No laughing matter

Comedy ain’t what it used to be. Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld, among others, have said that they’d never do stand-up on a campus these days because the ultra-PC students are so easily offended. Since Joan Rivers’ untimely death in 2014 robbed us of a bold, antic counterweight to all things PC, three other female comics who once fearlessly provoked in every direction have caved in to the zeitgeist. “You have to listen to the college-aged, because they lead the revolution,” Sarah Silverman solemnly told Vanity Fair last summer. “They’re pretty much always on the right side of history.” Last December, in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Amy Schumer repudiated her own on-stage persona, saying, “I used to play a character onstage, really irreverent, kind of a racist. . . . I played this very privileged, white Republican chick. And that’s not who I am. . . . I did not grow up with money. I’m a Democrat.” And Chelsea Handler, who on her nightly E! gabfest — from which she walked away in 2014 — was determinedly facetious about absolutely everything, resurfaced earlier this year in four “serious” Netflix documentaries about topics such as race (that one featured Al Sharpton, no less) and is currently hosting a thrice-weekly Netflix outing on which she seeks to “educate” herself by chatting with people like Senator Barbara Boxer, Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, and Secretary of Education John B. King, Jr.

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