 This is where the sharpest ideas are forged. And some wonky ones, too. It's our New Year's episode, so amid all the merry-making, I'll be the party pooper, because today we will discuss who's allowed to joke about what. A few years ago, people complained about political correctness. Today the call is on cancel culture. It sometimes goes as far as show business billionaires complaining about how they just can't say things anymore, because women, or trans people, or abuse survivors, sometimes even homeless folks and other tyrants just won't know how to take a joke. I grew up with a lot of white friends, but all my white friends had one non-white friend. Thank you for your service. I don't know, I think comedy suffers when you only have one type of perspective, you know what I mean? Migration is part of the human condition. Everybody is a migrant, which is objectively not true. Comedy, as a genre, is probably the most honest way of portraying what our current societal values are. What is yellow and plays the guitar? John Lemon? Yeah, that was stupid. See, proof that even in academia... When somebody you feel like are going too far, what is the line for you that you wouldn't want to tolerate or wouldn't necessarily prefer having on your stage? To be honest, I, as a matter of policy at the comedy pub, don't want to ever tell anybody what they can joke about or not. Because stand-up comedy is a very direct art form. You do a joke, it's either funny or it's not, and you get instant feedback from the audience. I think a lot of the time you have to actually one-know something about that background that's not just a shallow surface-level understanding of their identity. Because I feel like a lot of the time the tension is broken when you make a joke that could potentially be offensive when it's actually smart. People don't get mad about offensive jokes when they're funny. That's the truth. People don't get mad about offensive jokes if they're smart and well-written. Funny is like a moving goalpost and then there's an element of witty that we expect in a joke to have a bit more of a depth, not necessarily deep in this dramatic sense, but have a bit of a nuance that we recognize, have an edge. And the punchline, I would hope that the punchline we expect today would go beyond it turns out they were gay or something like this. Humor changes, but in general, the culture repertoire that people have changes and it changes very quickly. I don't think anyone has tried to sort of cancel Eddie Murphy for that, right? So it's like, okay, it's something that you thought was funny at the time. We don't do that anymore, but we have to renegotiate the present. How do we treat certain texts from the past that we still read which contain offensive words? Like Shakespeare specifically about Jews and women. You can't change the past. You can't change what people wrote at the time. Of course, you can recontextualize it, but you cannot and you should not sort of try and change this and make it sort of digestible for the present. Because it's, you know, at least as an historian, I would say, you know, you shouldn't temper with your sources. I never thought I was a Karen, which is not... Great way to start a sentence. You can be named Karen. You just should not be a Karen. Karen is just a state of mind. It's a vibe.