I think you’re confusing “would not be allowed to be made today” with “would face a ~48 hour Twitter outrage cycle then the world would move on”.
I feel like we're stuck in this absurd cycle where the outrage to the outrage becomes a force multiplier. A small number of very vocal people on the left express outrage about X. Not a view shared by the vast majority of the population, left and right included. Right wing media picks up on said outrage and makes vast, sweeping statements about what it means about "the left" and "America today". The whole thing snowballs, some folks on the left end up defending people they don't agree with just because of the outrage on the right... blah blah blah it all eventually dies down until we do the same dance a couple of months later.
It's all an absurd waste of everyone's time, except for the folks like Tucker Carlson that get record viewing figures and a huge pay day from it.
I mostly agree, and you're spot on about the outrage cycle. Well put.
However, I don't think the outrage cycle is really contained within Twitter, or within social media in general. It also spills over to traditional media, at least to some extent. Since it gets a lot of attention, including sometimes from influential people, it can actually affect the kinds of content that people dare make, especially if financial risks are involved.
What you're "allowed" to do is a bit of an imprecise expression unless you go right down to law, but it would be a little disingenuous to pretend that social pressure doesn't affect what people expect others to find permissible. Getting outrage thrown at you can certainly make people feel something is socially forbidden. (That of course serves a pro-social role as well. But I don't think we're used to the idea that it's normal to have outrage or other strong emotional condemnation towards something we do from random people we don't know unless we've done something totally unacceptable. We're wired to think of social acceptance as important and outrage as something that requires our attention. The way social media works throws us off because of that. But I digress.)
I agree about the description of the outrage cycle, but I think what you're leaving out is people frequently get fired/ostracized for these things. That really does have a cooling effect.
I also think that as more high profile people leave Twitter, the extremes of canceling are going to die down. It's pretty well accepted in the leftist communities that canceling has become more than a bit too impulsive and reductionist (this latter factor, I would suggest, due in part to Twitter's tiny character limits), and I think at this point everyone wants to leave Twitter and be done with it, but it's a technical issue now. Twitter is addicting, and honestly so is the adrenaline rush from knowing some rich guy's day/week was ruined. imo, it's easier to just not think about Twitter when people you know/admire aren't on there, and if you're not thinking, you're not tweeting, and if you're not tweeting, you're not recklessly canceling.
Something should replace it, though. Transparent accountability is good, and I think we'll really need to figure this one out before a tech monolopy takes advantage of it again.
Your conclusion misses the fact that those outraged people move the needle.
Studio Execs are very sensitive to outrage. It's part of the calculus.
Often, the outrage is perpetuated within the industry as well.
That said - Airplane would get made - they'd just adjust the jokes accordingly.
When they made Airplane, there were a lot of gags they didn't use because they just were 'too much' - or not funny.
So adjusting the content a bit is always something going on.
That said, the 'fear bar' is much, much lower for certain formats.
My canary for that is Tina Fey. And Judd Apatow. These are staunchly progressive people, but with serious comedy chops. They have been making some passive aggressive public statements lately with respect to this stuff, you can hear what they think on podcasts.
What we need is for Mel Brooks is to come back and save us. He's too old, but if he backed a Ben Stiller remake of 'Blazing Saddles' - I think it would be the funniest thing of the century.
I'd maybe agree that they occupy similar spaces in their respective media landscapes, though Bee being a comedian already makes her a different proposition. But either way I wouldn't say they are the exact same thing. An example: recently Tucker Carlson recently took time in an episode to detail an entirely unfounded conspiracy theory that the FBI was behind the January 6th Capitol attacks. It was completely and utterly false, and easily proven as such. But he has not (to date) admitted that.
If there are examples of this level of disinformation coming from Samantha Bee and/or Joy Reid I'd be interested to see them.
> Bee being a comedian already makes her a different proposition
That's a bit of a cop-out in some ways, especially depending on how it's meant.
If it's meant to indicate that Samantha Bee uses humor, that's fine. But by the same token, Rush Limbaugh used humor. Ben Shapiro and Stephen Crowder use humor. None of those people do a show with their primary intention being to get a laugh, though. They do a show with their primary intention being to express a point of view, and if they can use humor to do that, all the better.
If it's meant to indicate that we shouldn't take Samantha Bee too seriously, don't worry; I don't. I also don't take Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson too seriously, either.
