Gen Z vs. Boomers: Who Are the Real Snowflake Generation?
by James Allen
Image by Aline Viana Prado
The debates over freedom of speech and cancel culture are nothing new, but both have been revivified over the last couple weeks. This is partly due to the ongoing Joe Rogan Spotify saga - which would need a blog of its own to fully unpack - with a litany of commentators, celebrities, industry figures and news/media outlets such as CNN and VICE all campaigning for his de-platforming.
The UK has a free speech debate of its own rumbling on, with comedian Jimmy Carr finding himself at the epicentre of this cultural quagmire after coming under fire for a joke he told in his recent Netflix special, ‘His Dark Material’. For those not familiar, the title of the show should give some indication of the brand of humour Mr. Carr typically adopts. And, although I say recent, the special actually came out about a month and a half ago. Evidently the blatant heinousness of his wrongdoing took a while to trickle down through literally hundreds of thousands of people before rendering Carr the focal point of the ire of British civil society.
You can absolutely see how the joke could offend people - it was an offensive joke. I don’t think it’s necessary to type it out verbatim, since taking a joke out of its original context is an incredibly bad faith approach to comedy that gives no mention of the pacing, delivery, nuance, character, irony (or anything else that might make a joke funny).
As E.B. White said, “dissecting a joke is like dissecting a frog; you understand it better but the frog dies.”
Possibly the main problem with Carr’s joke, however, was that it wasn’t terribly funny or well-crafted. Saying that, it isn’t dissimilar to a joke famously told by Bernard Manning, an equally professionally unpleasant comic in the 70s, who tells a surprised audience about his dad dying in Auschwitz: “he fell out of the machine gun tower” - a joke that has been doing the rounds for years. Both jokes are based on the same misdirection, one just does it quite a bit better.
Perhaps you don’t find that funny either, though. And if you don’t, you’re right. And if you do, you’re also right - because humour is by its very nature subjective. Both jokes, and all jokes for that matter, come from the same place: trying to get a laugh. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they fail. Interestingly, Carr’s joke doesn’t even fall into that second category - it was met with a momentary shocked inhalation followed by enormous laughter. In that sense, the joke served its purpose; it got a laugh, it worked.
Some have claimed that the audience’s laughter adds to the horror, and that the joke oughtn’t be considered a joke, because there are certain things you can’t possibly joke about. However, we can fairly safely assume it was a joke due to the fact that it was told by a comedian, along with a load of other similar jokes, in a recorded comedy special, and because it received a huge laugh from an audience who had paid to go see a comedy show rather than a racist, genocide-celebrating, Nazi rally - as far as we’re aware.
The UK’s Culture Secretary, Nadine Dorries MP, described Carr’s joke as “shocking”, “abhorrent, and “not comedy”. Bearing in mind that Ms. Dorries tweeted in 2017 that “left wing snowflakes are killing comedy and suppressing free speech”, this sudden volte-face is puzzling. One positive, though: given that Gen Z are often lazily labelled as the “snowflake generation”, it is somewhat refreshing to see some good, old-fashioned, right-wing pearl-clutching.
This last point is worth expanding on. While the joke has proved divisive amongst all age groups, the narrative both within the mainstream media as well as some more independent (subtext: oft crackpot) news sources is that cancellation is a Gen Z-driven phenomenon. While this may be true within certain sub-cohorts of the generation, it fails to give an accurate representation of the true feelings of Gen Z – and it certainly has not been reflected in our conversations with our Collective of over 25,000 of them.
Where things become truly problematic is when the threat of legal repercussions for telling jokes become a real possibility. Dorries explained that the Culture Department do not currently have the capability to legally hold Netflix to account for streaming the content, but shortly may do, as the government is looking at introducing a new media bill which will “impose sanctions” on streaming services for sharing “the kind of comments Jimmy Carr made”. All the while no sanctions are imposed on the Chinese government for committing actual genocide against the Uighur population, rather than just joking about genocide.
When we asked our Collective about this proposed bill, 96% of them said they would not support it. Huh, so the supposed ‘woke’ under-30s turn out to be more libertarian when it comes to expression than the supposedly ‘small-government’ Conservative Party. While that may sound paradoxical, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Gen Z yearn for more open conversations, particularly around subjects that have made previous generations squeamish, such as sex, gender, and identity. This equally applies to jokes that make people uncomfortable.
That doesn’t mean they’ll wind up supporting the joke, nor will they necessarily support the joke’s teller, but they’d prefer to talk about it to work out how they really feel. For those who then find themselves firmly in the ‘cancel Jimmy Carr’ camp, they’ll hang him in the court of public opinion by not supporting his work, rather than silencing him in a court of law.
In spite of all the public furore, Jimmy Carr is unlikely to be ‘cancelled’ in any meaningful sense. In fact, this may even give his ticket sales a bump. The real impact, however, will be on those in the entertainment industry not yet successful enough to have a supportive base of fans, who will now relentlessly self-censor so as to not close future doors or even kill their career stone dead before it gets started. Younger, up-and-coming comics will second-guess their material and remove anything that could be considered contentious; TV executives may well do the same - the result of which being a deleterious blandifying and homogenising of entertainment.
It’s impossible to know where the line is without occasionally tiptoeing over it. If anybody ought to be allowed to swing and miss, even catastrophically, it’s comedians. When did f*cking up become such an irreparable condemnation of fate? The predominantly Gen Z-backed notion of ‘being kind’ doesn’t mean eliminating any speech that anyone might find hurtful. Indeed, that same principle of kindness ought to be applied to giving the benefit of the doubt to someone like Jimmy Carr - a self-styled nasty (not Nazi) comedian who has built a career on ironically being the worst person in the room. Maybe, just maybe, this comedian was trying to tell a joke. Trying to get a laugh. And, after all, comedy is meant to be about getting laughs, not claps.
As we’ve said, that doesn’t mean Gen Z believe people should never be held accountable for their words. If you think Jimmy Carr is sick in the head and never wish to hear him tell another joke, that is absolutely your right to believe and act upon. But there is a fairly colossal leap from finding something unfunny to believing that not only should nobody else find it funny, they shouldn’t even be able to hear it to make up their own minds in the first place.
Perhaps the Boomers and the Karens need to think more like the ‘snowflake generation’ when it comes to free speech – hear people out, and then, if need be, eviscerate them in return with the power of argument. Don’t just start moaning to Ofcom because somebody said some naughty words.