A Flipside Editor on the Review’s “Demands”

My grandma said she was worried that too many Latinos were moving into her town. I said, ‘Jesus, grandma, it’s 2016. Don’t be such a racist fag.’”

The only funny thing about the above joke, for all you fans of schadenfreude, is that I actually used to tell it onstage at CoHo on Friday nights. And it wasn’t even for the high-vibe, 7PM, about-to-go-out, pitcher-drinking crowd — it was the 8:30 leftover crew of dazed grad students, with the Sax Man somewhere in the back.

Who am I? I’m just a guy who likes comedy. In fact, I am (as I said in a recent Facebook flame war), “no arbiter of humor, but I’m an editor of the Flipside, so I probably do know me a thing or two about the jokey-jokes.” I’m also now a Robber Baron who still dabbles in stand up, and who has (thankfully) gotten much better at humor writing than he was during the CoHo era.

Thus, it was as a self-identifying comedian that I cringed while I read the Review’s April Fools Day article. “Not once has an administrator inquired as to the relative health of our feelings,” it read, “The system is broken!” Gosh, clever. “WE DEMAND that Stanford renames White Plaza to Black Plaza.” Did you think of that one by yourself? And worst, “WE DEMAND that Stanford builds a wall around El Centro Chicano, and makes MEChA pay for it.”

Oh my. Oh my.

Suffice it to say that the article was ambitiously unfunny, and its unfunniness made it all the more stunningly tone deaf — even for a Review piece. I’m not a writer for SPJ, so I get to just come out and say it when I think stuff like that. Some have pointed out to me in response that humor is subjective, but I can take that only to mean in this case that some are subjected to a life of bad taste in comedy. The piece was really that bad.

However, my main complaint isn’t that the Review swung and missed (hard), nor was that the only reason why I cringed when reading their article. It was also that I could already see in my mind’s rolling eye the resultant accusations of liberal intolerance that were bound to take over my social media feeds.

And boy, were those accusations delivered.

As a Facebook friend of mine put it, “Our inclination to take offense to anything and everything that challenges our own views has gone too far and unfortunately, we have all become victims.” More crudely, a presumptive alumnus named Ken White commented, “25 years later, and nothing has changed: The Stanford Review tries, to the best of its modest abilities, to be edgy, and Stanford’s hordes of totalitarian little pussywillows lose their shit over it.” Responding to the latter, one perceptive netizen chimed in, “C’mon, Ken, admit it — you just don’t like that they want to rename your plaza.” But even the comfort I found in my agreement with the Plaza Name Conspiracy Hypothesis couldn’t ease the nausea my Facebook feed had induced.

Look, Review, despite what your defenders on Facebook, several posters to your article’s comment section, and — to make a probably-not-so-outlandish assumption — you think, the lesson to be learned here isn’t that activists can’t take a joke. It’s that your article flat-out sucked comedically (seriously; it sucked enough to make me willing to fight with SPJ’s editors to let me use the word “sucked”). And when a paper widely considered (i.e., by me) to be tacky and tasteless crashes and burns in a disquietingly bad effort at satire, it is bound to be offensive, if only for how tone deaf the product of that effort is bound to be.

But again, my main point here isn’t to prove the article was bad, and I’m sure there are some people (bless their hearts) who liked it. It’s to point out the remarkable hypocrisy present in arguing (as you have) that activists cry “offense” solely to silence debate, and then following up by silencing anyone offended by your article by asserting they simply can’t take a joke.

By way of extreme example, consider minstrel shows, a 19th century form of entertainment wherein blackface-bearing white actors would satirize (i.e., play into an infuriatingly racist image of) contemporary black culture. Minstrel shows were wildly popular at the time — the equally racist Jim Crow laws that swept the South in the era were literally named after a character of the genre — and were honestly intended by their authors as a satire of a group seen as (as one scholar explains it) “lazy, easily frightened, …inarticulate, buffoon[s].” Putting aside the eerie similarity of those descriptors to the ones we may readily imagine critics of campus activism employing, the question stands: weren’t minstrel shows “just a joke” too? They were honestly meant as satire, and a huge number of people honestly found them funny. Were black Americans offended by these shows just too darn coddled, intolerant, and unwilling to have their worldview challenged? Had they taken too many CSRE classes? Or were they, to put it lightly, on to something in their feelings of offense?

