 I'm very pleased to welcome you here this afternoon, and especially to this inaugural event or celebration of our new BFA in comedic arts. As you all know, this is the first such major to be offered anywhere in the US, and dare I say, in North America, probably South America too. And an excitement about it is running very high in the Emerson community and beyond. I know that the New York Times Magazine is working on a piece, and we hope to see that in the not too dear, not too near future, in the near future. This new major strengthens our commitment to the study of comedy by adding academic rigor and intellectual resources from faculty and industry professionals both here in Los Angeles and beyond. It's grounded in the history and the theory of comedy, and it will prepare our students for brilliant careers in comedy performance, writing, and production. And today's, the topic chosen for today's discussion is an important one that is really at the center, the heart of a national conversation around political correctness. And the question that will be posed today is should comedy be politically correct? Can comedy be anything other than that? Historically, comedy has been used as a vehicle for social change, as we know, well, no. And a principal example of that is with one of our alums, Norman Lear, who many would argue started important conversations and advanced social change with shows like All in the Family and the Jeffersons, and it goes on and on. But would Lear be able to get away with what he did in the mid-70s today? And that is an important question. There's a changing of the guard, a new generation, that embraces political correctness and is demanding that comedians not cross certain cultural lines, and specifically those that some would argue unnecessarily target or hurt and create places of discomfort for certain groups of people just to get a laugh. So there are many questions that we can ask in this arena, including these, is the debate about acceptability of certain kinds of comedy, a debate between generations? Does comedy have to be offensive in order to be effective or to be effect or bring about social change? Or are there other ways of approaching comedy that are less offensive but still may get the point across? And that is why we are gathered here today to hear different points of view from a wide range of comedy scholars and practitioners. And so to get us started, let me introduce today's moderator, Ken File. Ken is an Emerson College alum who earned both his BA and MA with us and then went on to earn a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. And he's now back at Emerson happily for us as the senior scholar in residence in the Department of Visual and Media Arts. He's written extensively about comedy and much more and he has an important voice in public conversations about popular culture. And we're very, very lucky to have him here with us today. But before I turn this over to you, Ken, I must point out in the back in the red is this wonderful professor, Marty Cook, who really was the spirit behind this. I remember having conversations with you a couple of years ago about moving forward on this. And you did it brilliantly. And Emerson and the intellectual and academic community is the better for it. So we all want to thank you, Marty, for your leadership. So anyway, so Ken, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you very much. Thanks, thanks, thanks. Well, welcome to our panel discussion, comedy and campus culture, who's laughing now? I hope you'll be laughing soon or at least nodding your heads in interest. This is of course, as President Pelton put it, the inaugural event for Emerson's BFA program in comedic arts. Just to let you know, we're live streaming for our friends outside the Ivory Tower of LA and beyond. So welcome to the streamers. And folks on the web can submit questions to comedy at emerson.edu. And we'll certainly try and get all your questions in. And by the way, folks who are here, physically that is, please sign the guest register so we can keep you up to date on future events. I'm what, humbled by Lee's introduction to me. And so now I'd like to also introduce my co-moderator, Nick Holmes. Nick is a senior performing arts major. He's also among the first of the comedy minors in this new program. He's a member of the Zach Stetson performance group and he aspires to write comedy for TV. Hi, thank you all. I also need to give some credit to the absolute support and generosity of the comedy program committee, including Magda Romanska, Aaron Schwaal, Mike Bent, Hassan Ildari, Manny Bassany's Adam Greenfield, Christina Zaman, and of course, Marty Cook and Rob Sabal. Now let's introduce our panelists. And we'll start on the end over here, Sierra Cato. Sierra is a student comic from Harvard University. She's a senior computer science major with an impressive list already of comic credits. She appeared on Last Call with Carson Daly on NBC, the current season of Last Comic Standing, also on NBC, season two of Laughs on Fox. She's also been showcased in the LAIO West Comedy Festival and the Women in Comedy Festival. Next we have Paul Lewis, professor of English and American Studies from Boston College. Professor Lewis has developed interdisciplinary approaches to the study of humor in literature, popular culture and politics. He's the author of Cracking Up, American Humor in a Time of Conflict and What's So Funny About a Dead Terrorist Toward an Ethics of Humor for the Digital Age. And Professor Lewis is also a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Humor. And next we have Sasha Cohn, PhD candidate from Brandeis University. Miss Cohn explores American pop culture and its intersections with the history of politics, gender and sexuality. Her dissertation in progress is entitled The Comedy of the Culture Wars, American Humor, Feminism and Gay Liberation, 1969 to 1989. She is a Crown Fellow and NERFC, and I meant to ask you how to pronounce that, so I'll just spell it out, NERFC Fellow and a contributor to the Time Magazine History Archives. And then we have Corey Rodriguez, Corey Rodriguez is a stand-up comic of veteran actor, impressionist and comedy circuit headliner. Mr. Rodriguez has racked up a notable list of comedy competition victories and performs regularly on behalf of charitable organizations. And then, let's see, a little out of order, but improvised, right? It's part of comedy. There we go. Yes, I can't improvise. I'm not a comedian. And last but not least, we have Michael Lohman, professor of television from Boston University. Professor Lohman is a veteran comedy writer and producer of a series of iconic television shows, including All in the Family, Happy Days, One Day at a Time, Alice and Newheart. He has received 11 Emmy Awards, a Humanitas Prize and citations from the NAACP Image Awards and La Raza Latino Bravo Awards. So please give a warm welcome to our panelists. So the discussion structure will run as follows. We'll begin with a brief statement from each panelist beginning with Sierra. We'll just go down the row here. And that will be followed by a couple of clips that we have chosen to frame the contemporary debate about political correctness on college campuses. And that will be followed by questions from Nick and I, as well as the audience here and folks streaming. And once again, for you streamers, please submit questions at comedy at emerson.edu. And once again, we'll try and get to everyone's questions. So without further ado, Sakatou. Wonderful, thank you Ken. So I'm Sierra, I'm like probably quite a few of you, a student and interested in comedy. So it's kind of an interesting intersection. I also don't think I have like a very solid opinion on the matter because I'm still learning and I'm sure my opinion will change like 50 times during the course of this panel, so that'll be fun. But I think the main thing that is kind of interesting being a student and being a comedian is sort of this split personality that I have as a result that I'm sure a lot of people share here today. For one, I definitely think that as a student and on campus, there's sort of the idea that campuses are a little coddled or the idea that we're super politically correct. And I think I am one of those people. I think I count myself as learning about matters and wanting to be sensitive to everyone and thinking in that way. And then at the same time as a comedian, I think I also get frustrated about censorship and get frustrated that sometimes I can't write everything I wanna write or say everything I wanna say or that even if I touch on something without hopefully not perpetuating certain hegemonic structures or anything, that it may still be criticized because it's a little too controversial. So yeah, so I'd say I have a lot of internal conversations with myself where I censor myself or I'm like, wow, Sierra, you would say that? Gosh, you're gonna be sensitive to everyone. But at the same time, I wanna be able to say certain jokes and make fun of certain things that hopefully are helping the purpose overall. So there's a lot of paradoxes, I think, is the main conclusion and that I want comedy to be something, of course, that you get to talk about really difficult subjects with. But at the same time, I understand that right now what people respond to best is often really trying to be progressive and trying to challenge certain things that have existed in the past. And so it's really exciting, I think, for us who are students who are also interested in comedy to use it to move forward in those ways and to hopefully use what we've learned as students and about the world around us to then also use our interest in comedy to sort of either create discourse on it or just talk about it in a certain way. But again, it is a tricky situation and I think I'm still learning, so I'm really interested to hear what everyone else has to say here and then also just as we mature and as we kind of go out into the world and do comedy to see what we can learn from it and how we can sort of say what we wanna say and send our messages that we wanna send. So, thank you. So thanks so much to Marty Cook and the new comedy program for including me in this discussion. I come at the subject, not from the world of performance comedy, but from the perhaps funnier world of humor research where public opinion and common sense ideas about how humor functions between individuals and groups are tested and frequently overturned. Once tested, it turns out that laughter is not the best medicine unless there's no good medicine for your illness, that we're unlikely to achieve world peace through laughter, that how one uses humor is more important to one's well-being than how often one tries to be funny and that derogatory humor directed at a specific social group or individual can have negative personal and social effects. I'm likely to bring specific research in three areas into this discussion where appropriate. One, Thomas Ford and Mark Ferguson's prejudice norm theory, which is based on the finding that being amused by derogatory jokes about dislike groups, for example, women, African-Americans, reduces the power of norms that prohibit hostile acts against members of these groups. Two, the phenomenon of jeer pressure discovered by Leslie James and James Olson turns out that people who witness acts of bullying are less likely to object if the bullies ridicule their targets while physically attacking them, kicking their butts while treating