CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD: Why Saving Comedy Is So Crucial To Saving America.
Real humor requires risk-taking — it requires saying something that will surprise and, sometimes, appall the listener. So why should we be surprised that humor is vanishing?
People aren’t dumb. They’ve looked around, and they see that telling the wrong joke — or even simply laughing at one — is a quick way to destroy your life; better to just suffer in silence and watch old Eddie Murphy clips from the 1980s like they’re banned readings in the Soviet Union, which, soon, they might well be.
Most of the funniest comedy today comes from anonymous people online — the people who make internet memes and run anonymous Twitter accounts. Think about that: Random idiots on the internet are way funnier than professional comedians paid millions of dollars a year for one simple reason — only anonymous people can actually be funny without fear.
Read the whole thing.