'The Office' co-creator says that modern comedy is 'policed by the left', knocks cancel culture
British comedian Stephen Merchant — famous for co-creating "The Office" alongside Ricky Gervais — called out the left for putting a "straitjacket" around comedians by enforcing cancel culture.
"But you do feel like there’s a sensitivity to the words before they’ve even heard the joke or the context," Merchant said in an interview with The Guardian. "And that is inevitably a straitjacket of sorts – it quashes experimentation."
Merchant carefully explained his position on cancel culture, arguing that there have always been limits in comedy.
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"It seems to me that there’s always been policing of comedy, of there being… guardrails," he said. "I think the difference is that it used to feel like it was the Right that was policing it. It feels like it’s the Left that’s doing it now, and it’s allowed the Right to become the arbiters of free speech. Which does feel like quite a significant shift."
Merchant said that, as a comedian, the response online to a joke can be totally out of "proportion" with the joke itself, adding that stand-up comedians have learned to be more careful because they "don’t want to spend weeks on Twitter trying to justify a joke."
Merchant suggested that he understood that the demands for comedy change with time and that he did not want to be a grumpy ‘"old man of comedy’ railing against the younger generation."
But he emphasized the "freedom" of comedy in previous generations.
"And that’s easy for me to say as a White, heterosexual middle-class bloke, but it used to feel like the things you weren’t allowed to joke about were the very things you should," he told The Guardian.
"So for the older generation like me, you do feel a bit like there was a freedom there," Merchant explained. "And that it was your own conscience and judgment that meant you were the arbiter of your own taste."
Instead, the world of comedy has become like a minefield for some comedians, he said.
"But now it does feel like there’s a danger, that there’s a prescriptive list of things you can joke about," Merchant said. "Everything else is off limits, which is a hard thing to navigate when you’re trying to be creative."
Merchant's co-creator in his "Office" days, Ricky Gervais, has famously confronted cancel culture enforcers in public.
After a promo clip of Gervais joking about young cancer patients went viral, a petition was created in response to demand Netflix remove Gervais’ "offensive skit mocking terminally ill children."
"It’s sort of like a reaction. They don’t analyze it. They feel something. That’s what offense is," Gervais said of the backlash against his comedy in a podcast. "It’s a feeling, you know? That’s why, ‘I’m offended,’ is quite meaningless. Because what’s your argument? What do you want me to change?"
Fox News' Stephanie Giang-Paunon contributed to this report.