Humour is being destroyed by the humourless

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld claims the “extreme left” have killed comedy.

Jerry Seinfeld believes the hard Left is destroying comedy. I don’t buy it. The hard or extreme Left have never been funny. Karl Marx was the least amusing of all of the Marx Brothers although Chico had a more ferocious gambling addiction. Stalin liked a laugh but his sense of humour was more of the German type where people fall over and hilarity ensues. Old Joe would have liked Australia’s Funniest Home Videos while complaining that people on the show didn’t get hurt enough.

Seinfeld lambasted the lack of classic TV shows being found in today’s society, but he is ignoring a few obvious examples.

“Nothing really affects comedy,” Seinfeld said while promoting his directorial debut film, Unfrosted, a film about the history of the US breakfast snack, Pop Tarts which seems a skinny premise for a film but it hasn’t been released yet so I’ll wait before passing judgment.

“People always need it. They need it so badly and they don’t get it. It used to be that you’d go home at the end of the day, most people would go ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Oh, M*A*S*H is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on.’ You just expected some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight. Well guess what? Where is it? Where is it?”

Seinfeld is referring to US network comedies. He and co-creator Larry David enjoyed creative independence in the writing and performance of his eponymous show but network executives have been tinkering and tampering with comedy for a lot longer than these days of woke interventions.

Seinfeld went on and started finger pointing, “This is the result of the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people,” he explained. “When you write a script, and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups – ‘Here’s our thought about this joke’ – well, that’s the end of your comedy.”

In the US, the Federal Communications Commission has been overseeing levels of decency for longer than television sets have been sitting in living rooms. In 1978, the US Supreme Court upheld the commission’s findings that George Carlin’s classic “seven dirty words” monologue, with a stream of repeated profanities, was indecent. No one called the FCC woke.

Seinfeld should know, too, that these are grim times for free to air television. A network picking up a sitcom is going to be risk averse. Less commissioning of new shows necessarily means a more homogeneous product. One size fits all. Meanwhile, we can stream Seinfeld and many other comedies of that generation (I’d love to see the Carol Burnett Show again, if any of the streaming execs are reading this). If there is any content on these shows that would be subject to censorship now, I can’t find any earthly reason for it.

Seinfeld’s Puerto Rican Day episode which was first broadcast in 1998 was removed from repeat screenings by the NBC Network for a brief period. In 1999, no one called the network woke.

The cast of It's Always Funny in Philadelphia: Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton, Kaitlin Olson, Charlie Day. A hugely popular and extremely un-PC show on FX/Foxtel.

Seinfeld could flick from free-to-air to FX in the US or Foxtel and Binge in Australia to watch one of the 170 episodes over 16 seasons and counting of the hilarious and most definitely not PC sitcom, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is no taboo that goes unexplored. Religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation – nothing is off limits. Set in a bar, the four main characters are so appalling that any woke transgression – and there are so many – can be ascribed to the utter awfulness of the protagonists. My personal recommendation is to skip series one (come back to it later) and move onto the second series, where Danny De Vito appears for the first time. If we really did live under the yolk of a woke agenda, this show would not exist.

The answer is not that comedy has been destroyed by ideology. It is that some of the loudest noisemakers, bookburners and finger waggers in our communities from both sides of ideological aisle don’t understand irony and never will.

John Cleese is one of the funniest men alive. He is the man of silly walks, of fish dancing, of a fierce Latin teacher turned Roman centurion and of course, the man who gave us the broken, reprehensible Basil Fawlty in the two-series, 12-episode high farce, Fawlty Towers.

Fawlty Towers has been rendered into a stage show now pressing three of the episodes from the show together – Communication Problems, featuring a hearing challenged Mrs Richards, the Hotel Inspector and the Germans. Early reviews state that the stage show is faithful to the original scripts with one exception. The old Major’s ranting on cricket and ethnicity in the Hotel Inspector episode has been removed from the program at Cleese’s wishes.

Cleese explained this – not as an instance of self-censorship but because the one offending word would attract more trouble than it was worth.

“Whenever you’re doing comedy, you’re up against the literal-minded,” Cleese told the BBC. “And the literal-minded don’t understand irony, so that means if you take them seriously, you get rid of a lot of comedy, because the literal-minded don’t understand metaphor, irony, comic exaggeration.

English actor and comedian John Cleese.

“And the result is, if you listen to them, these are people who are not, so far as understanding what human beings are saying and doing, they’re not playing with a full deck.

“Literal-minded people can only have one interpretation of what’s being said. People who are not literal-minded can see there are different interpretations depending on different contexts.”

In other words, comedians use a number of devices to render situations funny, including exaggeration and shock but if a person has no appreciation of these things and perceives it through a single dimension, then they will become enraged according to a word used here or an image broadcast there and then spread that nonsense around on social media farming likes and agreement. .

Book and film banning has been a conservative mainstay for years in this country, among some of them at least. The difference now is that a lot on the Left has joined them in their tut-tutting. The only way to beat these people is to ignore them. Sit back, watch It’s Always Sunny, feel really dirty and laugh like a drain.