But usually, it's meant to deflect criticism. Jon Stewart did the same thing. He would make serious criticisms of commentators (including a much younger Tucker Carlson) as if he was trying to be taken seriously, but as soon as anyone criticized him he would immediately fall back to, "I'm a comedian!"
To his credit though, John Oliver (who was on the Daily Show along with Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert back in the day) doesn't seem to hide behind the "I'm a comedian" shield anymore.
Shock horror, society has moved on in the 40 years since Airplane was made...
How do you even know it wouldn't be allowed? People love to spout this kind of stuff, but... have you even tried?
Edit: A very nice example I've come across is Ricky Gervais stating that the British Office couldn't be made today. I think he's being very disingenuous saying that because while out of context it could appear to have a lot of controversial jokes touching on taboo subjects, within the show it was always clear who the real target of the jokes was (same with Borat). Masterfully done and I believe (from what I've seen in terms of comedy recently) that kind of stuff would still fly at the BBC. There's even a documentary from a couple of decades back about the success of the office and a BBC producer admits even back then they had to reign in a few of the areas Gervais wanted to go in terms of race & disability (it was also mentioned that he is quite obsessed with these topics), so its all bullshit that people like him are shouting about "THESE DAYS...!".
In fact maybe he's right and the Office couldn't be made today. But that's primarily because Gervais isn't funny these days
> Please stop saying "You can't joke about anything anymore". You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system.
> "Now [The Office] would suffer because people would take things literally...This was a show about everything — it was about difference, it was about sex, race, all the things that people fear to even be discussed or talked about now, in case they say the wrong thing and they are cancelled...I think if this was put out now, some people have lost their sense of irony and context."
> “…They’re even more scared now because people don’t take an explanation for an answer, they just say, ‘Well, I don’t want to see it, so let’s ban it.’”
Obviously the Office isn't in the limelight anywhere near as much as it used to be, but I never hear people having a problem with its tone or style of comedy. A few other sitcoms have had scenes removed from streaming platforms / boxsets (Peep Show, Fawlty Towers etc). But the Office I've never really seen mentioned in a similar way. In fact it's still pretty much beloved by everyone and regularly polls amongst the best British sitcoms of all time.
I didn't downvote you, but the office was very much censored and there were articles about it[1]. The same article discusses Community having one of its best episodes ever yanked over black face that was explicitly explained in the episode. People have lost their collective minds.
Yeah, as another comment mentioned I was specifically referring to the UK Office. I've seen the first couple of seasons of the US Office and so not enough to really comment on this particular scene being removed.
However, they are vastly different shows tonally and so I imagine a scene featuring black face would be handled very differently by the US version
People have lost their minds, because they don't want to see blackface, even in an ironic context? I wish you wouldn't say those things, because I feel the same way, I really don't want to see it, and I don't find it funny or worth seeing in any context. Please don't assume that everyone likes the same jokes that you do.
> Ricky Gervais stating that the British Office couldn't be made today. I think he's being very disingenuous saying that because while out of context it could appear to have a lot of controversial jokes touching on taboo subjects, within the show it was always clear who the real target of the jokes was
But that’s exactly why it could not be made today. Today, you can’t say anything which can be taken out of context. Quote mining has become a national pastime.
So, how do you explain Ricky Gervais' ongoing presence in TV, standup & social media where he routinely says objectively worse stuff than ever appeared in the Office with no real damage done to his career?
His recent standup work has far more objectionable content in it than the Office ever did
A standup is the producer/director/writer/actor for the program. An sitcom/romcom has multiple producers/directors/writers/actors involved, so there is a much broader level of editorial. The producers deciding what directors/writers to hire is in and of itself editorial control. The writers agreeing what jokes to use is editorial control. Even the actors will get their say while on set with lines like "i just don't feel this is what my character would say", then you get rewrites onset.
TL;DR: of course a standup's routine is much less scrutanized than any other type of content by the nature of it.
Yawn, everyone always uses this film as a "prime" example. I don't even think it's true. This film (like Borat) was clearly satirical and the real targets of the jokes quite obvious...
I think a better example of movies which "wouldn't be allowed today" is probably something like the Hangover, which just mines outdated stereotypes & slurs for laughs. Just a sign of society moving on really (as much as Todd Phillips likes to cry about it, I feel his inability to adapt to the comedy landscape is really just a failure of the imagination).