them as the butt of jokes. And three, galatophobia, the fear of being laughed at, a social anxiety disorder first studied by Wilbur Ruch at the University of Zurich. Research in these areas has advanced to the point that the current issue of the Journal I Help edit is devoted entirely to studies of the effects of derogatory humor. Final point about the use of the term political correctness. The Atlantic article by Caitlin Flanagan in September decries its prevalence on campuses, especially in relation to the booking of stand-up comedians who need horror of horrors to avoid jokes, for example, about sex or rape that will make women feel uncomfortable. How the plight of potential comics competing for college gigs compares to the challenges female college students face on campuses plagued by sexual assault is worth considering. Here's a suggested starting point. The term political correctness, however it originated, has become a cudgel in the hands of conservative polemicists from Rush Limbaugh to all of the current Republican presidential candidates who use it to mock social justice concerns and empathy for victims. If you offend a friend by teasing a bit too roughly, can't you take a joke seems a reasonable reproach. If a joke or caricature supports systemic bias, mocks the suffering of victims or promotes a derogatory and still potent stereotype, can't you take a joke is a pathetic and deceptive defense of cruelty. So just finally to professional comedians I'd say, it's not all about the base, it's about tact. So I'm coming from this from a historical perspective as a historian and I wanted to just give a little bit of that perspective here. And I think I wanna sort of bring up two ironings since irony is a form of humor. I think so the first irony has to do with the fact that the college campus was actually the birthplace of the free speech movement in the 1960s. So in 1964 at UC Berkeley, Mario Savio sort of initiated student protests to change the climate of the university to an environment where people could sort of say anything they wanted for to showcase a diversity of political opinions. So I think that there is an irony to the phenomenon of today's college students attempting to limit what can be said on campus. And this isn't just sort of my opinion, it's actually something that was mentioned in the Caitlin Flanagan Atlantic piece that Paul brought up as well. The other irony I wanna point out when talking about this issue concerns the idea of minority groups being offended at a particular comedic material. And I wanted to point out that there's actually a tradition of outsider or minority humor in the United States, particularly among black and Jewish comedians. And that it was actually comedians like Lenny Bruce in the 50s and Richard Pryor in the 70s who originally opened doors and paved the way for contemporary comics to be able to use vulgarity and profanity to discuss controversial and taboo subject matters like sex, race, politics, violence, and identity. So the edgy, shocking, and offensive material that some find objectionable today actually has its roots and origins in these minority entertainers. Other examples include African American comics like Dick Gregory in the 60s, Red Fox from the 50s to the 70s, and Mad Magazine which was largely authored by Jews and immigrants. So I think that that's an important thing to keep in mind when we're having this discussion in this debate about who's being hurt by this material and where the sort of idea of this irreverent subversive comedy even came from and who started it. And then the other thing I just wanted to mention, I think that offensive comedy can actually make issues visible and serve as a catalyst for conversation. When it does sort of cross the line into what people would describe as hate speech, generally I've noticed that the comedy community sort of polices itself, and activists use this type of speech as sort of a teachable moment. I think that the best way to deal with objectionable speech is to dissect and critique the ideas rather than stifling them. And I would also just finally say that I think the problem is less about what subject matter itself is being made fun of or used in material and more about how it's used, which I think is something that Paul mentioned as well. For example, there can be rape jokes, AIDS jokes, abortion jokes that are used as catharsis by the groups who are affected by those issues. So just another thing to point out. Oh, Corey, Corey? Oh, I thought you guys were wrong, I'm sorry. I was taking notes, I was like, this is gonna be great. All right, so Corey Rodriguez, see my name. I work at, I perform at many colleges all over this beautiful country. And I've just done quite a few recently, probably like 20-somethingish recently. It is possible to be a very successful standup and not be really, really offensive, but I don't think you're gonna be, or not be offensive, but I don't think you're gonna be a happy person if you're not offending someone. And the reason I say that, there's a reason I say that because no one, I don't care how nice you think you are, someone doesn't like you for whatever reason. In this room, I don't care if you think, I'm so even, even killed and I'm the best person. Somebody doesn't like you. They don't like the way you talk. They don't like the tone of voice you have. They don't like something about you. Something you do is going to offend them. They don't like the way you go to the bathroom and not wash your hands. That offends me if you do that. So there are gonna be people like that. So when you stand on a stage and you're performing comedy, I don't know where that person was that day. I don't know what they were doing. I don't know if they had a family member who passed away and I'm doing a death joke. I don't know if anything that's going on. You don't know where that person's coming from. And if that person doesn't know who they're going to see as the performer, well, then I think, I don't like when people can sit back in an audience and judge a performer. They hold some responsibility too. Know who you're going to see. You don't know who you're going to see. So if you don't like it leave, you can't stay the whole time and be like, I was so upset with everything they said. I stayed for the whole hour and a half, but I was upset. Leave, why support it? It doesn't make sense. You have a responsibility as well as being an audience member. So that's something that I kind of think about with it. But I do think now, I don't want to sound wishy-washy, but I agree with Paul in a sense where I'm not, I'm not, you don't want to be hateful and I'm not that. I'm the same person I am offstage, like the same things that I would say to somebody in regular conversation, I would say to them from the stage. Now, where I disagree with Paul is the sensitivity of things. Like the fact that someone points out that you're black or points out that you're gay or points out that you're late or points out that whatever it is, I don't think it's like, oh, well, I feel so offended and discriminated against and people are laughing at me. That's a problem. That's life. That's in my opinion, that's life. So I don't feel bad about that at all. I mean, I've been places and people have pointed out I'm black and they've done it in a very cool way and it's fine. I'm not like, oh no, I'm black, I'm crying. Like, I know I'm black. So if you're gay and somebody points it out and they're not trying to rip you up, you know, who cares? They just pointed out what you are. And then I'll just say this, this last part. I don't like the political correctness part that we can't make fun of certain things, meaning like Bruce Jenner. So this was a huge thing. But I don't think you should make fun of, again, my opinion, I don't think you should make fun of Bruce Jenner in a sense that what he did and his act and his courage and the act that he took. But to make fun of the process in general, we make fun of the fact that we have a black president. How many black president jokes were there? Why can we make fun of the president but we can't make fun of Bruce Jenner? It's still an act, it's still something that happened. It was in all of our faces. It was on every channel. So we're supposed to be like, I don't see it. No Bruce Jenner's there. It was Bruce, now it's Caitlyn, but I don't see it. I don't think that that's fair. I think you should be able to comment about what's in our faces and we should be able to have some sort of humor about it. But as Paul said, and Sasha said, I don't think it should be hateful, so. Well, I'm very happy to be here among so many distinguished educators and distinguished students as well. Since I am from the film and television department at Boston University and since Emerson is really our rival in this department, they don't usually let me cross the border. But they relented this one time because they're about to receive a gift of a very, very high fence all around Boston University donated by Donald Trump. So I mainly teach writing television situation comedy scripts and so I'm going to talk today from my perspective as a writer and a producer in the field and I'm going to zero in on network broadcasting only. In the past and the present as well, minority groups lower down on the white male power structure were strongly marginalized. They were either absent or stereotyped or hidden or ridiculed and as a result, this led to and leads to violence against them, problems with jobs, housing, social situations, loss of esteem, suicide and ignorance and stereotypes. In other words, these groups were and are oppressed. The networks put into place PC rules. Supposedly to rectify this. So in a moment of being non-PC bullshit. The networks put this into practice because the networks were afraid of losing viewers and the sponsors were afraid of losing viewers and also the creative community, it was beginning to and does pre-sensor itself because they want to get a show on the air. So that's the basis of all that PC that's happened in the past and continues to happen. Nothing is being done with all this PC to change anything, to change bigotry and stereotypical brutalities. So what PC really is, is censorship. And as a colleague of mine at Boston University, Dr. Deborah Haramio would say it's sanitization of television and sitcoms. I am totally, totally against censorship. I believe it enables ignorance and stupidity, hate crimes, bigotry, physical violence against minorities, women, the LGBT community and others. I began my career and I didn't know that Norman went to Emerson. I began my career with Norman Lear in the 1970s on All in the Family and other shows. Norman believed that the only way for us to progress in these areas was to bring it out of the closet and to force America to deal with it. But, and this is really, really important, he also recognized that for every bigoted stereotypical remark, it had to be countered with the truth. So for every Archie Bunker who said things like Spick and Spay and called his wife a ding bad and a son-in-law a dumb pollock, there was Mike to counter that with the truth. And also Norman believed and recognized that you also had to show the effects of what these words and this language had on human beings as well. Norman did that on all of his shows. He had six or seven shows in the top 10 and he did that on every one of them and America did not collapse, okay? America survived and is better today because of what Norman did, in