Comedy Dies in Woke Darkness “Free men have free tongues.” by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/comedy-dies-in-woke-darkness/
Last week four stand-up comedians were disinvited from a comedy club in Seattle, right around the corner from the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” or CHAZ, a glorified squatters’ camp created by antifa and BLM “peaceful” rioters during the 2020 “summer of love.” The four comedians fell afoul of neighborhood wokesters who complained to the club’s management in order to “ensure the programming stayed aligned with the socially diligent enclave’s ethos.”
Such stories have become so frequent that many people just shrug off the seriousness of their implications. But comedy is not just a type of entertainment, or a matter of taste. Comedy is much more than that: it is a critical part of the political institutions in governments in which citizens are free to speak publicly, and have the right to hold their leaders accountable to the people and, in the U.S., the Constitution.
Censorship, “cancel culture,” speech codes––in short, punishing the speech that one faction strives to silence for political gain–– all strike at the heart of our freedom and unalienable rights. Indeed, from the time decades ago that the “politically correct” Nurse Ratched feminists started scolding “sexist” jokes by saying, “That’s not funny!”, the woke have insidiously intensified their war on humor and the First Amendment.
The political heritage of comedy arose with the creation of constitutional rule by citizens in the ancient Greek poleis, particularly in Athens where citizenship was extended to the non-elites as well as to the rich and noble. This epochal development required extensive adjustments to the old order of aristocrats for whom ruling the state was a birthright, what Pindar, the celebrator of aristocrat achievements in the Panhellenic games, called the “splendor in the blood,” the inherited superiority of talent, charisma, wisdom, and character needed to be leaders of men.
But enrolling citizens without rank or wealth created a much more complex and diverse polity. The old elites were relatively homogenous in terms of wealth, manners, and education. Elite critics of the Athenian “poor,” as they were often called, like Plato or the earlier poet Theognis (6th century B.C.) have left a copious catalog of antidemocratic insults and complaints about the Athenian dêmos or “common people,” which provided the foundation for the subsequent 25 centuries of antidemocratic criticisms against politically empowering the masses.
Theognis, for example, wrote that “those [common people] who before knew nothing of lawsuits, nothing of laws,/who lived on the range, far out from the town, like wild deer/these are now the Great Men . . . . Our former nobles/are Rabble now.” And unlike the cultured elite, have no virtue or innate wisdom, but “only one virtue:/Money.”
Another critic known as the “Old Oligarch” later targeted the idea of political equality for citizens. Hence the Athenians, he wrote, “have chosen to let the worst people be better off than the good,” and “they have everywhere assigned more to the worst persons, the poor, and to the popular types than to the good men.” Among the common people “there is the maximum of ignorance, disorder and wickedness.”
Given this elite disdain for the majority of citizens and the notion of any sort of equality, several principles and institutions developed to level the political playing field. All magistrates, for example, at the end of their one-year terms, had to make an “accounting” of his actions, including money spent, to a board of citizens. Also, any citizen could accuse a magistrate of abusing his power, and if his accuser was convincing, the unlucky magistrate could face a trial, with several hundred citizens acting as judge and jury––and with the possible penalty of exile or even execution.
The most critical means for holding power accountable, however, was free speech, the ability of any citizen in good standing to address the state’s officials and assemblies without fear of punishment, no matter how uneducated or ill-mannered he may be, and to be treated the same before the law. The early 4th century orator Demosthenes wrote, “As every man has an equal share in the constitution generally, so this statute [equality under law] asserts an equal share in the law.”
Another important tool for enforcing political equality and accountability to the citizens was theatrical comedies. These productions were part of a religious festival, attendance at which was a right of citizens as important politically as voting. Given the wide variety of education and economic class, there were few restrictions on the content and language.
The favorite targets of comedy were politicians, orators, military leaders, or anyone who became prominent and thus prone to hubris. To remind them that they were no better than any other citizen, they were ridiculed and insulted by name in comedies attended by thousands of their fellow citizens, and subjected to vicious slanders and accusations of corruption, usually of an obscene nature.
Scatological jokes and gags were also common, as were brutal homosexual slurs. Apart from making people laugh, this obscenity underscored an important foundation of the radical democracy: no man, no matter his wealth, birth, or success, was free from the passions, vices, appetites, and moral failures that define all humans, and often lead to tyrannical excess.
Finally, the tradition of free and open speech protected comic poets from any attempts to silence or censor them. The 5th century powerful demagogue Cleon, a favorite target for Aristophanes during the Peloponnesian War, after one of the poet’s particularly brutal and slanderous plays, demanded that the Council silence him.
But they refused, honoring the traditional political role that comedy and its obscene personal attacks played in criticizing men with power and checking their ambitions to aggrandize more at the expense of their fellow citizens. Aristophanes, by the way, followed up his free-speech victory by writing yet another play making vicious fun of Cleon, and gloating over his failure to shut him up.
Over the last 50 years, in America comedy has been subject to more and more restrictions far more pernicious than the quaint, pre-Sixties proscription of sexual subject matter and vulgar language. The rise of identity politics––a classification system that assigns privileges to some citizens based both on the accident of ethnicity or sex, and on the sufferings of their ancestors––has created a whole class of citizens whose feelings and sensibilities must be obsessed over and catered to, mainly by silencing and shaming their critics.
Add these restraints to the general therapeutic bent of our culture––the notion that being made to feel bad or insulted is a crime that needs punishment––which exacerbates the perceived injuries to the hyper-sensitive “snowflakes.” Whether sincere or a tactic for aggrandizing more power and influence, today the standard of the irrationally sensitive must be followed by everybody, even at the expense of our First Amendment rights.
These conditions are obviously deadly for free speech, especially comedy. Transgressors are canceled, like the four comedians in Seattle, or programmed to censor themselves. What the ACLU, once a champion of free speech, used to call the “chilling has effect” has spread wider and wider.
Given the dysfunctions in our technocratic, relentlessly hardening “soft despotism,” we need the freedom to address those problems as we see fit, and to use the power of laughter to puncture the arrogant pretensions of those assaulting our unalienable rights and freedoms.
Sophocles once said, “Free men have free tongues.” We need more comedy and satire, more laughter and scorn, more mockery and ridicule of the pompous, self-righteos scolds, and push back against our crisis of political accountability, inequality under law, and usurpation of power by the “woke” commissars. That’s how we’ll keep our Republic.
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