I had a great opportunity to see Jeff Dunham live in Regina recently.
To those of you who don't know about him, I'd say, you are missing out. First, he is a really talented ventriloquist and a stand-up comedian with a sense of humour, 98 per cent of which I sincerely appreciate, the type that I hardly see these days. And second, a good laugh is something I think everyone needs these days.
Last weekend Jeff brought his puppet team – Walter, Bubba J, Peanut, Achmed and a new guy, Url – to the Queen City on his Seriously tour.
The show was so good, that it made me forget about everything else for a couple of hours and my face was sore from laughing for a while after. So if you ever have a chance to see him, I'd highly recommend it just for the sake of significantly extending your life.
But what caught my attention was the comment Jeff made at the beginning of the show before he started joking. He reminded the public that while he touches on different hot-button topics, the point of what he is saying is to make people laugh and have a good time. It was a lengthy remark, and he almost apologized in advance if something he says would make someone in the audience feel offended.
I've never been to his live shows in the past, but I've been to some other ones and I've never heard any comedians saying anything like that before the pandemic. In this show, Jeff joked about the American and Canadian politics, Canada in general, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and other current matters, but none of it was even close to being too provocative to my taste.
I've seen comedians having way meaner jokes, way dirtier language and way more prejudice in what they were saying, and none of them ever apologized even when the crowd would give them a long boo. This time jokes were smart and funny.
People come to a comedy show to laugh, and jokes about what matters do the job better than anything else. There's always been a difference between good and mean jokes, and that remark made me think that the latest category might have gotten wider over the past couple of years.
That mean group grew bigger well before the pandemic when jokes about women, race and any kinds of marginalized groups were finally taken for what they were – systematic oppression. But it seems that things have changed even more since early 2020 when a great chunk of our lives moved over to the virtual space – a world where anyone has a platform to manifest their opinions, anyone anywhere may hear those words, and every other one is taking strangers' manifests about anything personally.
This tendency existed before the pandemic, but I think it got worse lately. I guess, the two years of anxiety, instability, fear and changes – the only constant we had throughout this time – affected our reactions big time too, making us even more sensitive. On top of that, some of those who ended up experiencing one of the 50 modes of COVID, myself included, will tell that one of the "exciting" side effects is the excess negativity, sometimes almost instantly turning into aggression.
It does fade away with time, but those who felt it may agree that those few days or weeks felt pretty dangerous, first of all for people around.
All these factors combined and topped with some other circumstances I probably didn't think of, resulted in a different society, now trying to "get back to normal." Psychologists probably could explain the growth among the keyboard warriors population and their motives, as well as why people let their guards down and get so easily offended by some virtual iffy who-knows-who.
I don't know the answers, but that remark at the show made me realize that now that we are going back to offline, it seems that we are taking those tendencies with us into in-person interactions.
And almost echoing my thought shortly after the show the news about the Oscar incident reached me. I don't follow the Academy Awards, but the unprecedented moment when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock right on stage couldn't go by.
By no means would Rock's joke be appropriate in any kind of setting, let alone the Oscars ceremony with its level of publicity. Yet, Smith's reaction was pretty outrageous, too. I can't even imagine what their family has been going through in the sense of stress, emotions and feelings over the last years, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone swearing or seen anyone fighting at the Academy Awards before.
It definitely resonated with the general post-pandemic vibe. But does it mean that we are now living in a world where a slap in the face is a response to a stupid or mean joke? Hopefully not. But it does seem like the list of our triggers significantly grew over the past two years.