my opinion, on those shows. So fast forward to 2015 and network broadcast television, which in my opinion is still in Newton Minow's vast wasteland today. There is one show that is doing something about it and that show is Blackish on ABC, on network broadcast. The first show of the season on Blackish was all about the word nigger and how it affected so many and caused such harm. Other shows were how the church has played a major influence in the lives of black families and it went all the way back to slave days and showed you a photo of a slave who was allowed, slaves were only allowed to have one decent outfit and they could only wear that outfit going to church on Sundays. And then you saw a montage of progress in that area on Blackish. Other episodes this season on Blackish include mixed marriages, discussion between about a black man and a white woman, and another about how many blacks are reluctant to go to the doctor because of the past history of the white medical establishment and their relationship to African-Americans going all the way back to the experiments at Tuskegee on black men. And you saw the progress in this show throughout all of it. So this sitcom series is not only dealing with real topics honestly, but it's funny. It's very, very funny. We laugh at Dre's office colleagues who are saying the most racist, stereotypical comments and thinking that they are liberals and we are sensitized to that in the same way that we laughed at Michael on the office and his insensitivity to women and to races and thinking he was a good guy in the same way that we laughed at Archie Bunker saying all of those words. So all of those shows were dealing in truth. And as President Pelton mentioned, I don't think comedy has to be offensive to cause change. I think comedy has to be truthful to cause change. So my final thought goes back strangely to, it wasn't mentioned in the introduction, but I was the executive producer of the showrunner on Sesame Street for 10 years and worked with the international productions as well. So my final thought goes back strangely enough to the Jim Henson organization which supplies the brilliant puppeteers and muppets on Sesame Street and other shows as well. A few years ago they created a new muppet and named that muppet Spam. Now you know there is a processed food product called Spam and the Spam company was furious about naming a muppet Spam and they threatened all kinds of action. And the Henson organization responded and I'm paraphrasing, the Spam company is upset about us naming our new muppet Spam because our product is more nutritious than theirs. So my question to you today as you begin this comedy initiative is, what kind of nutrition are you going to bring to it? Are you going to go PC and bury your heads in the sand? Or are you going to forego censorship and show us, show us how bigotry can harm our lives and also marginalize and eliminate minorities? Who better can show it the effect of hatred than comedy? Who better can force us to look at the harm it causes than comedy? Who better can change our opinions, at least challenge us to think of things we never thought of before than comedy? Nobody wants to hear a lecture. Everybody wants to laugh. And I remind you that you are the ultimate censor. You have a right not to watch a show that you find offensive. You do not have the right to not allow the rest of us to watch that show. I will thank you all very much for your stimulating and thoughtful comments and we'll have so much to talk about. We already do, I'm sure. However, before we launch into the questions, as mentioned previously, we'd like to screen two clips right now that address the current debate over political correctness comedy and specifically in the context of college campuses. So first we'll hear from Bill Maher on Real Time with Bill Maher giving a kind of overview and he'll explain the kind of course of events beginning with Jerry Seinfeld's comment back in June. And next we'll see a clip from a recent interview with Sarah Silverman with Vanity Fair and she too is responding to this controversy. So if we could play those clips. And the footage of the joke that was too intense for Americans here. Watch your monitors. Isn't the first athlete who's gone into acting? Stop teaching geography grammar and math. Those are pretty hard. But Americans have got to learn how to do it. A few months ago, we introduced a segment called Explaining Jokes to Idiots. I'd like to bring it back tonight for the benefit of the Spike TV network which last night aired its guys' choice awards and censored a joke delivered by Clint Eastwood. But we were able to obtain the footage of the joke that was too intense for America to hear. Watch your monitors. Dwayne The Rock Johnson isn't the first athlete who's gone into acting. There's also Jim Brown and Caitlyn Somebody. So we didn't get the footage but that is exactly the line that they cut. Why? Is Caitlyn the new C-word? We can't even say it in a joke. And this was on a male network that thinks of itself as macho. But you know, guys, just because you have balls doesn't mean you have balls. You know, what is so worrisome about this new brand of censorship is it doesn't care if something is actually offensive. That joke was not an insult. Not in any way was it a remark that demeans Caitlyn's journey or would make her Adam's apple grow back. It's just certain words that set people off. This is what Jerry Seinfeld was complaining about last week when he said college audiences. Just want to use these words. That's racist, that's sexist, that's prejudice. They don't even know what they're talking about. An opinion echoed by Chris Rock, who said he stopped playing colleges because of their unwillingness to offend anybody. And Larry the Cable Guy concurs. He said, it really is a shame that nobody can handle comedy anymore. You know, when Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry the Cable Guy say you have a stick up your ass, you don't have to wait for the X-rays to come back. That's right, a black, a Jew and a redneck walk onto a college campus and they all can't wait to leave. One undergrad from San Diego actually wrote Jerry an open letter on the Huffington Post to help him, Jerry Seinfeld, better understand how comedy works. I sure wouldn't want to be judged by what I wrote at 20, but stupid though I was in 1976, I wouldn't have presumed to lecture George Carlin on comedy, though I think, though I sure wish George was around today to write a letter back to this kid as only he could. But since he can't, allow me. You little shit, you're your busy, with your new letter explaining astrophysics to Stephen Hawking and giving jump shot pointers to Steph Curry, but try to get a clue. In the same letter, this kid cited Amy Schumer as a comic who's edgy, but without, indulging in harmful stereotypes. Okay, but what about her line? I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual. I love that joke because no matter what Trump says, I don't think of Latino men as rapists. It's just funny because it's exaggerating the fact that Latinos, like almost all men, except white guys, are more aggressive when they hit on women, which, lots of, which, which, lots of chicks like. So pre-fuck you on that one. See, the PC police aren't saying you can't make jokes. You just can't make them about a protected species. Jokes about men, yes. Gay men, no. Kim Kardashian's ass, yes. Her stepfather's tits, no. If someone on the internet expresses the wrong views about gays, women, or Jews, they're subject to endless shaming, unless they're Muslim, in which case, all that intolerance is a cultural difference, which we just have to tolerate. Because, of course, it's a religion of peace. There's a piece of you there, there's a piece of you there. And now let me explain why that joke is perfectly okay. Because everyone gets made fun of for something, and it's never 100% fair. If I make a, and the French surrendered joke, everyone laughs. Even though the French haven't surrendered in every war, in fact, mostly in just the one, but it was kind of an important one. I've been fascinated by this Bill Maher that I saw talking about how- With the woman who wrote that piece on the Atlantic? Yes. With the woman, exactly, about how colleges have become this basically extended country club for four years, and the kids are curating their own experience, and how it's just normally been where comedians have gone to kind of, you know, test their material, or there's always the most receptive audience, and now comedians really are just like, no, thank you. There's a lot of gray matter for me in this, because I didn't agree with everything they were saying. Well, I watched that episode. To a degree, everyone's gonna be offended by something, so you can't just decide on your material based on not offending anyone. But I do think it's important, as a comedian, as a human, to change with the times, to change with new information. I don't think there's anything wrong with changing with the times. I think it's a sign of being old when you are put off by that. I caught myself a few years ago fighting gay. I say gay, like, that's so gay. I just say gay, I have gay friends. I don't mean it like gay. I mean it like it's gay, like it's lame. And then I stopped myself and said, what am I fighting? I have become the guy from 50 years ago who said, I say colored, I have colored friends. It's not hard to change with the times. And I think it's important, and when you have new information, and you become more aware of the world around you, you can change. I don't say that things are gay anymore if I think they're lame. I don't even think about it. It didn't take long to get used to it. And to that effect, I think you have to listen to the college age because they lead the revolution. They're pretty much always on the right side of history. Any issues that I think we could pursue in the discussion? I suppose the first couple of questions that I have that Seinfeld and Maher and others bring up is whether or not political correctness. And of course, I'd love to hear what your definitions or understandings of political correctness are. But does it impede comedy? Does it inspire the need for greater creative thinking and imagination? And then the other thing is why the college campus context, why do you think this debate is reignited over comedy within that context, as opposed to something else? And we can go in order, I suppose. Let's start from this end this time, how's that? Okay, so political correctness really is a catch-all for a lot of different things. It's hard to really define it. In my thinking, political correctness is really, as I said before, relates to those who are marginalized and really lower down on the power scale. We often do not include them in conversations, or we put them down without any reason why. And we only show one side of the story. It's interesting, I was watching a couple of nights ago, I was watching a Joan Rivers concert on television that she did in 2012. And the theme of it was I hate everybody, especially myself. So she said I hate thin, I hate fat, I hate gays, I hate straights, which didn't say gays. I hate all these different people. And then she said, and I hate people who are blind, I hate people who are deaf, and I stopped for a moment and I thought about that. And her joke was a pretty mild joke in terms of I hate people who are blind because they never tell you how good you look, okay? That was the joke that