I thought the 21 / 22 Jump Street movie addressed this issue quite well it seems the shift took place sometime between the two releases
I mean, this already happened. Ted Danson was semi-cancelled in the early 90s for wearing blackface to a Friar's Club roast of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg.
Blackface being problematic isn't something we just figured out in the last 12 years, and people trying to do something funny with it anyway isn't new either.
I don't disagree with the fact that blackface is an old phenomenon, I think RDJ's prodigal-son-returns factor and headlining a tentpole summer blockbuster helped brace the impact a bit.
I'm pretty skeptical of the "couldn't be made today" tropes. Some types of films have gone out of style. And there probably are cultural/ethnic stereotypes that would have been mostly considered funny by many audiences that would be more broadly seen as just offensive today.
But I'm not sure how many things are really outright taboo. For example, I've also heard people say that Heathers couldn't be made today--can't be threatening to blow up a school--but it was actually staged as an off-Broadway musical not all that long ago.
The 22 Jump Street movie kiss/fight scene could never be done today, nor could the other kissing scenes, but the kiss/fight scene was a pivotal part of the movie.
Borat is racist, it's not 'satirical' and that's ok, the world's complicated. It's also ok to hide behind 'satirical' as everyone does, except when you get picky on movies you personally don't think are 'satirical'
Hollywood's inability to deal with kissing is academically interesting. Currently combining sarcasm with the 'correct' actions they are told to follow. It's a dangerous path towards the religious moralism we left behind in the 60's, but perhaps I fear change.
have you ever seen an episode of it's always sunny in philadelphia? the show is regularly far more offensive than any line in airplane, and nobody cares.
Including blackface, which other threads are suggesting is just totally impossible to pull off. The reality is it's perfectly fine to do anything offensive so long as the the joke isn't just reinforcing those beliefs.
Not any different than the very common older, white racist character in sitcoms today. They're funny! Not because racism is funny, but because the unacceptability of their racism is funny.
I think it's actually pretty debatable, depending on what you count "longest running" to mean. Curb Your Enthusiasm has been on since 2000 but has taken years-long breaks. Is that longest running?
FWIW It's Always Sunny is, I believe, considered the longest running live action sitcom. Longest running sitcom overall is The Simpsons.
Not the longest running show... soap operas, and possibly some news programs, hold that title. For example, the soap 'Days of Our Lives' has been running since 1965.
I think the problem is that a lot of the humor in Airplane has aged like sour milk - it's not a comedy made to stand the test of time. Consider "Blazing Saddles", which does not suffer from this problem nearly as much and is 6 years older. I could see it getting made today just fine with a few tweaks.
> And Blazing Saddles is the poster child for "could not get made today" arguments.
Blazing Saddles was the poster child for that when many of the movies that argument is now made about were made, too.
Because its the kind of movie that could never be made, except that it was. And if there was a Mel Brooks-in-his-prime now, the modern equivalent (which, presumably, Blazing Samurai this year will not be) could get made today.
> Airplane! is another movie that "wouldn't be allowed to be made today"
Yes, the kind of comedy it has is very tied to the immediate social context for commercial viability, both as to the what it is lampooning (late-70s disaster films) and how.
The broader template of Airplane! (broad take-it-to-11 parody of recently popular film patterns) because it was itself the pattern for its own flood of films in the 2000s (Scary Movie, Date Movie, Superhero Movie, and several sequels to Scary Movie).
The, "Could not be made today," line of thinking is overblown. I predicted around 2015 that a movie in the style of "Falling Down" could never be made with a black lead. Less than 2 years later, Get Out was released. And as far as scandal-worthiness goes, I think if Sorry To Bother You got past the salacity filter, we're doing pretty good.
I feel like we're stuck in this absurd cycle where the outrage to the outrage becomes a force multiplier. A small number of very vocal people on the left express outrage about X. Not a view shared by the vast majority of the population, left and right included. Right wing media picks up on said outrage and makes vast, sweeping statements about what it means about "the left" and "America today". The whole thing snowballs, some folks on the left end up defending people they don't agree with just because of the outrage on the right... blah blah blah it all eventually dies down until we do the same dance a couple of months later.
It's all an absurd waste of everyone's time, except for the folks like Tucker Carlson that get record viewing figures and a huge pay day from it.