5 Feet of Fury

Jerry Seinfeld and moral anorexia: My NEW Taki’s column

Comments are sure to be “JOOOOOO!!!!”-y, sorry…

Second, even Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t quite get it. He singles out Louis C.K. for praise as a younger comic who “doesn’t worry” about PC.

Except he does. And so does C.K.’s female counterpart, Amy Schumer. They’re the comedy Jesus and Mary to millennials because they’ve discovered that a dash or three of sriracha helps audiences of every political persuasion swallow what really amounts to the same old rotten, knee-jerk, “progressive” worldview.

If you simply lard your gags with enough swearing, scatology, and sex, you can make them seem edgier than they really are. As I’ve said here before, every “shocking” C.K. (or now, Schumer) bit is really just an eat-your-kale Afterschool Special, but with swears.

Strip away the cursing and the cringeworthy blather about bodily functions, and this “brilliant, daring, revolutionary” comedy is just “Louis learns that fat girls are human too” and “Eleven ugly men (and one hot guy—I love you, Nick DiPaolo) debate how ugly some woman is—get it??!! #patriarchy!”

(Yes, that’s the Judd Apatow formula, too. But at least Apatow the accidental moralist smuggles in surprisingly traditionalist messages: “Sex isn’t a toy.” “Keep the baby.” The 40 Year-Old Virgin was sublime and ridiculous, while Knocked Up may have aborted as many abortions as the invention of the ultrasound.)