There are many attributes Americans share that have helped us shape our country into the free, fair and friendly place we all know and love.
Through the hard times of the Great Depression, our ancestors showed great efforts to ensure the foundation of our economy, which was second-to-none for the better part of a century.
But no matter how bad things got, Americans have never lost the ability to stop and enjoy the one attribute no recession can shake: the sense of humor.
As Americans, we turn on late-night comedians like David Letterman – or the exponentially funnier Conan O’Brien – every night and watch him poke fun at this week’s pop-culture hot topics. They have the ability to formulate style and substance in order to entertain us in a way we could never expect a stranger to do in real life.
When in the right comical context, they can get away with jokes that would seem very controversial or even taboo were they shared in an office lounge or a coffee shop.
Someone who does this better than anyone is the ever-subtle Lisa Lampanelli. In an HBO special, Lampanelli did nothing short of glorify “black women” and their willingness to “hit their kids,” and she received insurmountable applause from every ethnic group in the audience.
Why is it that the priceless one-liners we enjoy so much seem to lose their shine when taken outside the context of stand-up comedy?
Since the explosion of the age of political correctness, what is considered funny in social settings keeps drifting further away from what is funny in the setting of a comedy club or in our own homes where no one can see you laugh.
In a Comedy Central special, comedian Russell Peters even pointed out that after he made a joke involving racial stereotypes, many of the white people in the audience were muffling their own laughter so as to not offend the minority group that the joke targeted.
While respecting the dignity of every race is important to maintaining diversity and open mindedness, I believe censoring true humor and creativity in the interest of not offending a particular group only leads to inequality among all groups. Once we start making different rules regarding different races or ethnicities, no matter which way they may lean, it ultimately boils down to people are being treated differently because of their race.
So in order to get on a real path of equality, we need to break down these social walls that prohibit creative and harmless entertainment, and we need to reinvent what it was that helped make us the original melting pot: our good old fashion American sense of humor.
Through the hard times of the Great Depression, our ancestors showed great efforts to ensure the foundation of our economy, which was second-to-none for the better part of a century.
But no matter how bad things got, Americans have never lost the ability to stop and enjoy the one attribute no recession can shake: the sense of humor.
As Americans, we turn on late-night comedians like David Letterman – or the exponentially funnier Conan O’Brien – every night and watch him poke fun at this week’s pop-culture hot topics. They have the ability to formulate style and substance in order to entertain us in a way we could never expect a stranger to do in real life.
When in the right comical context, they can get away with jokes that would seem very controversial or even taboo were they shared in an office lounge or a coffee shop.
Someone who does this better than anyone is the ever-subtle Lisa Lampanelli. In an HBO special, Lampanelli did nothing short of glorify “black women” and their willingness to “hit their kids,” and she received insurmountable applause from every ethnic group in the audience.
Why is it that the priceless one-liners we enjoy so much seem to lose their shine when taken outside the context of stand-up comedy?
Since the explosion of the age of political correctness, what is considered funny in social settings keeps drifting further away from what is funny in the setting of a comedy club or in our own homes where no one can see you laugh.
In a Comedy Central special, comedian Russell Peters even pointed out that after he made a joke involving racial stereotypes, many of the white people in the audience were muffling their own laughter so as to not offend the minority group that the joke targeted.
While respecting the dignity of every race is important to maintaining diversity and open mindedness, I believe censoring true humor and creativity in the interest of not offending a particular group only leads to inequality among all groups. Once we start making different rules regarding different races or ethnicities, no matter which way they may lean, it ultimately boils down to people are being treated differently because of their race.
So in order to get on a real path of equality, we need to break down these social walls that prohibit creative and harmless entertainment, and we need to reinvent what it was that helped make us the original melting pot: our good old fashion American sense of humor.