she mentioned. And I thought, well, some people might find this offensive, but what she is doing is she's not marginalizing people with disabilities. How often do you see people with disabilities on the air in all forms? We marginalize them. We don't talk about them. We ignore them. And that's a really bad negative. When I produced Sesame Street, I hired a little girl, Tara Schaefer, in a wheelchair to be on the show as a regular character. And kids were absolutely fascinated by this. They had all kinds of questions. Does she always live in that wheelchair? How does she go to the bathroom? Does she do this? Does she do that? Kids really were interested in what it did and what Joan Rivers' comment about blind people did is it takes the mystique and the fear out of somebody who is different and just presents them as different. And I think that's an important thing to include in PC that we often don't, that we eliminate and marginalize certain groups of people which we should not do. I agree with both of those clips. So I told you I'm wishy-washy, but I have a focus. I agree with both, but I think the reason I agree with both is because we're kind of glossing over it. No one's like hitting it on the head. And what I mean by that is, okay, so what Sarah Silverman is saying is absolutely correct, but also what Bill Maher is saying is absolutely correct because it wasn't like Sarah Silverman just used the example of saying the word gay, right? But it wasn't like a joke that was gonna cause any sort of change or something that was like we're addressing some, maybe we're addressing like a slave trade joke or something like that where you're bringing something to the light and you're trying to educate somebody at the same time and make a big joke. That's different than just using a word to offend or being, I don't know, just being offensive to be offensive, that's different. Those two things, I don't see how most people don't agree with both of those clips, like they both go together because no one's hitting it. I don't know, I just think we can always find reasons to be offended, look, I could be offended already with Michael. Michael said early on, he said nigger, right? But then he was like, and what'd you say? You said in Joan Rivers said gays, he was like, well, she didn't say gays. So we know what she actually said, right? Was fag, right? Which I just said, I'm sorry. I wasn't clear, she didn't say gays because she thinks gays are her biggest supporters. She loves gays, she excluded glad gays. Oh, okay, I thought we'll see how I read that. Now I'm offended, I'm offended. And I would've just wrote something like, he left and he said nigger, but he didn't say that. And he's like, I didn't mean it like that, see? Exact, that's case in point, anytime something's written or anytime you're on a stage and you're delivering something, it depends on how the person takes it. That's how I took it, in my head, I'm over here thinking, why didn't you say that? He said the other word, he didn't say n-word, he said the word, so what did he say, gay? Right, but that's all of us, but I'm not, obviously I'm not that sensitive. I'm not that, I don't live that close to my skin though, so I'm not like, oh my God, I can't believe you said that, but so, I don't know, I don't know if that gives you any more insight onto what I'm supposed to say, but I'll pass it off. You know, what we're talking about when we say the phrase political correctness, I think in the sort of iteration that we mean on this panel, perhaps correct me if I'm wrong, is the sort of 1980s, 1980s, 1990s phenomenon of identity politics sort of dictating a lot of what goes on at a university. So, and if that's what we mean, I think that PC culture can be good and bad depending on what it's doing. So for example, when it's used to expand knowledge I mean things like adding race and ethnicity studies and women and gender and sexuality studies to a curriculum at a college campus, or talking about being able to talk about power and sex and oppression in a class. For example, those things were heavily challenged when they first appeared in history and so they were conservative or sort of more traditional professors and observers saying things like why are we teaching non-western subjects now? Why do women need their own class? Stuff like this and in this case what political correctness was really doing or functioning to do was to sort of expand knowledge and add to it, right? Versus the other side of the flip side of that is when it serves as censorship and when it actually narrows or limits what we can say. And so I think those are two very, there's oppositional ways of using identity politics and we see them both to this day. And so my opinion about it would be what is political correctness doing to the sort of body of knowledge that lives and breathes in a university? So I agree with Sasha's comment and the history of this term, but I wish we just do away with it in discourse because I really do feel as though it's become a cudgel that the right wing uses and very effectively, I heard a radio discussion, they were saying oh the conservatives, hey political correctness, no, they feast on it. Every time they can use that phrase they are whacking someone who cares about social justice over the head. So if you think that a kind of material that an objection, someone being offended at a kind of joke is being hypersensitive, say they're being hypersensitive because you don't want to get into bed with the Republican presidential candidates, I don't, or Rush Limbaugh when I use a term which has become about it's as corrupt as the term death taxes. You like income inequality, you call inheritance taxes death taxes. But I just wanted to give an example of how this could operate. So go back in history and think about the association of Africans and African-Americans with monkeys and with simians. This is an enduring trope in American popular culture. Goes back to the antebellum period, goes back further than that actually. So imagine, and you don't have to invent the idea that this was used in comedy right through that period especially in the post-bellum period in the early decades, corresponding with the culture of lynching, corresponding with Jim Crow. And you know I'd love to say we've moved beyond all that, but actually Barack Obama, Michelle Obama were both caricatured as monkey-like and simian during the last political campaigns. So we haven't moved away from this. And if you say I'm politically correct to think that's abhorrent, then I'm sorry. I don't think I'm that and I don't think I'm hypersensitive either. But that's what they would have said at the time if you'd objected to it. If you were an abolitionist and you objected to any of this stuff they would have said, you know what? You're, well they didn't have political correctness. They weren't that clever. But they would have said something to suggest, come on, can't you take a joke? I can't, not those. Yeah, I think sort of the interesting thing that came up a lot I guess is sort of that there is sort of a responsibility as a comedian to promote certain things that are hopefully progressive and hopefully are, you know, for lack of a better word, politically correct, or like for, you know. And so I think because at the intersection of comedy and entertainment, like there is so much conspicuousness and there is so much that, you know, a lot of people are going to see and you're gonna have influence that there is sort of that responsibility. And clearly like thinking of the implications of the joke you're making. Like that seems to be the common theme, especially in those clips. It's sort of like on both ends, you know, as the deliverer of a joke or as a comedian you have to be able to think about what you're saying and like realize, you know, maybe it's not that somebody can't take a joke, maybe you're actually, you know, perpetuating something you don't realize which everybody does by accident. And, but then on the listening end, you also have to, you know, not shut down if you hear a word because who knows, maybe the comedian is being subversive and introducing something that you would agree with. I think right now also a lot of the issues are that there's sort of this culture around like the viral clickbait of, you know, people wanting to be the ones to say so and so is racist, so and so is being offensive. And so that creates kind of like a bit of a witch hunt when it comes to a lot of comedians. Think about how like Trevor Noah, when he was first, you know, chosen, people went into his history of Twitter and just picked him apart and that happens to almost every new SNL cast member. It happens a lot. I think I really, going back to, I guess, the Joan Rivers joke about blind person, I think that that's really the issue of like visibility of people's visibility is super important and pertinent to today. As an Asian-American comedian, I think, like I don't see a lot of Asian-Americans on television and that was like a big part of growing up that I didn't realize. And then now on the same network that has Black-ish, they also have Fresh Off the Boat, which was the first Asian-American, like I guess sitcom in like 20 years since Margaret chose All American Girl. And, you know, it was, it's still on. There was a huge Asian-American community support for it because we just want to see people that look like us on television and that experience. And I remember talking to my parents about it too and we were happy, but definitely a lot of it was like, well, we kind of hope that there will be one in the future. That's not just like the punchline is we're Asian, you know, because that's a lot of it. And there is now. There's Dr. Ken, which is kind of just, it's Ken drawing sitcom, same network, but also it just shows that it's expanding and the kind of like, I think a huge thing is that with different marginalized groups, like there's different things that each one is trying to push. So I think it's hard to say blanketed like, oh, for all marginalized groups, like we just want visibility or for all marginalized groups, we don't want to be made fun of at all because I think it depends like which group you're in or which group each one has a different history. And so I think it's kind of interesting to see, like I feel like from the Asian-American standpoint, like a lot of it is just like, hey, we just want to be seen, you know, we just want to remember we're here versus maybe other, like I would say a lot of the issues surrounding Caitlyn Jenner and trans identity and maybe they feel as if, you know, her visibility is only one identity. So they don't want to, you know, only have one person represent all of them, you know? And I don't really know, but I think that it's just a very, very difficult case by case experience. So, yeah, that's one thing. I think Sierra brings up a very interesting point when she talks about minority groups in comedy commanding their own narrative, making jokes beyond just oh, they're Asian-American, oh, they're different and actually telling personal stories to bring flesh out. And I think that Paul Lewis brings up a very interesting point saying, talking about comparing African-Americans to having simian-like traits and how that's something we view absolutely apparent right now. And I'd be quite interested to make the connection to Clint Eastwood's Caitlyn Jenner joke saying someone used to be called Bruce Something. I believe the fear comes from this with when we