him imparting some wisdom to us, the bright-eyed and the bushy-tailed. I’d be able to rise above the “LOL a woman doing something womanly” joke history. As a comedian myself, I’m no stranger to some bullshit women-aren’t-they-hilarious tirades, and if I’m completely honest, I’ve laughed at them too. But I’m still actively grappling with these pieces. I’m not sure if the optimistic scenario is the accurate one.
I feel very aligned with how Rock sees it. Growth happens when we encounter something uncomfortable, dig deeper into that discomfort, and experience it enough so that it is no longer uncomfortable. Comedy is a tool that can help us sink into things that we don’t fully understand yet. Comedy can be a bridge. And, more obviously, it can make figuring all this stuff out just a little more entertaining.
(3 hours later)
And now this article just came out, and I just found it, and here it is saying a lot of these things as well.
Lord of the Freys 