I don’t doubt that minstrel shows are a totally different ballgame than the April Fools Day article, but the broader point stands. As much as the First Amendment guarantees your right to say, “Come on, I was just kidding,” common sense equally guarantees that there are limits to the validity of that defense.

And I am not saying that as a member of the activist community, either. I have literally written op-eds that included criticism of certain activists’ tactics. I’m saying that as someone who cares a lot about comedy, and who isn’t going to let you hide behind a guise of it.

Of course, the “they’re just being touchy” offense is to be expected. It’s common to blame the crowd when comedy goes badly — I absolutely found myself blaming the “PC college atmosphere” when my opening joke and ones like it bombed, and I’ve definitely been frustrated at times by what does and doesn’t get a reaction from Flipside readers. I imagine that this is a doubly attractive avenue to go down for the politically conservative in 2016, a year when Donald Trump defended prior public descriptions of various women as “fat pigs”, “dogs”, “slobs”, and “disgusting animals” by saying, “I don’t have time for total political correctness.” To think, that two-word expression may have actually once meant something.

The key is that, when it came to blaming the audience, I eventually realized I was wrong. The crowd was silent not because of some fear of a PC-backed “witch-hunt.” They weren’t laughing because I wasn’t funny. And that realization helped me grow as a comedian and a human being.

So please, Review, realize that while the political left can sometimes be touchy (I don’t deny that), Stanford’s activist communities are absolutely open to dialogue. Consider that when you published your initial responses to Who’s Teaching Us’ demands (surely a challenge to the activists’ ideas, but one that narrowly managed not to challenge boundaries of taste), there were no widespread calls for an apology, no denunciations of the entire inception of your piece, nor any determinations by SPJ that a guy who wrote the article “CS Major Girlfriend Still Not Down for Back-End Testing” should be the voice of reason on this issue. Just counter-arguments. The kind that happen in a dialogue.

Realize that your defenders’ allegations of a double standard, wherein liberals laugh at jokes about conservatives while voicing offence at any return volleys, range from disingenuously described to imaginary. For such a double-standard to exist, there would have to be some comparably egregious conservative-offending satire that most liberals let pass. Show it to me. Meanwhile, I’ll show you that Flipside absolutely has not shied away from Democratic, liberal, or activist-directed satire (e.g., e.g., e.g.), but that we’ve never (to my knowledge) caused a reaction as negative as the one garnered by the Review’s April Fools Day piece. Perhaps that’s because we think a ton about tone (hint: start doing that), especially when an article is directed toward individuals on campus, regardless of their political stripes. Or maybe (as is relevant for this discussion) certain forms of comedy simply work better with a left-leaning agenda, while other media forms (talk radio, for example) are a better fit for a conservative one. I would be far from the first person to posit that idea. Yes, liberals like laughing at clips from the Daily Show wherein conservatives happen to be the butt of the joke. But I fail to find an example of liberals being offended by an actually funny satire of them. Flipside has done more than one, as have The Onion (e.g., e.g., e.g.), Clickhole (e.g., e.g., e.g.), and others. But nobody freaked out at those, as much as they were pointedly directed at activists. Maybe it’s because they were actually clever and funny.

My point is not about how the activist/minority communities on campus reacted to the piece, any steps they’ve taken in response, or whether the Review should be allowed to publish articles like this one. Obviously, the Review should, in a legal sense, be able to publish whatever it wants.

It’s that the Review should also be able to accept that not all criticism directed toward it is activist drivel. Activist-types can and do engage with ideas that challenge their own, and it’s hard (if not wholly incorrect) to conclude that activists just can’t take a joke when the joke in question was as bad as the Review’s. Instead, it seems that the Review and its supporters have taken to deploying the same topic-avoiding, conversation-silencing techniques they seem so interested in decrying by writing off legitimate disagreement as “political correctness” run amok.

Grow up, swallow your pride, and realize that you put out something tasteless. Do it so you can move on and start adding to campus dialogue. As someone who used to write the liberal side of the Daily’s Super Tuesday series out of an interest in open, spirited debate, I maintain that there is absolutely a need for a strong conservative voice at Stanford. Don’t let yours go the way of the 2016 GOP primary campaigns.

Or don’t take my advice, and keep unnecessarily urging students to associate conservatism with crassness. The entire campus will be the lesser for it. And as the jokes guy in the room, I can certify that that ending wouldn’t be funny at all.

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Ben Kaufman is a junior studying public policy.