Is the Anti-Woke Backlash upon Us?

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, May 23, 2024

 

If you’re an avid news consumer, perhaps you heard of the university professor who was threatened with discipline because he said his exam was structured like a “Chinese restaurant menu.” Or the professor who said he was made to walk across campus holding hands with another man as part of his “gay sensitivity training.” Or the UC Berkeley professor who claimed the story of Little Red Riding Hood is sexist, arguing it had been rewritten by men who wanted to portray the protagonist as “a weak little thing who had to be rescued.”

 

But it’s also possible you missed these stories because none of them happened during the recent “woke” era in educational institutions across America. In fact, they all happened between 1989 and 1991, during the era of “political correctness,” the precursor to woke.

 

Perhaps today’s culture of “check your privilege” and “bias response teams” has outdone the late 1980s in sheer obnoxiousness. Or maybe today just seems worse because everyone is carrying a personal TV station in their pocket that broadcasts every last woke absurdity in real time.

 

But virulent leftism certainly existed in the days of PC, complete with speech codes and diversity mandates. And you know what students did?

 

They revolted.

 

Tired of political correctness (the term was wielded by conservatives at the time in virtually the same way “wokeness” is now), young people orchestrated a backlash to the vampiric scolds sucking the life from their college experiences.

 

At the tail end of the 1980s, hair metal bands preached overindulgence in alcohol, sex, and Aqua Net. Anti-PC comedians like Andrew Dice Clay began selling out arenas. As America moved into the 1990s, crass films by goofballs like Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey became money-making machines. Beavis and Butthead rode a wave of cultural crudeness to become classic cartoon characters. (Hollywood even made PCU, a crappy film satirizing PC campus culture, the less of which is said the better. But they tried!)

 

Sure, there isn’t a grand era of glorious stupidity upon us just yet, but there are green shoots indicating that Americans want to get back to having fun.

 

Take the recent Netflix roast of former NFL great Tom Brady, which featured brutal jokes that would get any of the presenters thrown out of a faculty lounge at any elite college in America. For three hours, athletes and comedians volleyed tasteless jokes about sexual preference, race, and head trauma.

 

Of course, nothing is funnier than the stuff you’re not supposed to laugh at, which is why the scolds showed up in force. Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins, who seemingly just discovered what a “roast” is, derided the broadcast as a “vulgarian parade.” She condemned the jokes about Brady’s wife leaving him as “misogynistic” and provided a lesson on the history of comedy, noting that it was “invented” by the ancient Greeks. (This would be news to any farting caveman, who undoubtedly kept his clan rolling with laughter.)

 

In fact, if there is a new era of irreverent fun on the horizon, Netflix is leading the charge. In 2022, after a group of Netflix employees walked out to protest a comedy special by Dave Chappelle, the company issued a memo telling its workers that, if they are offended by the streaming service’s offerings, they can leave. After a brief dip that year, the company’s stock is now as strong as it has ever been, demonstrating that standing up to the mob has a financial benefit.

 

In a time when hardly any comedy movies are being made, Netflix also green-lit a silly Jerry Seinfeld flick about the history of Pop-Tarts, signaling the return of full-length feature comedies. (It’s only a so-so movie, but hey, you have to start somewhere.) During the press tour for Unfrosted, Seinfeld complained that the extreme Left was killing comedy, with wokeism making certain topics off-limits. Like clockwork, he was dragged by those same people, hilariously screaming that Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t know anything about comedy.

 

Even revered progressive institutions like Saturday Night Live are beginning to realize that comedy should be fun and not just a platform for liberal snark. Earlier this season, the show featured guest host Shane Gillis, who was famously hired a few years ago as a cast member but fired within days after some unfortunate jokes he’d made about Asians and gays came to light. Gillis isn’t strictly a “right-wing” comedian, but he enrages the Left, delving into topics the comedy gatekeepers have long decided are off-limits.

 

Recently, SNL opened the show with a sketch about the anti-Israel, pro-Palestine protests happening at Columbia University and around the county. The show’s progressive viewers were likely salivating, ready for the show to savage the “right-wingers” supporting Jews’ right to exist.

 

But the show zagged, instead making fun of the schools and protesters themselves. The sketch featured longtime cast member Kenan Thompson as a dad complaining that his tuition money was being spent on the radicalization of his daughter, saying she “better have her butt in class.”

 

“I am supporting of y’all’s kids protesting, not my kids,” he says. Thompson’s fed-up father decries all the jobs he has to work to pay Columbia’s $68,000 per year tuition just so his daughter can get a degree in African-American History. “It’s like, little girl, you been black your whole life. You know what it is.”

 

You can guess what happened then. The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips declared the sketch an example of how it is “a lousy time for political satire.” Esther Zuckerman at the Atlantic wrote that the sketch “completely missed the point” of the protests, instead saying she preferred guest host Ramy Youssef’s request to “Please free the people of Palestine, please” from his monologue a few weeks earlier.

 

High comedy, that.

 

Contra Phillips, SNL’s slow about-face is actually evidence that satire is alive and well. It is just that people refuse to acknowledge satire as legitimate when it is their chicken being devoured.

 

But SNL legend Maya Rudolph still thinks the show lacks the freewheeling style it once had. “I don’t think I would be creating the things I created on Saturday Night Live if I worked there today, because [of the] scrutiny,” Rudolph said in a recent interview with Apple Music 1.

 

“I feel like people want to take a sound bite and create problems, and that’s become a business,” she said. “It’s so ugly and it’s so not at all my life. It has nothing to do with me. So it just makes you shy away from wanting to put yourself out there.”

 

Perhaps the most welcome by-product of the revival of fun is the shrinking effect of “cancel culture.” After years of political activists trying to serve as America’s human-resources department, it seems we have all tired of loudmouths claiming a scalp by getting people fired for something they said.

 

Recently, progressives have barely been able to muster the effort needed to cancel Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker after a graduation speech at a Catholic college in which he suggested women might be happier in traditional roles. Sure, feminists and their ilk have kicked up some dust (including the NFL speaking out against him), but their claims about what he said are wildly overblown, and ultimately, Butker isn’t going anywhere.

 

Of course, there are liberals who have routinely denied that cancel culture ever existed, pointing to famous people who are now back in their jobs after merely taking a little time off. But it seems the idea of cancel culture may have come and gone without anyone ever engaging in an honest discussion of what it was. It wasn’t just that famous, powerful people suffered through a hiccup in their career, only to ride their name ID to a comeback. It was that ordinary people with no such recourse got thrown out of their jobs and had their reputations ruined for imagined transgressions.

 

Hopefully, as was the case in the early 1990s, American culture is on the rebound toward sanity. If history is an echo, we will all rediscover that the only way for us all to truly get along is to laugh at the same crass nonsense. As it has in the past, America should reject oppressive idiocy and go back to having stupid fun.