I just watched Jimmy Kimmel’s 2023 Oscar monologue over again. When I first watched it I couldn’t quite figure out what was wrong but when I watched it a second time, it was obvious. He wasn’t funny. His jokes were glib and sanitized and clearly had been pre-approved by whatever corporate adjudicator was in charge of making sure no one in the audience or watching elsewhere was triggered or offended. I felt for him. Watch it yourself. He knows he’s not being funny. He reels off his one liners as though he’s reading instructions on a cake box, leaving no time for the audience to react, speeding through his monologue. If his worst fears needed confirmation, this friendly Jimmy Kimmel loving Hollywood audience gave it, their response tepid throughout. For a consumate professional comedian of his calibre to take the stage at the Oscars, a career pinnacle by any measure, knowing your material wasn’t funny must have been horrible. And it’s not because he’s not funny. It’s where we’ve come to.

It’s worth acknowledging that humour has become shockingly aggressive and painful over the decades, used to lacerate and harm for the most part without consequence. Some mistake free speech as the right to say whatever you think. Hogwash. Not in a safe society are we free to say anything we want, to spew hate, to harm people with words. As that applies to political speech so too should it apply to humour. Redress is long overdue. We need guardrails on what we as a society consider acceptable. No kidding, we’re humans and we do have an infinite capacity to wreck things. That said we need to find balance. We need guardrails, but too often nowadays we mistake cancelling for those guardrails. There is no balance in cancelling. In any event how many times do we need to learn: Cancelling will always prove futile.

I was just watching a comedian on FB. He’d moved to the US from Eastern Europe and had a heavy Slavic accent.

“Your language English. This is very difficult to learn. I just figured out ‘he’ and ‘she’ and now you tell me ‘he’ or ‘she’ has to be called ‘they’. You have idea how difficult this is?”

He continued, “I ask my friend over for dinner. He says that would be great. Can I bring friend, he asks. Sure I say bring her over. ‘They’ he says. ‘They’ I ask? So you bring two friends? No, he says, just one. But she is ‘they’.

Now you tell me that’s not funny. I laughed out loud. The comedian was using humour to help us laugh at ourselves, using the obvious inadequacy of the pronoun ‘they’ which we’re being asked to adopt to correct a real and hurtful cultural bias which those who are gender fluid or gender inquisitive are faced with every day. It’s not intended to ridicule members of that group. It is simply funny and it may even advance the conversation about whether the pronoun ‘they’ is even up to the task that has been set out for it. Is that such a dangerous question to pose? So dangerous that it shouldn’t be said out loud for fear of triggering or offending? As an aside, may I suggest the pronoun ‘one’ might better achieve the goal of recognition and clarity and be more easily understood in its use.

“How does one feel?”

“Where is one going?”

“Coming for dinner? Does one have any food allergies?”

But I digress.

Ricky Gervais is a brilliant if caustic British comedian. He says that humour has purpose. Make no mistake I’ve cringed at many of his jokes but in equal measure laughed out loud as he stripped bare obvious absurdity with his humour. Gervais says good humour is ironic. He warns his audience they may be offended and gives them a chance to leave and then he lets ’em have it. He says his goal is to get people to laugh at things they know they shouldn’t laugh at; ironically that sheds light on the reality that we’re all sexist and racist and that list goes on and on, personalized as we see fit.

David Sedaris is a great US humourist. I’ve followed him for years. He taught me to stop worrying about inspiration for my writing,

“We’re human and humans are hilarious. All of us. Just open your eyes and ears and you’ll have your inspiration.”

He’s right. He understands why the brilliant TV sitcom ‘Seinfeld’ was so successful. Jerry Seinfeld called it a show about nothing. But it wasn’t. It was a show about something, observational humour about human beings navigating their lives together. We are funny and it does us good to be reminded about that, even where in the reminding, we are offended. ‘Archie Bunker’ was a ground breaking TV show in the ’70’s, a show which has been credited with profoundly changing generational and cultural attitudes. I didn’t like the show. Not one bit. Archie offended me. I couldn’t watch him without getting angry at what he would say. He reflected everything I despised about bigoted, racist homophobic men. He was a mirror and I did not like the reflection. That is what Ricky Gervais means when he says good humour is ironic. It sheds light and it asks questions of you. That you aren’t totally comfortable with your answers to those questions is the whole point. Was the answer to cancel ‘Archie Bunker’? No, of course not. Did it offend hundreds of thousands of TV viewers over the years? Yes, it surely did. Did it trigger change and society wide conversations about racism and bigotry and the role of women and our acceptance of homosexuality? Yes, it did.

That show wouldn’t last a second today.

In cancelling, in our zeal to ensure that no one is triggered or offended, in sanitizing the ‘Jimmy Kimmel’s’ of the world to prevent any hint of complaint is to hide from our truth. Humour can strip us bare and reveal us for what we are as individuals or on a bigger social scale, what we are as a people. Humour lets us see ourselves for what we really are. Sometime that ain’t pretty but how can we change if we can’t see ourselves. How can we see ourselves if humour is cancelled?

Oh and BTW, I was just kidding about the ‘Cancel?‘ thing up top. You know I was just looking for a catchy title, something to get your attention. It’s so important in good writing. So please don’t cancel me.

No, really.

Please.