Said Jennifer Flanz, executive producer and showrunner of “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” quoted in "In closed-door meetings at MTV, creators are grappling with how to make entertainment more responsible/An inside look at an ambitious plan that has writers working with mental-health professionals" (WaPo).
Would calling someone “crazy” or “unhinged” contribute to the kind of stigmas that makes people afraid to seek help?...
“It’s definitely OK to find humor in the challenging experiences people face,” [said Meredith Goldberg-Morse, senior manager of social impact at MTV Entertainment Group]. “But when you’re doing that, it’s important to be mindful of not sending the message that the person managing the condition is the punchline of the joke.”
Notice that there are 2 different phenomena under discussion here: 1. Actual mental health conditions, and 2. The use of mental-health language to insult or mock. These 2 things are interrelated, because caring about people with actual mental health conditions seems to be the main reason to think you ought to refrain from using mental-health language to insult or mock.
I can think of some other reasons: 1. It's stale and unimaginative to just call the people you don't agree with "crazy." 2. It's inaccurate (you're not diagnosing a disorder). 3. It's a way to avoid making specific and substantive arguments. 4. It's hypocritical (because you yourself sound crazy when you endlessly call other people crazy). 5. It's part of the problem of winding people up about everything (which is why I stopped watching "The Daily Show" years ago).
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Owen writes:
"I think this will turn out really well: not. And in fact the preoccupation with policing vocabulary, turning it into pablum to avoid giving offense —more precisely, to avoid giving some professional whinger an excuse for taking offense— is IMHO not a healthy part of “doing comedy” but a symptom that comedy is dying.
"Why? Because comedy is about breaking things —conventions, expectations, the ground and frame of reality itself. It is about shock and surprise. What is a punch line but the moment where the audience, that has been willingly led down the garden path of the set-up, suddenly gets a face full of custard pie? The ability to provoke with a joke (but only so far: witty but not cruel, wacky but not incoherent), to poke fun (such a violent term!), to flirt with the absurd, is what we pay for. If these idiots succeed in muffling the punch with all this PC swaddling, they will destroy the enterprise entirely. We will watch them mince carefully from one approved euphemism to another, and after about 5 minutes we will change the channel and not come back."
Owen's comment makes me think of something Ricky Gervais said in his comedy special "Humanity" (which I re-watched the other day): Ricky learned comedy from his older brother Bob, who laid down the rule: "If you think of it and it's funny, you have to say it."
Lloyd writes:
"There used to be a sense that sober, sensible people might look at anyone who was a bit too partisan or ideological as "crazy." Post-WW II, the left probably succeeded in making sure the guns were generally pointed to the right. The right might respond by being proudly non-intellectual or anti-intellectual. A Bob Hope joke: "Gary Hart dropped out of the presidential race, but how he says he is running again." (Yes, I date myself with my stories). "He says he has new ideas. Wasn't it 'getting ideas' that got him in trouble in the first place?" Any kind of "getting ideas" is potentially bad, gets you in trouble, etc. Today there is more of a sense that you have to pick an ideology, crazy or not."
I remember Ross Perot leaning into the "crazy" insult by dancing (with his wife) to the Patsy Cline recording of "Crazy."
Maybe the song "Crazy" will become politically incorrect.
I like this info from the Wikipedia article about the song:
"According to Willie Nelson in an interview with Sirius XM satellite radio, he was at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge and had put his own song "Crazy" in the jukebox. Patsy Cline's husband heard it and wanted to get it to Patsy. They were both drunk, and Willie was reluctant to go, and he even stayed in the car while her husband played it for her. In the end, she recorded it a few weeks later. In another interview, Willie says that the song originally was called "Stupid"."
Stupid! You can't be calling people "stupid" anymore either.
"According to Ellis Nassour's biography Patsy Cline, Nelson, then a struggling songwriter known as Hugh Nelson, was a regular at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge on Nashville's Lower Broadway, which he frequented with friends Kris Kristofferson and Roger Miller, both also unknown songwriters at this time. Nelson met Cline's husband Charlie Dick at the bar one evening and pitched the song to him. Dick took the track home and played it for Cline, who absolutely hated it at first because Nelson's demo "spoke" the lyrics ahead of and behind the beat; an annoyed Cline remarked that she "couldn't sing like that"."