find groups of people be it the trans community, they're starting to be, there's a fear that we don't wanna marginalize these people, make them viewed as not persons and demean their experiences. So when people get upset and offended, I think that part of the equation is to say that, how can we make sure that we're including these people in comedy and discourse without saying that Caitlyn Jenner isn't a person and that her transition isn't valid and we're not making fun of her because she has this identity that she can't really help. So I'd want to really bring up the point, many comedians have said this, but recently Gilbert Gottfried did, is that nobody has died over a joke, but we talk about how jokes and comedy affect a social conversation, how we view certain groups. So I was wondering if anybody on the panel would like to speak to the relationship between telling a joke and its interpreter being experiencing miscommunication or the person telling the jokes, giving off malice or social ignorance and what responsibilities had to make sure jokes don't kill, jokes don't harm. I think it's wrong to say that jokes can't be fatal and I'll give you an example of it and I'm not gonna go to the Monty Python sketch about the killing joke, right? So I would say that advertising campaigns that promote potentially fatal products and use humor in their ads, I don't have to make this up. Joe Camel is a really good example, right? Selling cigarettes to children with a comic character and more recently, children watch about 100 ads for really not nutritionally good serials that feature comic characters who just love the hell out of them. Some of those kids, it's gonna be, so I don't know and I think if political candidates tell jokes that make them seem more appealing to voters and they get voted in and they send people off to wars that we shouldn't be fighting, well that's potentially lethal too. So humor has persuasive force and it can function fallaciously and it convents people of various things, some of them result in behavior, some of them result in death. I wanted to go back if I could for a moment to the comment that was made about Margaret Cho's series All American Girl because I'm a fan of Margaret Cho and I suffered through that series and watched it All American Girl and if you get the DVD on that, Margaret has a conversation at the end with another actress in which she says very clearly that the main reason the series failed was it was about ethnicity and you cannot base a series totally on ethnicity and that's why All American Girl failed, she said also because I had not found my voice in comedy and the networks drove me crazy, they even sent her to the hospital, they made her lose weight and gang weight and there was a mess. But I agree with that, that you can't base a show on ethnicity, you base it on character, that's what you base a show on. Character, it's certainly in sitcoms, it starts with character, you create your characters and from your characters, you then create your conflict, your story and especially your comedy. So even a character like Sheldon on Big Bang Theory would be funny in any situation whether you like him or not because of his character traits of being anal, arrogant, difficult, he'd be funny as a waiter, he'd be funny as a bank teller, it doesn't matter. So it comes from the character traits that you create doesn't come from ethnicity, you certainly should show and identify a Korean American family as they are and be truthful to that and discuss some of the things that they go through and the difficulties but you can't base a whole series on that and I would agree with Margaret Cho on that. We'd love to get the audience involved at this point as well. So if anyone out there or in the interweb sphere has anything to ask, we can, oh, over here, great. Thank you. A comment which will lead into a question. My name is Mike, I'm the artistic director of Improv Boston down the road a little bit. We've been around for about 30 years in the heart of the Boston Comedy scene and have seen the zeitgeist of what is palatable in comedy change throughout the decades before my work with Improv Boston. I was at Second City in Chicago writing, performing, teaching, directing and then somewhere along the line actually created a satirical religion that was designed to shine the light on sort of the heavy right wing cruelty and hypocrisy in the churches like Westboro Baptist, that sort of thing. All of that is to say my background leads me to see comedy as a tool as opposed to an end goal and when you're seeing comedy as a tool I think comedians generally have two considerations. One is interpretation and the other is intentionality. I think we can control our intentions but as artists we can't necessarily control the interpretation of those intentions. So we have a responsibility to be well intentioned and what I'm curious about is assuming satire is valuable to society. Assuming that comedy with positive intention behind it as a catalyst for social change or social conversation at least is important. What is then the value of offense? Is there value intrinsic value in being offended or in offending others as a means of getting a conversation going? Oh, sorry. No, no, go. I just wanted to address this with a historical example with a couple of them. So in the 1980s, the late 80s there were probably two comedians that you guys are probably familiar with, Sam Kinnison and Andrew Dice Clay and they were sort of considered shock jock comedians so they're sort of traded on being extremely offensive and they sort of crossed a line when they started to make jokes about AIDS and gay men and one joke that comes to mind is Andrew Dice Clay I think did a set in Brooklyn in the late 80s and he started off by saying something like, oh, we don't have fags here, they're all dead. So that's a very dark, I think pretty much universally offensive thing to say. And so the gay community, they didn't just sort of let themselves be ridiculed this way, they staged protests to Andrew Dice Clay's shows as well as Sam Kinnison's shows because he was doing very similar material. And so I think the use or the purpose of this type of content, I think is that it's a catalyst or a trigger for activists to point out cultural myths and sort of toxic cultural beliefs that are problematic. And so they use these, this type of goading or baiting to bring attention, to publicly bring attention to the issues like AIDS. And as we know, gay activism related to AIDS really did a lot to increase awareness and visibility and funding and policy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I think when we're asking what's the point of an offensive joke, I don't necessarily think there's a point to that for the comics career because usually it doesn't turn out very well for them, but there can be real things that happen as a consequence of that in terms of community outrage. So I think, that's a good question, like is there a need for things to be offensive? And I don't think, I think I said it up top, I don't think it's necessary, but I think you will always offend somebody if you're being true to yourself. And so two examples, like one, I'll take Dice Clay, like Sasha said, let's take Dice Clay and let's take Richard Pryor. So then you take Dice Clay. Dice Clay, in my opinion, is especially old Dice Clay is silly and not really trying to say anything besides be a little more offensive and know that he's pushing the edge, pushing the boundaries with his jokes, but it's not like he's telling you anything. He's not saying anything. He's not, nothing's gonna better you there. Mary Muffet and whatever, nothing's gonna, nothing. Richard Pryor also offended many people, but he was speaking the truth. You're offended by his words, you're offended by his life. You're offended by, maybe he said fuck too many times. I'm sorry if I can't say that, I apologize. All right, sorry, I don't know, I just slipped right out. He said the F word a bunch of times. But seriously, he said things like that and he was speaking the truth and that, again, that's a level of offense, but what kind of offense are we talking about? That's a level of offense, that word is offensive. Him talking about growing up in a brothel. Some people, and the things that he saw and him describing it and giving you a vivid picture of it, you might be like, that's offensive, I can't take that, I'm here with my mom or I'm here with my lady and she can't hear that. Those things might offend you, but then you have dice clink, it's a different type of offense. So it's hard to be like, does it need to be offensive? Yeah, for some people's truth, but I don't necessarily side with someone who's being offensive just to shock your pants off. I don't coincide with that because I feel like if your brain can create that, it can create something that isn't reckless for no reason. Maybe I could jump in, I mean, I think that everyone is offended by something. So like people who say, oh, well if you're offended by that, you're politically correct, right? They're missing the point. We could find their sore spot too. Dead baby jokes go down pretty well with some adolescents, but take them to a maternity ward that you are not gonna be admired for telling those kinds of jokes. So people's impulse to be amused is a perfectly natural one. Their impulse to be offended is also worth respecting and also, by the way, an expression of free speech, which is what I didn't like about Bill Mards. Like I think he's turning the censorship thing around and trying to belittle people who might be sensitive to one thing or another. One thing about satire though. We think of satire as being noble and progressive and undermining corrupt authority. You can use satire political character either way. Think about what the right has done to environmentalists ridiculing Al Gore, for example. Think about the Gulf War jokes that got us into the Iraq War. So you can use humor fallaciously and it can have disastrous consequences. That doesn't mean humor isn't good. I don't mean to be the skunk at the garden party. But I also think that with that example that you said, which is great, Paul, is if you take, if you took a comedian into a baby ward, okay? Maternity ward, I'm sorry, baby ward, same thing. All right, if you took into a maternity ward and you, as a professional comedian, you know, any professional comedian knows that's worth their weight at all. Knows that you're not gonna do those jokes there. So if you're gonna come to a common, you're coming to a common place where everyone's coming in and you should leave your crap at the door and you're coming into a comedy club, then it's free game. You don't, we don't know where you at earlier that day. And if you don't like it, you could walk out because you don't have to stay there. But someone would say, you can't do those jokes at all. Well, some people are gonna be laughing. If there's a majority of the room laughing and they know you're joking around and you're fooling around. I'm not saying I necessarily do those jokes, but I do defend some people who do some jokes like that, especially if they're not trying to be malicious. They're not in a baby ward, in a maternity ward, sorry. In a maternity ward. And doing those jokes, you're not in a, I don't know, you're not in a senior citizen's home and doing all these female to hide and death jokes. It might not be cool, but when you're in a different setting and you get old people that are coming