About a month ago, commentators were in a brief uproar over a Daily Telegraph article by the comically named Sophia Money-Coutts titled “Generation Z is an employer’s nightmare – my 20s are their shameful.” You know the kind of thing. The author had heard “from his peers” that Zoomers “don’t want to work long days and know their employers can’t do them.”
Can you imagine such a thing? You can. Humans beyond a certain age – barely past childhood in many cases – have been complaining about the imagined collapse of society since we started worshiping turnips. “The wheel? Don’t tell me about the wheel,” Ug the Odoriferous might have said. “In my day, we could drag a saber-toothed tiger for an entire day with a single flask of warmed mud. Now they move around in their sophisticated “carts” Is that the word?
Some of this can be found in complaints about students protesting their university’s relations with Israel. We hear a lot about the supposed decline of popular music. Too many boring rockers care too much about how many collaborators are listed as songwriters on Beyoncé’s albums. (Tell that to the ghosts of Elvis and Frank Sinatra.) This week’s episode of It Was Better Back in the Days — the 15,675th by my count — comes from Jerry Seinfeld.
It began with a relatively gentle evisceration of the contemporary film industry. “Cinema does not occupy the top of the social and cultural hierarchy as it has for most of our lives,” he said, without madness. Then he got into comedy. Woke Watch subscribers will know what to expect. “Before, you went home at the end of the day… People said, ‘Oh, it’s for your health.’ Mash is on,” he said to the imaginary sounds of friendly lawn mowers and suburban bluebirds. “Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is here. Everything in the family is activated. Where is he? Where is he? This is the result of far left and PC bullshit and people who worry so much about offending others.
Of course, there is a band of new puritans – the “useless sex scenes” band – determined to eliminate unease and discomfort from popular culture. The facts, however, suggest that they are not getting what they want.
It seems unkind to point out how flimsy the central thesis is. As noted in this column just a few weeks ago, Seinfeld recently appeared on the latest episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. And it’s hard to imagine a series less “PC” than Larry David’s satirical self-evisceration. Many commenters pointed to the indestructible South Park and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The latter show’s Rob McElhenney responded to Seinfeld’s suggestion that he would no longer be allowed to air the episode of his own eponymous series in which Kramer made rickshaw drivers homeless with a reference to rugged treatment of Always Sunny towards crack addict Rickety Cricket. .
And what about nostalgic examples of Seinfeld, anyway? What about Mary Tyler Moore or Mash could fall foul of the PC Gestapo? Perhaps some of Archie Bunker’s racist language in All in the Family might offend (although he was much more restrained than Alf Garnett, his inspiration in the BBC series Till Death Do Us Part). Certainly, despite parasites like the innocuous Abbott Elementary, the traditional situation comedy no longer has the same hold it once had. The old-school detective series also doesn’t have standalone episodes. Tastes change. This has little to do with the Woke Stasi.
To be fair to Seinfeld, he acknowledged that stand-ups “have the freedom to do it because no one else gets blamed if it doesn’t go well.” It’s hard to ignore the Netflix specials in which Jimmy Carr, Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle smugly disobey every maxim nailed to the virtual cathedral door by the man Seinfeld considers the Martin Luther of the “far left.” Of course, there is a band of new puritans – the “useless sex scenes” band – determined to eliminate unease and discomfort from popular culture. The facts, however, suggest that they are not getting what they want.
Everything changes. Everything remains the same. None of the people mentioned above can ignore that their parents’ and grandparents’ generations also felt that the world was going to hell in the handbasket of Mick Jagger (or Little Richard, or Clara Bow, or Oscar Wilde). The mystery lies in how each successive cohort believes that it, and it alone, has ultimately perfected a culture that will crush the one that comes after it. Of course, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols and hip hop all remained central to the discourse. But this time it’s different. This time, the music is auto-tuned trash, the comedy is PC filth, and the (checks notes) TikToks are brain-eating viruses. This time it will disappear in an instant and we will all go back to watching Leonard Cohen in a field.
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