The Buzzfeed company is an online content outlet with a combination of news, science, and entertainment videos and articles. They are based out of Los Angeles and they have a liberal stance on many subjects. Much of what they put out is commentary on pubic perception of social opinions and what they think should or shouldn't be socially acceptable. California as a state is left-leaning and even more so in LA and I think there, more than in other parts of the country, people have to dance around things that might be considered not PC, especially when dealing with comedy. Like what Jerry Seinfeld was saying in an interview with Seth Myers a few weeks ago, he got booed for a relatively harmless joke at a college campus because the liberal crowd felt he was making fun of gay people and it was not politically correct of him.
I love the goofiness of the four men who make up the try-guys, but they tend to have a lesson with most of their videos which I do find irritating. I feel like they're trying to teach me that "it's ok to be yourself" and to "don't judge others" and it begins to become a little preachy. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with trying to teach people a lesson with your comedy, in fact that is what a lot of types of comedy styles, like satire, aims to achieve, but I draw my qualms with the fact that it seems like they are talking down to me like a child. It's like I'm watching a family sit-com where we all learn together that you should always tell the truth. Comedy is meant to break the rules and be edgy and so when it finds itself being confined by the edges of our increasingly PC world it becomes boring and unfunny.
It's interesting that you saw too much PC in the clips--as if the purpose of comedy were not to highlight incongruities, but to show us that it's ok to be incongruous. That's a very interesting take, as if the point was to teach us that, if you want to dress up in a wedding dress, go ahead and do it. Which, of course, I think it is also. I wonder--what would the non PC version of this skit look like? I felt like if anything it was pretty intensely mocking women, which isn't particularly PC. But your point is well taken. I see it now. How would it be possible to minimize it?
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