The Shrill Voice of Humanity
Currents
Author’s Note: This article is intended to be read aloud in the voice of the incomparable Gilbert Gottfried.
In the wake of Gilbert Gottfried’s death, it is striking how rare his beautifully brash humor has become, and how easily offended our culture now is. Gottfried’s crude routines landed him in the hot seat on a regular basis, but he never cared. His comedy was about testing how far over the line you could go, and how far you could bring the audience with you. His jokes were funny because we all knew they were wrong. Gottfried was the first to make a 9/11 joke. He said at the Emmys after the scandal with Pee-wee Herman, that if masturbation was a crime, he was Al Capone by age 12. He tweeted jokes about the earthquake that hit Japan in 2011, and was fired by Aflac as the voice of their duck because of it. One wonders why a company like Aflac would even hire Gottfried in the first place — someone who publicly described the mystical depths of Joan Rivers’s “bat-infested vagina” with its “hot rush of love slime” “burning a hole through the floor to the sewer below”, to which she then “slithered away” herself.
The contrast between Gottfried and our current moment could not be starker. As the social media manager for the Bi Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for the interests of the bi community, of which Queer Majority is an outgrowth, I cannot help but notice how, in this climate of hypersensitivity, nearly everyone in online queer spaces has to walk on eggshells in the name of political correctness. Under the pressures of this political moment, we are all morphing into PR simulacrums of ourselves, mouthing cookie-cutter platitudes and tweeting like politicians or corporate brands rather than risk the ire of the army of righteousness by expressing an independent thought.
Early on in my career, I used to second guess myself, worried about not having used the correct lingo, fearing I had let the project down and made us look bad. There was always a subset of the audience determined to be unconditionally up in arms about how this was problematic, or that was offensive. I took to scrutinizing my words with a fine-tooth comb in a vain attempt to somehow appease everyone, spending hours perfecting my language to curry favor with the PC gods. Eventually, with the help of my colleagues, I learned to navigate the waters. I learned how to spot when someone was looking for a witch to burn as opposed to asking a sincere question.
Over the better part of a decade working in social media, things have gotten worse. I have witnessed droves of online queer spaces hijacked by radical activists, micromanaging, suffocating, and smothering the enjoyment and spontaneity out of everything with their obnoxious ideology and language policing. I have seen so many regular folks try so hard to find a queer space where they could belong, but eventually leave because they were lorded over by extremist gatekeepers. If a person posted a bi meme that said “both” genders instead of “all”, made a joke about being glad of their sex, or poked fun at any woke dogmas, you can bet they were excoriated. Any word that was out of place, any phrasing that was awkward, or left anything to interpretation, and any term even moments out of date was met with the swift “justice” of The Right Side of History™.
What should have been safe havens for LGBT people to connect soon became far-left echo-chambers. This was becoming the face of the LGBT community, and the rest of us were shamed into silence and voted off the island. I myself have been kicked out of several LGBT groups over polite disagreements, in some cases for merely expressing the view that an unintentional misspeak is not “literal violence” and that we cannot educate others by screaming at them from our keyboards. Even worse, I support LGBT people’s right to have different opinions on social issues within the community (“fascism” is the technical term for “diversity of thought”, or so I’ve been told by wacktivists). But in all seriousness, sometimes science and statistics matter more than feelings.
A recent controversy in the Facebook group for our social club, amBi, had some members crying transphobia from the rooftops. The group, though open to all, is bi specific, and we try to stay apolitical, to be a place where people can simply relax and be themselves. Sadly, nowhere is safe from outrage. Someone, let’s call him Joe (not his real name), shared a meme poking fun at pronouns in a very lighthearted way. The joke read:
“Sexually, I identify as Little Caesar’s pizza, my pronouns are Hot/Ready”
Pronouns are a spicy debate in queer circles right now. People are often strong-armed into including their pronouns nearly everywhere, despite evidence that it can lead to sexist backlash. It’s an easy, cost-free way to pretend to care about trans issues, meanwhile trans websites rarely cite sharing pronouns as an effective form of support. Most people don’t do any actual research, of course. They simply see the practice as a badge of allyship.