to you in a neutral ground, neutral setting, you're doing what you do. So some of that has to be taken into account. And if it's on television, you can change the channel. As Michael said, change the channel. You don't have to sit there. And some people take offensive things offensively when they're not, they take things offensively when they're not directed towards them. And so no one knows what you're going through. So again, change the channel. But if you sit there and you're like, oh, you're speaking to me and this is terrible. This is all about me and it's hurting me. And that's a whole different, a whole different thing. So that's what I think about it. I wanted to make another comment. I think something to think about here that we haven't really talked about yet is sort of the relationship between humor and power. And I think that, so there's a satirist from the 19th century, I believe named Artemis Ward and he is the one credited. I don't know if you really said it, because he's the one that gets credit for saying that satire should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. So in other words, the idea of punching up or punching down with a joke, right? So you, if a person with less social power in our sort of hegemony should be, has the right or the lenience to make fun of the people above him or her. And the people at the top with the most privilege, they're gonna look sort of tacky when they're kicking the people on the ground. So I think there's, this relates a lot to what we talk about. We talk about what's offensive and to who. Oh yes, sorry, one tiny thing. I guess, I don't know if people saw Thoughts and Prayers, which was Anthony Jeselnick's most recent Netflix special, and he does talk about sort of offending offensive jokes, which is kind of his thing, you know. And I think, well I think what is interesting that he brought up is just sort of the idea of context and how important that is in a lot of these situations. And in the age of the internet and Twitter and people reading things a lot just as they are in written form, it definitely changes, it definitely can be felt offensive versus if you know a comedian, like certain comedians can say certain jokes their style, and other comedians wouldn't say those jokes, but taking out of context I think things can be a lot more offensive. So just thinking about that a little bit, I think he comments on the fact that his style is very dry and often very mean, and it's kind of funny for that reason because he takes on this persona. And you know, he's not evil, he's not actually acting on any of his evil thoughts or whatnot, but it just makes light of a lot of things that otherwise would be just completely tragic. So I think a lot of his issues were surrounding when certain terrible tragedies would happen, events like the bombing in Boston or the shooting in Aurora, he would immediately take to Twitter and tweet out something that would pretty much make fun of it or lighten the mood and obviously he got a lot of trouble for it, but I think in his situation that is his humor and people who were fans of his understood it and people who didn't know who he was, of course would be offended. So it was interesting to see sort of how that plays into it and how context is often lost today with technology, but. It's interesting too because you make me think of the 50s and 60s where you had a number of black comics crossing over the mainstream and transitioning from the Chitlin circuit with all black audiences or primarily to mass culture, so-called white dominant cultural audiences and they changed, many changed their material for fear that the Chitlin circuit type stuff would perpetuate stereotypes because people would misunderstand the contextual means and the comedian speaking to her or his group, you know, Moms Mably or Flip Wilson or someone like that, really taming their material for the mainstream audiences, but what happens with Twitter and all that, you cannot keep it a secret anymore. And I suppose, I mean, does that change the terms of sort of self representation, I suppose, in terms of a minority comedian representing him or herself for a group, even if it's a group that's part of their own minority, they know that it could easily creep out and be a- Yeah, that's a problem. Yes, well, that's a conversation. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. I'm gonna hand things over to Nick now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, let's take a look at a couple of clips. We actually have a clip of Sierra at the Lat Factory from 2013. Yeah, we'll see how that goes. We have a clip from Corey at the Gotham Comedy Club also in 2014. And let's watch those clips. I think they'll give us a lot of time. In the meantime, take a look at this beautiful view. I'm gonna watch you. Fascinated by this Bill Moore. I was at my friend's house and he has a pit bull. Whenever I go to his house, it's scary because he has a pit bull and he never locks his door because he has a pit bull. So you show up and it's just a screen door, screen at the top, metal at the bottom. I get to the door, the screen's all torn up and I get to the door and I'm looking in. I'm like, oh, and the dog's just waiting for me like... And I get to the door, I'm like, yo, come let me in. He was like, the door's open, just come in. I was like, you should just come let me in, right? And then he said to me what guys say to other guys when you want to make them feel bad. He was like, he's mad at me. He grabs the dog by the back of a collar and he's pulling her back by a collar and I could just hear her little feet hitting the floor like... And I'm trying to squeeze by the dog and he's just disrespecting me. The dog's like... And I'm like, oh, he was like, I hate when you come over. I was like, I hate when I come over too. He's like, oh. He's like, you always act like a bitch. I said, I was born like that. I didn't care. I didn't care what he was saying. I was afraid. I was afraid. We get into his living room and he let the dog go and he did something that people that owned dogs do. This is the scariest shit in the world. We get in the living room, he lets the dog go and he said, relax, relax. He just let the dog smell you. That is the most fear that I ever have, right? Because the dog never smells an area body you don't care about, right? The dog was like... He said, stop backing up, I said, I'm scared of him. He said, the dog can smell fear. I said, well, you can definitely smell his pee running out of my leg. Oh! I was at my friend's house and he has a pit bull. Whenever I go to his house, it's scary because he has a pit bull. I was at my friend's house and he has a pit bull. Whenever I go to his house, it's scary because he has a pit bull and he never locks his door because he has a pit bull. So you show up and it's just a screen door, screen at the top, metal at the bottom. I get to the door, the screen's all torn up and I get to the door and I'm looking at him, like, oh, the dog's just waiting for me. He's like, the door's open, just come in. And I get to the door, I'm like, yo, come let me in. He's like, the door's open, just come in. I was like, you should just come let me in. I was like, you should just come let me in, right? And then he said to me what guys say to other guys when you want to make them feel bad. He was like, stop backing like a little bitch and open the door. I said, I feel like a little bitch right now. I want you to come let me in. The door, like, he's mad at me. He grabs the dog by the back of her collar and he's pulling her back by her collar and I can just hear her little feet hitting the floor, like, tka tka tka tka. And I'm trying to squeeze by the dog and he's just disrespecting me. The dog's like hurr hurr hurr and I'm like, oh. He was like, I hate when you come over. I was like, I hate when I come over too. He's like, who? He's like, you always act like a bitch. I said, I was born like that. I didn't care. I didn't care what he was saying. I was afraid. I was afraid. We get into his living room and he let the dog go and he did something that people that own dogs do. This is the scariest shit in the world. We get in the living room and he let the dog go and he said, relax, relax. We just let the dog smell you. Ha. That is the most fear that I ever have, right? Because the dog never smells an area body you don't care about, right? The dog was like, he said, stop backing up. I said, I'm scared. He said, the dog can smell fear. I said, we can definitely smell this pee running down my leg. Ha. Yeah, no. And when it comes to dating, right? Because the Chinese part of me is always like, oh, Sierra, find a nice Chinese boy to date. And then the Japanese part of me is like, no, no, no. Find a nice Japanese boy to date, right? And then the American part of me is like, I don't know. They're all yellow to me. Like, yes. There's like a bajillion of you guys. You do the math. I guess I'm typically better at that. Language, I only speak English. So it's pretty weird. I'll go to like a Chinese restaurant and they're always coming at me speaking in their tongues. And I'm just like, sorry, I don't know how to blow Chinggles. They kind of judge me. Like, they think I'm a little less Asian because I don't speak Asian. It feels a little awkward. So I figured if that ever happens again, I'm just going to leave. And then drive away and crash into 17 cars and be like, who's the Asian now, bitch? They bring up all kinds of questions that I'd love to have the panelists discuss with regard to, first of all, how comedians might qualify a joke to... I suppose put it into context. I admire the way Corey used the word bitch in a way that put it into the context of men making fun of each other and demeaning each other. And so it becomes not the funny offensive use of the word bitch anymore, but all of a sudden it's about gender and men sort of maintaining or trying to maintain this kind of perfect masculine veneer. So it's just interesting how that issue was navigated around. On the other hand, with Sierra's jokes, many folks might say, might question their political correctness except for the fact that Sierra can identify with herself in making those jokes unlike, for instance, someone like Bill Maher who is not implicated at all in the jokes he's making about Caitlyn Jenner and others. So I'm just curious about the comedian's identity and how that relates to the use of potentially offensive humor on the one hand and then on the other hand, the way a comedian who, in this case, in terms of gender, the comedians in the dominant group, per se, the patriarchy, and yet the joke becomes not a joke about patriarchy, but the deconstruction of the patriarchal mold. Yeah, for a second, which prevents offensiveness and makes it more funny. Is that another conversation killer? Any questions for the audience? But any ideas on some of those issues? I mean, I don't know, I guess, from what, you know, those jokes there are kind of ones that I do say still, I think, and that was about a little over a year ago and I think now, you know, I would probably get a different response even just because things change depending on what room you're in, too. But a lot of my philosophy with some of the jokes that, you know, I like to tell, depending to my identity as an Asian-American or something like that, I think a lot of it has to do with just kind of sharing my specific story and a lot of, you know, how I was raised, like I'm fourth generation, so I'm