Comedy is a form of art that consists of jokes and sketches, with an intent to make people laugh. It has always been my favorite genre, not only because it helps me get through the hard times, good comedy often make people reflect on their lives. Comedy is a superordinate term that comes with different kinds, such as sitcom and stand-up.
As mentioned, comedy makes people reflect on their lives. How could comedy achieve that? Comedy is not only about our daily funny happenings, like an event of misunderstanding between two people. Sometimes comedy can get edgy, diving into the controversial issues in our society – such as race, gender and social status. Those topics highlight the social reality, and certain groups of people would be targeted at. For instance, the difference between men and women is one of the most used topics in stand-up comedy. Although they are delivered in a lighthearted way, some of the stakeholders might not be entertained, and they may even feel offended.
In this digital era, social media is widely accessed by everybody through their electronic devices. People can freely express their opinion and personal feelings on social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. On these platforms, ordinary people and famous people are in a level-playing field in terms of audacity of their speech. Not only artists can become a creator of content, regular people can do so too.
The cancel culture started as a product of audience interaction with pop culture under such freedom. The phrase first appeared in an episode of the reality show “Love and Hip-Hop: New York”, where a cast member told his girlfriend that “she’s cancelled” after knowing she had a daughter. After it was aired, the netizens on Twitter started to mockingly tweet about the cast member who cancelled his girlfriend for a (seemingly) ridiculous reason. One instance of such legendary tweets was “Meg loves orange. She’s cancelled.” As we can see, the trend all started as a joke. But as time goes by, the link between its usage and its origin is broken, and the word “cancelled” is no longer used metaphorically. Now, it is a form of expulsion for people whose value is disapproved by the public, and everybody could be a target of cancellation.
As comedians speak up on the controversies, the cancel culture would definitely affect them. Recently, US comedian Dave Chappelle is being cancelled on Twitter for poking fun at transgender people and being “transphobic”. Regarding this issue, Chappelle slammed cancel culture and said he “refused to be cancelled”. From this, it seems that comedians aren’t really restricted by the cancel culture, isn’t it? His colleague Chris Rock said otherwise, stated “the fear of being criticized for problematic remarks has resulted in a lack of risk-taking among comedians, creating unfunny content”. It shows that even highly famous comedians are concerned by that, not to mention lesser-known comedians who desperately want popularity and in need of pleasing everybody. From an artistic perspective, the cancel culture is definitely a threat to comedy.
Good news is, comedians are less likely to really get cancelled. Another US comedian Kevin Hart was left out from the 2019 Oscars for making “homophobic” remarks, but he continued acting and doing stand-ups afterwards. Perhaps this signifies something – people are smart enough to understand comedy has the right to exist as a genre, jokes don’t click with them because it’s simply not their type of humor, and nothing more than that.
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