The left killed comedy.

There’s a scene in The Madison where a little girl corrects a man for calling their dinner, Indian tacos. She chirped that it was too offensive. Can’t say that. It’s racist. He just stares at her like she’s grown a second head, which honestly, is the correct response.

I laughed, and then I felt a little sad. They made a strong point about the silliness of these millennials and their children throughout the episode but it deep down makes me sick for our kids.

The irony at the end was that the little girl met the lady who made the tacos and she was actually an Indian. It embarrassed her when she realized. The whole scene with Michelle Phifer was brilliant. She even called her grand daughter a sheltered whiny brat. That scene isn’t some clever joke, it’s a typical day in our lives now. It’s a Tuesday.

We used to be a funny country. A loud, irreverent, self-deprecating, ‘ribbing each other at the dinner table’ kind of funny. The kind of funny that required you to actually know someone to love them a little before you went in on them. That was the whole point!!! The joke was proof of the relationship!!

The left didn’t just take the joke. They took the relationships from us.

Now everything is a an insult. Everything is a micro aggression waiting to be documented and submitted to HR. You can’t call food by the name it’s been called for fifty years. You can’t do an impression. You can’t tell a story about your own family without someone in the comments explaining why your grandmother was problematic.

Comedy requires risk. It requires the possibility of offense. That’s what makes it work. When you strip all the risk out of humor, you don’t get kindness… you get nothing. You get a very long silence where the laughter used to be.

My daughter has a best friend. She’s Mexican. My daughter is white. And the two of them go at each other in a way that makes me genuinely cry laughing sometimes cracking jokes about burritos and mayonnaise and Herbie and whatever else they’ve decided is fair game that week. It is relentless. It is affectionate. It is one of the most purely human things I’ve ever witnessed.
You know what it’s called? Friendship.

But it also scares me, bc if they said it in the wrong company there could be real consequences.
The left would like to have a conversation with both of them about internalized racism.

The thing they don’t understand is that the joke is the intimacy. The willingness to tease is the trust. You don’t roast someone you don’t love. You don’t let someone roast you unless you feel safe.
When you make that illegal, you don’t make people kinder. You make them strangers.

There’s a reason every great comedian from the last thirty years has a special where they complain about the audience now. Dave Chappelle. Chris Rock. Jerry Seinfeld literally gave a commencement speech about it. These are not right-wing firebrands. These are guys who loved comedy and watched a generation decide comedy was dangerous.

And the Democratic Party, bless their humorless hearts, has become the institutional home of that generation.
They’re not trying to protect people. If they were, they’d be a lot more worried about the things actually hurting people. This is about control. Controlling language controls thought. And nothing threatens controlled thought like a really good joke, the kind that cuts through the nonsense and makes everyone in the room go yeah, okay, that’s true.
Truth is funny. The left hates both.

I’m not saying anything goes. I’m not defending cruelty dressed up as comedy. There’s a difference between a joke that punches down on someone and two kids who love each other taking turns being ridiculous about the fact that they come from different worlds.

One of those is mean. One of those is the whole point of America.

We used to know the difference. We’re going to have to remember it because the people who claimed to be protecting us from the mean jokes have made it impossible to tell any jokes at all. And that’s not a safer world. That’s just a sadder one. Just had to let that out. Thanks for listening.

Xoxo- Jenny

“Every joke is a tiny revolution.” – George Orwell