I took one look at this meme and found it harmless and cheesy (yes, that is my pizza pun). But soon enough, the comments became a shitstorm. The post was well-liked overall, but upset commenters — none of whom were trans themselves — began attacking Joe, shrieking about how transphobic the joke was. Joe committed the cardinal sin of mentioning that he had run the joke by his trans friends, who gave it the thumbs up, to which he was then charged with using trans friends as shields and with manipulating them into giving him permission. He ended up editing his post, apologizing profusely, and prostrating himself before his critics. Some characterized his editing as a “dirty delete” and demanded he keep his original post instead of cravenly trying to hide his crime against humanity. Others stated that he must instead delete the whole thing immediately. Still others wanted Joe kicked out of the group altogether, over a meme. There was nothing he could possibly have done to appease the mob.
I jumped in as an admin, muting and doling out temporary suspensions to the most obnoxious and bloodthirsty combatants who violated group rules. They swiftly flooded my DM’s complaining that I was allowing blatant transphobia by silencing them. The people who screech the most hyperbolic and melodramatic calumnies always recast their behavior as polite discussion or correcting an error, like a schoolyard bully telling a recess aid he’s only playing, as a smaller boy hangs suspended from his fist by a shirt collar.
I always have an inner conflict in these situations. Even though I have a dark and twisted sense of humor — the kind that would get me banned from my own groups — it is my job to ensure that what is allowed aligns with group rules. I have no problem compartmentalizing in this way. I know exactly when something goes too far, even if it personally has me in stitches. Joe’s shared meme did not cross any line. And it wasn’t even close. I do wonder, even though I’m more lax than many moderators, why not stretch things a little further? No progress is ever made without hard conversations, and morbid humor is an excellent way to break the tension.
In fact, studies have demonstrated the psychological benefits of laughing at rough situations, such as providing coping mechanisms and preventing burnout, allowing people to reframe events in a new perspective rather than fixating on an upsetting narrative, sparking conversation, and helping folks navigate emotions, especially in groups. Suffice to say, you need to be able to laugh at the most unfortunate things in life. Gallows humor commonly develops among most oppressed peoples — perhaps, just perhaps, those who cannot appreciate it might not be as oppressed as they claim.
This gets to a broader issue. How can we expect to tackle any of the world’s problems if we cannot speak freely? When something as silly and harmless as a pizza pronoun joke is viewed as an intolerable sin, something has gone wrong. Very wrong. Because achieving real progress in the real world requires far harder conversations and decisions than whether it’s okay to jest about being pizzagendered — if we can’t even handle that, we’re in deep trouble.
This madness has spread to nearly every corner of the internet. Even in literary spaces, similar controversies and witch hunts regularly ignite, where someone decides to blacklist or cancel a work based on some perceived — and usually microscopically thin — “problematic” transgression. Nevermind that these writers are usually among the least racist or sexist people in society, the social justice mob now performatively pretends not to understand how fiction works, and considers works that describe racist eras or characters as promoting racism. A recent example is with “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens, charged with depicting racist tropes… as a tale set in the mid-twentieth-century American South. Every time that book comes up in my online groups, the same vicious food-fighting and name-calling breaks out. It feels as though one can no longer exist online without having to research every potential issue and be willing to die on a hill defending it against irrationally angry zealots. And so most people just retreat into the shadows. Nobody wants to sit and be yelled at, even if they know they aren’t in the wrong.
