If pure-hearted laughter is divine, the suppression of it is demonic. This could come to mind with our Left’s war on comedy, which really is happening. It also really is a campaign common to leftists.
Just ask USSR-born comedian Yakov Smirnoff, a man popular during the late Cold War period (the 1980s). As he quipped in an old Miller beer commercial, smiling, “In America, there’s plenty of lite beer and you can always find a party!”
“In Russia, the Party always finds you!”
He was joking, but not kidding. The Soviet Union practiced authoritarian censorship, and jokes had to be approved by a de facto “Department of Humor.” That was a colloquial name for a unit within the USSR’s Ministry of Culture. The latter’s job was to ensure the culture was communist.
And with socialism and communism gaining favor in the United States, so is their its penchant for suppressing good comedy. Writing about this Tuesday, commentator Armando Simon laments left-wing humorlessness. Citing Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez, he writes that she
stated that one of the things that first helped her to break through the indoctrination received at school of the cult of personality of Fidel Castro was her observation that Castro never joked, highly unusual for a Cuban.
Simon then continues:
We are in the midst of a Marxist upheaval going full throttle towards turning America into a Communist utopia. The symptoms are all there: self-censorship, censorship (aka “cancel culture”), political indoctrination of the military, indoctrination in the schools, network news deliberately becoming propaganda outlets, Balkanizing the population, etc.
Another symptom is the slow strangulation of comics and comedy.
Comedians are complaining of the toxic air that is stifling comedy. “Cancel culture” is being waged by insufferable, self-righteous fanatics always lurking in the background, ready to pounce on the slightest transgression. Cancel culture has gone after comics because of the hypersensibility of the chronically offended — in other words, the leftists. It is a type of censorship. Some of the people who partake of the cancel culture also do so for the sheer exercise of power at ruining other people’s lives and livelihood, amazed that it is so easy to do nowadays. The range of punishment varies. Just ask Andrew Dice Clay and Dave Chapelle.
Hellbound and Down 