It happened a few nights ago, not 50 years ago when Lenny Bruce was handcuffed and arrested.
According to the NY Post (and if any group knows bad taste, it's them), Nimesh Patel was invited to perform at Columbia University. The students apparently were open to hearing the views of an "edgy" comedian. ALL comedians are "edgy," really. They generally get laughs by surprising (shocking) audiences by talking about things using an original perspective.
Patel, who spent one season as one of a gigantic load of staffers on "Saturday Night Live," was "yanked off stage...for telling jokes about race and sexual orientation that made students uncomfortable." As Lenny Bruce proved years ago, one can't rely on being quoted correctly, and a comedian's delivery is important to how a joke is perceived. But according to the Post, Patel riffed about someone who is black and gay: "no one looks in the mirror and thinks, ‘This black thing is too easy, let me just add another thing to it.'”
Not much of a joke? It's also not much of an insult. Who's to say Patel was being sexist or racist? This "observational" line, to use a black expression, "is what it is." Whether, to use a gay expression, "it sucks," is a matter for individuals to decide.
Meaning: you do NOT "yank" the microphone away from a comedian. If he's not saying something that is outright, humorlessly and insanely vicious and disturbing, you let the audience "vote with their feet."
The audience can boo. They can heckle. They can walk out. That's what audiences do. They don't need a Hitler censoring the show for them. This isn't Nazi Germany and Patel is not Werner Finck.
The NY Post described Patel as an "Indian-American comedian." Does HE describe himself that way? Would you describe Jerry Seinfeld as a "Jewish-American comedian?" What's up with THAT?
The Columbia Asian American Alliance (apparently Patel tossed in a joke about them, too?) wrote: “We acknowledge that discomfort and safety can coexist, however, the discomfort Patel caused was unproductive in this space." Patel's humor was “counter to the inclusive spirit and integrity” of using verbose words, or something.
The Post quoted somebody with an ironic first name, LIBERTY MARTIN, as justifying Patel's thought-decapitation: "Patel’s mic wasn’t just cut off because he told offensive jokes to a sensitive, snowflake audience, which is the narrative that I see being talked about. He was booted off the stage because he sucked the energy out of an entire auditorium."
Aw, the duuuuuude sucked the energy out of the roooooooom. You know wuttum sayin? LIBERTY wasn't throwing SHADE or throwing Patel UNDER THE BUS, or saying he wasn't kewwwwl, WHATEVER, he just, you know, "sucked the energy" out of the roooooom. And Lord knows, it took a lot of energy for a bunch of Millennial assholes to park their fat butts in chairs and listen to somebody.
I never heard of Patel before this. If he's a lousy comedian, well, how many GOOD ones do we have anymore? Stand-up, like progressive rock, is a rather dead medium. It's been done. All people can do is stand in the footprints of the greats and be imitative. Rock has ceded to rap, and stand-up began to give way to poetry SLAMS. Seeing anyone get up and do observational humor is pretty boring, know what I mean? Have you noticed that? As for standing up and telling one-liners, Steven Wright gave us something different from Henny Youngman, but that was a generation ago. One reason people are clinging to Jerry Seinfeld as the greatest stand-up is that he has NO competition now, and anyone who thinks otherwise might also think that Kathy Griffin was a replacement for Joan Rivers.
The bottom line (and there's no Bottom Line where comedians can get well paid), is that there are very few comedians around, good or bad, and the PC craze has made it even more difficult to find anything to laugh at. Most comedy is like fungo...the fun is tossing something up and smacking the crap out of it. It releases tension and hostility. It is a release. Was it ever "PC" for Chaplin or the 3 Stooges to hit a policeman with a pie or punch a cop in the stomach and then kick the cop in the ass and run?
The late Barry Crimmins titled a comedy album, "Kill the Messenger." He could've called the next one "Cut the Microphone," but he IS the late Barry Crimmins. Is comedy dead? It's not doing well when anyone on stage, risking silence or boos, also risks being "yanked off stage" after having been invited to perform.
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