This has created a culture where reasonable people are bullied into submission and effectively silenced. A culture that inspires, above all, self-censorship, where any form of questioning or difference of opinion is not tolerated, where debate itself is a form of bigotry. This illiberal extremism erases the role of intention behind any speech that seems to run counter to the new orthodoxy by asserting that the outcome is harmful. The fact that Joe’s pronoun joke was so obviously made with no ill intentions is irellevent — Joe uttered a heresy (and belongs to the wrong identity categories), and must now go to leftist hell for the unforgivable sin of murdering trans people with words. It didn’t matter that there were trans people who found the joke funny. When you want a pound of flesh badly enough, it barely matters who you take it from, or why.
In order to navigate these minefields, we learn to say only what we know is safe instead of being true to ourselves. We’re all secretly afraid that we might speak the wrong thing and get canceled. We have no problem criticizing politicians for their disingenuous pandering, and yet that’s exactly what we’re all doing. I save most of my crude or vulgar humor for those closest to me. I have made suicide jokes with a relative while picking her up from the mental ward. I’ve made abortion jokes at the clinic to ease my friend’s tension as she terminated a pregnancy. Sometimes these uncouth and distasteful jokes are what pull us through incredibly trying moments and help find a flicker of light when the tunnel is pitch black. Needless to say, I would never be allowed to rear my head in public ever again if one of these hall monitors ever got ahold of my texts. But I refuse to pull all my punches.
Despite these fears, I have slowly been expanding my humor more openly on social media, though not to the extent of abortion and mental health jokes (I’m not a fool). And while I meet resistance from humorless scolds who can’t laugh at the little things, it has established a sense of camaraderie among my followers and friends who find solace in my silly comments or off-color memes. Strangers privately message me to express awe that I, an LGBT activist, posted something that directly challenges or even mocks one of the Ten Commandments of the Left.
I wonder what unpoliced thoughts the world is missing because people are too afraid of backlash. In fairness, some of these unspoken sentiments are surely better left unsaid. I don’t relish the idea of a certain unhinged 45th President returning to Twitter to incite political violence, nor do I want alt-rightists given carte blanche to spew their bile. There needs to be a line — the problem is, we’ve drawn it far too narrowly around a set of norms and sensibilities only a sliver of society agrees with. We’re missing out on people just being people and having funny, natural thoughts worth sharing, because now someone might take offense to it, or pretend to take offense in order to milk some social clout out of it. This, in turn, could lead to getting doxxed, threatened, shunned, or even fired. It sucks the humanity out of everything.
I’m done being a politician. I’m tired of walking on eggshells and seeing others be bullied into silence. I’m tired of straight-cis people worrying that they can’t speak around me because of repeated encounters with queer radicals who make mountains out of molehills. Shaming strangers who unintentionally misspoke or weren’t up-to-date with the latest lingo is not how you combat hate and bigotry. It’s how you push people away. Human beings are imperfect, but most of us are well-intentioned and mean no harm. We’re all on different journeys. There is no way for a single person to know everything, and we shouldn’t have to. I don’t want to feel like a phony PR spin doctor. I don’t want to hide my genuine thoughts, which until thirty seconds ago were not even remotely offensive, because the new regime deems them unquestionably verboten.
Ultimately, we have a choice. We can speak freely, or we can self-censor so as not to invite public overreaction. After years of being swarmed by these new Puritans, I no longer care if someone thinks less of me or deems me problematic for speaking my mind. They will not live rent-free in my head. I am secure in the knowledge that I follow my moral compass to the best of my ability. I will not lobotomize myself into a woke automaton to fit someone else’s idea of who and what I should be.
My challenge to you is this: don’t give up on humor. We should strive never to be cruel or mean-spirited, but we should also embrace jokes that transgress the line of political correctness. Be the smartass, wise-cracking jokester you wish you could be. Be like the great Gilbert. Push the limits. Don’t let fear rule over you. Find ways to unleash your filthy and sacrilegious thoughts. Give the audience a grin while you look on the bright side of life. In such trying times, we could all use a laugh. If you feel your feathers being ruffled, remember: It’s a joke, not a dick — don’t take it so hard.
“You never know what people will choose to be offended by.”
