‘You can’t say anything anymore’.

Allegedly.

I’ve been a fan of comedy since the early 1980’s. There was always an element of counter culture to it. Back then it involved lampooning the church, and capitalism.

Over the years that edge seems to have blunted. The corporate media is almost never openly satirized. As if there was nothing silly about two goofy upper class nerds unironically trash talking each other into a fist fight (the whole Musk v Zuckerberg MMA thing).

No harm, a milder family friendly form of comedy can be good.

Except it’s not milder. Most of the big name mainstream acts (Chapelle, Carr, Gervais etc.) spend hours as podcast guests shiting on about how they could be cancelled at any moment, and are not afraid to stick it to the system. The ‘sticking it to the man’ generally involves telling a primary school level trans/ knob gag -which is then rapidly promoted to the top of the corporate network feeds.

Any genuinely thought provoking or controversial material is noticeably missing, which is …strange.

I used to publish indie comedy novels using the publishing arm of Amazon (KPD). They have a monopoly. Three years ago I started an online audio comedy story -a seanachaí mix of audio drama and narrative storytelling. It turned into a bit of a Gulliver’s Travels style satire. One of the sections gently mocked the engineers behind online media (parodied as brilliant engineers, but social simpletons). This got a small bit of traction, and may have brought the tale onto the corporate censorship radar. Because shortly after I published that section I was informed by KDP that I had been banned from publishing on their platform, and all copies of my stories were removed from sale.

I tried to get them to disclose the reason for this, but they ‘reserve the right not to disclose decisions which may be of a sensitive commercial nature’.

I can’t help thinking I’m not alone. The dearth of satire in the mainstream social media seems to say I’m not.

So …knob gags it is, along with ‘edgy’ corporate friendly offense, and crowdwork. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

It’s just variety is the spice of life, and …if folk are afraid of people laughing at them, it’s because there’s something funny about them.