I’ve been watching a bunch of the NBC series “Last Comic Standing.” I like it, generally speaking, although the guy who won it last year was a travesty. One thing that’s sort of interesting is how so many of the comics are what humorless women in the 1980s would call “misogynists.” A huge amount of the material over the last couple months has been devoted to how women are – or can be — money-grubbing, duplicitous, shrewish, gold-diggers etc. That’s not that interesting except for the fact that nobody even nods to the existence of political correctness or feminism. It’s as if any woman watching will think it’s funny stuff. I suppose that’s progress of a sort, but worth pondering for its broader implications as well. Simply, because something annoys the politically correct doesn’t mean it’s well-mannered.
After all, political correctness is/was in many ways an attempt by the puritain left to reinvent Victorian morality without any reference to God or religion or tradition, rooting it instead in victimology and neo-Romanticism. But, hey, that’s a topic for another day.