Punching Up/Punching Down

Is it punching down to mock Chris Christie because he's a fat guy
 or is it punching up because he's white privileged? The PC police gots to know. 
Seriously, because if they don't, who does?.
As I wrote recently The Daily Show in its last dying days of the Jon Stewart era seems to be missing more than not, but even allowing for some inevitable school’s about to be out slacking, it was still remarkable to see how badly they missed with a bit making fun of the California water crisis.  Al Madgrigal made a show of profligate water waste that had him dumping bottles of water all over New York. Half way into it, I turned to my wife and said, “This is obscene.” Then, for the first time in my TDS viewing history, I hit the fast forward button. I doubt I would’ve found the bit so offensive if I didn’t live in California...as an old professor of mine used to say nearly every class, "It all depends on whose ox is being gored." By cutting away early, I may have missed some saving grace in the end where the bit is turned around so the joke is on those wasting water rather than those needing water. If so, that would’ve made it a “punching up” joke rather than a “punching down” joke in the current lexicon, and therefore politically correct. 
So, if I, too, have a line that humor should not cross, perhaps I shouldn't be as contemptuous of the PC Police as I have been in the past. They are, after all, just doing God's work just like regular police. But PC has reared its ugly little, pinched-ass puss once again at Jerry Seinfeld for describing people looking through their cell phone contacts with all the pomposity of “a gay French king” and then ending the description with a swish of his hand. That brought the PC police out on twitter with Ferguson-level ferocity. Seinfeld coupled his reaction to the hysteria with a complaint that it’s becoming unrewarding to do comedy in front of college campuses these days because of their hypersensitivity. Jerry’s not alone on this score. A year ago Chris Rock stated the same thing in announcing he would no longer be doing gigs on campuses. In making his announcement Rock cited a personal conversation he had with the sainted George Carlin, who was among the first of the modern stand-up comedians to notice how humor-challenged college audiences of today have become. I no longer have any business on college campuses, but I can get a sense of what they’re talking about by watching Bill Maher’s HBO show. There’s hardly a week that goes by when he doesn’t have to stop in midstream and explain to those Mark Twain called the Miss Grundys how comedy works when they launch a wave of tsk…tsk…tskingat any joke that ends with a punch line aimed at non-whites, females or LGBTQRSTUVs.
Comic Colin Quinn confronted the issue head-on in a recent interview in, of all places, Salon, the Wahhabi school of American PC. In the interview Quinn said:

"And punching up, punching down! Once again, these terms were not created by humorous people. Activists are activists. They are great and a big part of American society. Humorists and activists don’t very often meld. Humorists and activists have two very different mentalities. Activists are very sincere, very positive. That’s how activists should be. Humorists are supposed to look at everything and see the bullshit in all sides. This is my opinion. We are not supposed to see 100 percent right and wrong. Everything is middle ground. Everything is hypocrisy in all people and all situations."

“Everything is hypocrisy in all people and all situations”-- in other words what we used to call the human comedy. It used to be a healthy sign when people acknowledged that like everyone else they were not above doing some pratfalls through life. There was human bonding to be found in the admission that the joke of existence is pretty much on all of us, and no one is really above it all. But now there are entire classes of people who want to claim exemption from being the object of humor because their lives have been so intolerable that laughter at their expense has become one more act of intolerance. There’s some truth to that, but if such an exemption were actually available, the folks applying for it wouldn’t only be those currently making the most publicized demand. Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, Southerners, academics, farmers, old folks, and the lonely have all been at the butt end of countless jokes.  Are any of them any less deserving of protection than gays, women, the disabled, non-whites, the overweight, the stutterers, the slow-witted, or the foreign born? And if so, who decides that and how? What’s the metric for determining who can no longer be fodder for comedy?
The whole punching up/punching down notion arises out of the totally blinkered notion that good, socially approved comedy should only be aimed at those in positions of power and privilege. Well, that’s the best of jest of course, which is why monarchs often employed court jesters. But what happens when power and privilege is personified in a fatty like Chris Christie (as above)? Or when the anti-women’s rights governor of Texas is in a wheelchair? Or when the main proponent of “kill the gays” laws in Africa is black? 
Beyond the complexity of deciding who is entitled to a free pass and who’s not, there’s this: The quantity…and quality…of comedy that can be lost under the PC regime is staggering to contemplate. Just off the top of my head: Twain, Groucho’s encounters with Margaret Dumont (“Well, that covers a lot of ground. Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself!”), Sid Ceasar’s various foreign professors (Ludwig Von Henpecked); Dr. Strangelove’s prosthetic hand; Some Like it Hot (going trans to seduce a woman); much of Jerry Lewis; most of Lenny Bruce. And all of that pyromaniac of modern comedy, Richard Pryor (“Pryor started saying “nigger” when he began making comedy out of character sketches, inspired by the world he had been born into. ‘You cannot represent that world without using that word,’ [his biographer] says. Other commentators have offered more complicated explanations. But one should be careful not to rationalize the term, detoxify it, pat it on the head and say, Don’t worry, we know you didn’t mean to be bad. No, Pryor used it partly because he liked to be bad, and to drive moralists nuts.”)
In preparation for this post, I reviewed last week’s excerpt from my new book, one of those occasional Nobby forays into humor. It’s only 900 words long, but every 200 words or so I came upon a passage that could easily land me on the ground from tasering by the PC police—a guy throws his pregnant wife from a moving vehicle (making light of spousal abuse); a father drags his 12-year old son to executive board meetings (making light of child abuse); an Indian owes his wealth to a casino (racial stereotyping); a report on brain damage is totally denigrated (blatant disregard for the suffering of others); a black man serves as assistant to a white man (perpetrating the white power structure); and an ass-fucking on HBO joke, which could be seen as a slight on gays, yet it was inspired by the famous hetero anal sex scene on Girls.

I don’t make my living as a comedian, thank Jesus, so I don’t have to torture myself over this much as a professional concern. But it concerns me as a citizen, and it concerns me as an avowed liberal. There was a line in a 1941 Russian novel, called “Cement” that went like this, “Although we’re poverty-stricken and are eating people on account of hunger, all the same we have Lenin.” Making fun of people without food is, on its face, I suppose, slightly more cruel than making fun of people without water. The official Soviet PC police cut the line out, not because of how it mocked the hungry of course, but how it mocked Lenin. They routinely censored music, art, and literature that did not uphold the ideals of the socialist state. Political correctness is no laughing matter. It is liberalism served up Soviet-style, advanced with the purest of intentions of uplifting humanity, while corroding freedom at its core.