really, I'm really Americanized, but also kind of have this, you know, relationship with my Asian-American identity and then also I would consider I'm just American as well, you know. It's very complicated, I guess, and I like complicating certain things with comedy, which is very important, and, you know, now even, I mean, even like the driving stereotype joke at the end, like I don't know if that's a little too tired now, maybe I wouldn't say that. Now, you know, things change, so it's interesting kind of to see that. Well, the difference between your saying and Bill Maher saying, is he made the same joke? Okay, yeah, true, there's that. And maybe it wasn't as funny without a fissure. Sure, I mean, yeah, it goes back to context a lot, so I think I do have more liberties as looking like this, for instance, it's to make jokes about being Asian and sort of I feel more responsible as to like, okay, so what do I do with that? Those liberties, I want to use them in the right way. I don't want to just make it so that, I guess, those in power are laughing and those who aren't aren't, right? In regards to Corey's standup, what I liked about it, it crossed over two things. First of all, he talked about it from within the group as a black man and dogs and all that, but also he talked about it as something that's relatable to everybody, to every male, certainly, and to women too, I'm sure, that a dog comes over and smells your crotch. So we can relate to it in both those ways from within your perspective and also from all of our perspectives as well, which I thought was a really good bit, and based on truth as well. I think, let me say this again, what Sierra is saying too, because this is funny, I have to say this is a black median from Boston. You find, coming up in this scene, it was always like a lot of the comedy club bookers would say things like, you know, if you're black they'll be like, oh man, I'll try to do too much black stuff tonight. It's crazy, this is like a comedy scene here. Sorry if this hurts your feelings at all, but this is what they say. They'll be like, God, I don't do too much black stuff tonight, or they'll give me a backwards praise, backhanded praise, or say stuff like, sorry, I'm just getting loose now. They'll say stuff like, oh man, I really like your rack because it's colorless. You don't know what color you are and stuff like that. And the crazy thing is part of you, when you don't know when you're first starting out, it's right baby. I can't do anything, it's colorless, there's no race involved. But as I've been doing it longer and going to more places and things like that, it's kind of like that offends me a little bit more than it did initially. Because initially it's like praise from the people that are running the business. They're giving me praise like, hey man, it doesn't matter what color you are, we want to get you in here. And then I remember I was at one particular club that pertained to my race and she was like, the booker's wife was like, oh you weren't doing things like that before, it was just different. I did one joke that I had to do with race and I'm like, I just did all this other time that nothing to do with race. And so now I say what I want to say, when I'm going to say, how I'm going to say, but at the same time I'm aware of where I'm at, like being on the maternity ward. I know I'm in Boston if I'm doing stand up in Boston for particular people at a particular club. I know, so as a professional you still can dance around it and still do what you want to do and please both sides there. That's something that I wouldn't have to do if I was in an all black room per se but then there's jokes that are more mainstream which I look like a sellout more if I do and I'm in an all black room and they're like, what are you doing that white stuff here? I don't want to hear that. So it's a fine line, and then the way I speak, that doesn't help, college grad, I talk like this, they're like, you're talking like a white dude, man. So it's like I got to do certain things I have to do when I do my jokes and animations and different things that I have to do that have actually, to be honest with you, helped me that seem like it should be a burden. They've actually been more helpful in shaping learning stand up comedy so I know there's going to be some comedy majors that are in here and it's just a lot of, everybody has a different road but that's just part of the road that I went down, that's one of the things. It's the worst when you have family come see you and they're like upset you're not like Richard Pryor I'm like, no, I've been doing it as long as Richard. Like your first year or second year in and like, man you got a long way to go, it's like that's why I didn't want you to come because of this reason I don't need to hear this you know? I'm sorry, I don't have a whole life story of stuff to talk to you about, you know, whatever but things have gotten a lot better but those are just early, early things that happened but I was kind of speaking, trying to speak to what Sierra was saying, just being and speaking of what you were saying Ken, yes obviously a black guy delivering jokes about minorities or race is a lot easier than a white guy and you'll notice in the comedy club, if you've been to a comedy club lately what happens is a white guy makes a racist joke or anything on a borderline usually the crowd will clam up because they'll just be like, ooh, we don't know we should have that and he's like, what am I at a meeting? That's always his go to I feel like I'm at a meeting and then people will kind of loosen up and try to save themselves and then they go from there but so I don't know if that's political correctness when they do that sometimes it bothers me when they make a really funny borderline racial joke and the white guy is like, whoop, not going to say anything because I see one black person in the room they get like, hey, but sometimes the joke is really funny I wonder if I could jump in we haven't really gotten to one of the key questions here which is what kind of a place is a college campus right, so it's not is it more like a maternity ward? is it more like a comedy club? like if you're a student at a college and you go to a comedy night on your campus and professional comics come in is it okay if they tell jokes is it okay if they do like how uncomfortable shouldn't you be tactful as a professional comedian going into that place too and think what's my audience, what can they take what should they take? you have to be as tactful as the advisor is asking you to be so when you show up at some of these schools the advisor will say to me, these are adults they're 18 plus all in this room right now they're like let loose, whatever they're going to hear they watch worse stuff on the internet, have fun right, seriously, here's your check have fun, do what you're going to do I'll go to other places and they're like listen we had some bad things happen on campus don't bring up fires and don't bring up rape we'll go to another campus they'll say, you know don't talk about the president I went to one school, this is the president I went to one school and they were like I was in upstate New York and they were like listen we've been having a lot of racial things on campus lately so just giving you a heads up it's mostly white here a couple of black kids have really gotten into it with some of them and they're getting into it with the president and I'm about to go perform and I'm like, ah, alright alright, so there's always these weird things that are going to happen so they give you your maternity ward stipulations or guidelines and then you kind of take it from there so what did you do after they told you just before you were going to go on about that so she was telling me not to touch it but as any other comedian would do, that's exactly what I went for because I know where the heat is at I know where it's hot you start getting confidence in what you're able to do my ability is to make people laugh that's what I do, my ability is to help people laugh make them laugh, whatever so I attacked it after a couple minutes of breaking the ice I just went right to it she said there was protest that day but when I got there she was like, so the heat is on so in my head I'm like, man they want to loosen up a little bit so I just attacked it I attacked the fact that I was black and I was there, why they brought me in I was like, they brought me in for peace you know what I mean I started quoting Martin Luther King stuff but it was funny they all started laughing, they loosened up I got them to sit at tables together, whatever like a big thing in the 60s or whatever I had the temptations to just fix everything break down the lines but you guys are going to watch that movie it was that's what happened, it was good though it ended up being funny one thing just to answer my own question about college campuses I wish that college campuses would focus on free speech not just in connection with comedy when it comes up in this way I wish every college had a month where they call it free speech month and invite a lecture series where people come in and they talk against the dominant thinking on the campus maybe whatever that is at BC it would be kind of Catholic practice and I'd love to see programs that were assailing religion and so on and here maybe it would be about the role of the entertainment industry as a negative force just to go against the dominant but saying that doesn't mean it happens we believe in free speech when someone tells an offensive joke but we don't actually believe in it when we are assailing dominant ideology I just want to put in a quick reminder there are minutes left streamers can send their questions in at comedy at emerson.edu and we'd love to take some more questions from the audience we have a few people hi there my name is Nick Fossman I am a comedy minor here at Emerson and a quick story which will lead into a question when I entered middle school I was a teacher for a band class and he actually had muscular dystrophy and he was confined to a wheelchair and at first pretty much the whole class we didn't know what to do we were just nervous we didn't know what to say or how to break the ice to address the elephant in the room and he pretty much started cracking away at jokes about being a wheelchair and stuff like that because no matter what the position is for the person who's telling the joke whether they're in a wheelchair or if they're a different race, a different sex usually if they tell a joke regarding themselves the audience will probably respond with laughter but if someone else did it there would be a lot of groans and a lot of disdain so my question is is the person who's telling the joke are they being racist, sexist or is it the audience's fault are they acting as a way of hypocrisy in a way whether they'll laugh at a racial joke if that person is of that race they're joking about or if they're not laughing about it so I don't know if it's whether the audience is hypocrisy or the person on the stage I think Sierra and I are the only different races up here so I think we should answer that I don't think I don't know what the if they're being hypocrites and not by laughing at it I think it just makes people more comfortable I think at a certain point I think we will move all of the crap away from it and it's just what it is I mean people get more comfortable when they know that you're more comfortable with yourself if