Fear of getting canceled spun out of control in creative circles for a while. It finally appears to be on the wane.
So, are we in the clear from being canceled? Maybe.
Over the past seven years, since Harvey Weinstein’s horrors sent the #MeToo movement bursting into everyone’s consciousness, I’ve heard genuine fear from just about everyone in the industry that they’d be taken down for saying the wrong thing.
There were some terrible stories of people fired from jobs because they tweeted something racist years ago, and a few people (like Shane Gillis) lost big job opportunities in showbiz (SNL).
Stories like that are outliers, and that kind of cancelling is silly.
The real fear in the entertainment business was that a bad joke could ruin a career. But that doesn’t happen. (Shane Gillis’s career skyrocketed after the SNL kerfuffle.)
Sometimes people make bad jokes that punch down, like Dave Chappelle hitting trans people. A lot of people don’t like this material, and they have a right to express themselves, as does Dave Chapelle.
That’s not cancelling. That’s a conversation.
Despite the widespread fear, a proper cancelling rarely if ever happened because of an insensitive joke. It happened because of sexual assault and rape.
If you’re raping people, you deserve to be canceled. If you’re not, you never had anything to worry about.
The fear can die now. Tell your jokes! If people get offended, that’s their problem, and you’ll always do better reading rooms and trying not to offend too much.
Have fun.
While I read and love your stack, i have to disagree with you here. I don’t think these canceling catastrophes are outliers. There are a lot of comedians that have suffered because the club fired them. It’s the mob mentality and you can’t underestimate that. It’s the collective “wishing out into the cornfield” that is dangerous. As a comedian, one should offend, push boundaries, have understanding, and point out hypocrisies in people. And other people have the right to listen or shut it off. The Dave Chapelle thing.....well Netflix was the champion there. They stood by freedom of expression. If they hadn’t (and he is a multi million dollar earning comedian working under a multimillion dollar streaming title) he would have been silenced. So I don’t know what chance any younger upstart trying to knock the establishment or be satirical has. The current toothless Onion is but a former shadow of itself....and people who critique the old ones are offended by everything in it. Wha?? There’s a
I have a friend who had a successful political pundit career cancelled because of a joke he made on Twitter that wasn't punching down, but involved lynching. Don't punch down is great advice. But also, think very carefully about making jokes that draw analogies to tropes of extreme historical oppression -- like slavery or misogyny. If you have even a basic grasp of the history of racism in America then you should know that just about any joke that involves lynching is in very poor taste. Go read Ida B. Wells.