Temujin writes:
"Well this is just crazy talk.
"This sounds like an exercise in squeezing the last possible remnant of humor out of their late night 'comedy' show. Lord knows, unless the punchline ends in 'Trump' it's probably not going to pass the Fun-O-Meter. The entire meaning of the word 'comedy' has changed so much over the last 8 or so years. It used to refer to a medium that made people laugh. I listen- quite a bit- to Sirius Radio comedy stations. I have always loved stand-up and when I'm driving around, I'm the guy you'll see at a stop light laughing uproariously by myself in my car. One might think I'm crazy.
"But comedy these days has turned into a sophomoric exercise in using body parts or sexual acts as the punchline, or flailing against a conservative in some situation, or simply trying to be so politically correct, it's as if the comedian is looking for approval rather than laughs. And...that's what they get. Seal-like approval applause. It's as if Sarah Silverman is the standard and they are all trying to say things that would please Sarah, if Sarah were in the room. But she's not. And they're not funny.
"So there are reams of potentially very funny people making themselves completely unfunny trying to follow the rules as they think Trevor Noah or Sarah Silverman would have them do. Comedians used to have a room full of other funny people helping them write funny things. Today they have rooms full of serious censors, making sure they use the correct language and not offend anybody outside of Trump or conservatives. They have literally managed to make comedy unfunny.
"On the good side, that makes the few actual funny people that are out there seem so obviously smarter, braver, and more talented. It makes it so much easier to find the good comedians. They stick out. The rest are Trevor Noah's in waiting."
Jack writes:
"Ann, I think you hit the main point in then last item on your list of reasons why you don’t listen to that show anymore. Left-wing comedy degenerated from jokes to insults during the Trump years. Their audience didn’t mind that because the anger at having a non-Democrat president was fed by their insults. And it turns out that the anger increases production of dopamine in the brain which gives a sense of good feeling similar to what occurs following cardio workouts. So people literally get hooked on the show to get their dopamine hit of the day.
"I continue to find it sad that the purveyors of such non-funny humor simply don’t understand what is going on, or else they are very good at pretending that they don’t understand that they gave up comedy for political insults because the insults agree with their left-wing point of view and supports their small audience share."
Shane writes:
"We stopped watching all cable news programming in 2012 and cut DirecTV shortly thereafter, relying on AMZN and NFLX. Unfortunately, the only television I reliably enjoy is TCM so we went back to DirecTV in 2019. We've added Hulu, HBOMax to NFLX and AMZN so we are pushing $200/mo as well. Now the only reliable apolitical TCM host is Eddie Muller and that is probably only because he hosts Noir Alley so his chance to espouse is severely limited. Despite the politics, TCM allows for an escape from today's garbage."
I respond:
The one thing I plan to add is Criterion... just so I can have a selection of high-quality stuff and be shielded from the junk.
Natalie S. writes:
"I was wondering when this would start creeping into the mainstream. I’m in a handful of mommy groups on FB (or should I say “parent groups,” because the word “mom” has been banned from use in almost all of them since it leaves out fathers in the group as well as the biological women who identify as men), and most of them have a rule against using words like “crazy” or “insane” in ANY context. Obviously they don’t want anyone calling another group member crazy, as part of keeping the group civil. But you aren’t allowed to call yourself crazy either (I.e. “my kids are driving me crazy today.”) First offense gets you muted, and second offense gets you booted.
"I always thought this was, forgive me, insane. But the world is going, ahem, crazy, and I knew it was only a matter of time before this made its way into the general population. Looks like it’s finally starting to happen.
"I wonder how long until the word crazy is officially designated as “hate speech.” I say 2 years."
EDH sends the Ross Perot "Crazy" video link: https://www.c-span.org/video/?33999-1/perot-campaign-rally
Start video @ 52:30 (thru 55:00)
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