you see somebody got a big mole on their face and you're talking to them in regular conversation and you're like oh my god that mole but if the person's like it's alright I know you're looking at the mole on my face it's there I'm gonna get it removed soon you relax and you can talk to them you can like chill out and you can talk to them and you can have a regular conversation well it's the same thing I mean like I said I deal with it on a regular basis doing work in country clubs and Elks lodges and comedy clubs and a lot of times I'm the only black guy in the room that's just where I live this is where we live so yeah I might bring it up because it's on their mind anyways they're looking at me and there's things that they want to say or joke is right on the line somewhere and you know where their brain is thinking so I might just say it and then people can be like oh okay I don't have to worry it's not like a politically correct comedian where I have to worry that if I laugh at that or if I said that it just puts people at ease so I don't know if they're being hypocrites or they're just actually relaxing as people and being accepted and I feel like that laugh conversation is great because they're like okay you accept us for laughing at this we accept you for being who you are and let's play yeah I mean that's one of the things that I really like about comedy is that it's like very connecting and you can really immediately connect with people you've never met before and that's cool but I think you know one of the things for sure is that even as a comic from like a certain race or whatever identity like I can't speak for everyone who's Asian I can't speak for everyone so it's like I definitely understand that I've said jokes and then other Asian American people in the audience or other like women in the audience depending on what my joke's about like would be like hey like that's annoying you said that or like that's not a good thing to say and I take responsibility for that I think what's interesting is a lot of the like tightness that happens when people are like I don't know if I should laugh or not it's probably out of courtesy sometimes you know like people don't know oh is it okay for me to laugh like I don't have the background I don't think I have the background that it takes to fully understand if this is funny or not or whatever like I don't want to presume and so when somebody is up there who appears like they have the entire background and they've lived through things where they can now be on the other side and make fun of it then I think it gives the audience and sort of like oh okay well then I can trust this person so now I feel like I can probably laugh I just like didn't know before versus if there's someone who doesn't appear like they have the background or knowledge to make that joke like it can be very strange so I mean there you know there's a total gray area I think but I think at a certain point you know there should be some sort of like trust in laughter and like trusting the person who's saying that's funny to them so you know it should be funny to everyone and I think yeah I mean there's a lot of like education and comedy too so I think like that's funny and it's my unique experience as somebody who's different from someone in the audience like hopefully they can then see through my eyes and be like oh yeah that is funny from that angle so I'm going to laugh at this too so yeah can I say one more thing about that though so like what that specifically is I have to say this I don't I try not to early okay let me go back early on when you're doing this you address it very easily like you might make fun of yourself or make fun of your race very easily because you're in front of maybe a lot of people that don't look like you right and so you say jokes that even Sierra said she was like well I wouldn't say that car joke now it's kind of tired I would well because you kind of grow up and you get more confidence and you're like I don't really feel like that I wouldn't really crash into those cars I just said it because they think that's a perception of me or that's the perception I think they have of me and I think they're going to laugh at that and I don't I outgrew that that buffoonery like make in front of like oh I'm late I'm black right like just that like stupid perceptions that you have and you just say it because you think someone else is going to think it's funny I think that happens I think it must happen with writers it happens with anybody early in comedy you're just on the surface so you'll say that stuff but as you get into it more like Sierra watched that clip and she was like I wouldn't say that like there's plenty of things that I've said before that I would not say because you know you get uncomfortable when you're in front of your own like she'd be uncomfortable in front of other Asians doing certain jokes that she's like putting them down when she doesn't really believe that I'd feel uncomfortable saying certain jokes I used to in front of a black audience that I wouldn't say that in front of them you know you're saying it because you know white people are going to laugh at it or anybody who's non black is going to laugh at it but it's not you don't want to put people down so that kind of addresses more your question early on I was it was more shady in what you were saying is you're trying to get a laugh with no substance but when you flip it and you start saying something while you're saying that it's different why are you making one of those comments like make fun of it after the fact like oh I crashed into those cars and then for her to like clean it up after and be like you guys probably think I really did crash I'm actually an excellent driver like clean it up after you know and make yourself feel good but still get that laugh but still let them know no I'm not going to crash you know I'm just fine so I'd like to make a comment addressing your question and also bringing you back to situation comedy in terms of the audience being prepared for certain things when Ellen had her special show that she came out it was an hour long show it was a really really brilliant show it got a huge rating and then they started to address lesbian topics on that show and ratings went down down down and the show was eventually canceled America wasn't ready for the specifics at that point at that time in history when Will and Grace came on the air it took two or three years of it being a hit show before they had a boyfriend for Will it pissed me off so much that I just stopped watching the show but they were very smart and they learned from Ellen because they let the audience get comfortable with the characters with these out gay men to the point where they like them and then they began to start and have relationships for Will and at that point the audience was ready for it so I think the preparation and knowing where the audience is in time and space is something to be aware of when you're doing a show do other things all over the place right on the end my name is Joe Madoff I'm a I'm a student here I wouldn't really call myself a comedian but sometimes I get on stage and say things and sometimes people laugh it's pretty cool when they do and I going back to the college climate kind of setting in terms of political correctness I do comedy on campus, I do it off campus I've worked at comedy clubs I've seen like here especially people tell unpolitically correct jokes that have not gone well I've seen off that do great and what I one of my main criticisms of the PC movement is that I think it's very kind of self centered it doesn't really acknowledge that there's a world that's not college educated that it's kind of not very young that there's more real America all that type of stuff and one of say we get to the point where yes, political correctness does kind of take over it's sort of we get to the point where it's almost all politically correct or that kind of case someone brought up Lenny Bruce earlier are we just setting ourselves up for another Lenny Bruce scenario for someone to just come along and ruin the suit and tie bob new hearts of the world or no I think we're in a particular cultural moment right now of what some people would call heightened sensitivity and I don't it's really sort of hard to predict the sort of course of to take the temperature of the culture and predict what's going to happen I'm not sitting here panicked that that PC censorship is going to take over and no one's going to be able to say anything ever again I just I don't think I think that's sort of alarmist it's just going to it might what might be the case is that the college atmosphere may not be the site where really innovative comedy is happening that that might be the clubs that might be something else it's certainly the the the PC thing could affect what happens on campus in that respect but I also don't think that historically universities have been the greatest incubators of cutting-edge comedy per se I think that's mostly happened in clubs anyway so it's not that different right now and I just think we're going to see it continue to evolve one other comment about that we see non-PC all the time my students and I are and mostly on cable my students and I are watching Broad City and Silicon Valley and Veep and Louie and all those shows which are certainly not PC in any way so you all on college campus are exposed to that so I don't think that we're ever going to eliminate you know worry about that situation because you see it it would bring up such an interesting issue which is that those shows are appealing to local supporters of PC as well as critics of PC along with South Park and Family Guy and even all of the family I think back in the 70s it had a kind of split reception does anyone have any ideas about why those programs both seemingly irreconcilable sides of it? Well I think in terms of all of the family and even shows today there are people that criticize Archie Bunker as adding to bigotry because he was making it sound good because he was so funny so there's a certain amount of people who are bigots and who are not going to be changed by that one way or the other there's another group of people who recognize that Archie was being ridiculous, idiotic and it's satirized being a bigot and those people will laugh at Archie Bunker or something that's going on you know, Broad City or one of the other shows today and then there's a third group who might learn something and might change and might be more malleable it's almost like politics you've got republicans, you've got democrats and you've got independents and it's which way are the independents going to go I hope democratic Did anyone want to with this as we should start wrapping up any kind of closing thoughts on some of these Well, maybe just this notion that the PC apocalypse is coming when censorship reigns, I think this is extremely unlikely of all the apocalypses which seem to be heading towards us I'm voting for the zombie apocalypse climate apocalypse and of course well I won't even say but I really folks don't get too worked up about this issue it's not that major it's not so bad to wear a suit anyway if you were coming sorry no, no, you didn't anyone else? well folks, thank you so much for attending and the streamers thank you for watching and by all means wow, I learned so much panelists, thank you so much Michael Lohman Corey Rodriguez Sasha Cone, Paul Loisier thank you so much for participating