Feminist Scold Says, "That's Not Funny!"

Amanda Marcotte has taken the stereotype of the dried-up, humorless feminist scold and jumped the shark with it. She wrote an article about Jerry Seinfeld and teased it with the following tweet:

What’s really funny is Seinfeld’s defenders prove, with every gripe and whine, that they like him because they have no sense of humor.

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) June 11, 2015

What's really funny is that a joyless feminist wants to tell me what is funny and what is not funny. I would have never thought that Amanda Marcotte was devoid of self-awareness until just now. Either she doesn't care about being reduced to an archetype, or this is professional-grade trolling.

"Jerry Seinfeld is really not that funny," Marcotte explains. "This is all our collective faults for ever pretending Seinfeld was funny." And, "Wasn’t the joke on Seinfeld that he was a second-rate hack?"

Seinfeld has earned more than three billion dollars in syndication. That is more than the gross national product of thirty countries. That's first-rate hacking.

I understand that different people have different taste in entertainment. I find Will Ferrell funny at times, but he puts his politics front and center of a lot of his routines. I regard him warily, as he belongs to the other tribe.

Maybe Amanda believes that Jerry belongs to the other tribe. Marcotte shows that her feelings are still bruised over Seinfeld's comments last year that she frames as "dismissing the value of diversity in comedy." Seinfeld was asked by Buzzfeed whether he is bothered by criticism that his show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee isn't racially diverse.

He replied, "Who cares? Funny is the world that I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested. I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that." The emphasis on diversity bean-counting is "anti-comedy," he concluded.

Seinfeld also ruffled feathers when he said that he won't do shows at colleges, because the atmosphere of political correctness is pervasive and absurd. Marcotte does acknowledge the salience of this point, saying "some on college campuses use lefty politics as a weapon to try to censor or police the language and ideas" of others. In the very next breath, she dismisses the idea by saying that it's only a "marginal bit of infighting on the left, as opposed to a serious cultural shift towards hypersensitivity or censorship."

It's anything but marginal. Political correctness has become so solidified, that it is now being used as a barrier force guarding against possible desertion. That's the best way to understand the grievances filed against feminist Laura Kipnis, merely for suggesting that the definition of sexual assault is being stretched to fit whatever conduct Title IX coordinators feel like.

Amanda Marcotte reminds me of George Costanza's mother. He tells Jerry, "Listen carefully. My mother has never laughed. Ever. Not a giggle, not a chuckle, not a tee-hee..never went 'ha!'"

That's gold, Amanda! Comedy gold!