Comedians are in agreement: It’s hard to do comedy in 2019.

Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr both addressed the issue head-on in their recent stand-up routines. “F---in’ U.S.,” Burr bemoaned on his latest Netflix special. “Everything’s so goddamn heavy. Every joke you tell!”

Joker director Todd Phillips seems to agree. Joker, which chronicles the Batman villain’s descent into madness and murder, is far from a comedy. But Phillips admitted that he made the gritty film because he struggles to create humorous content anymore. Vanity Fair explains , “Phillips had found it increasingly difficult, he says, to make comedies in the new ‘woke’ Hollywood, and his brand of irreverent bro humor has lost favor.”

“Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” Phillips said. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore — I’ll tell you why, because all the f---ing funny guys are like, ‘F--- this shit, because I don’t want to offend you.’”

“It’s hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter,” he continued. “You just can’t do it, right? So you just go, ‘I’m out.’ I’m out, and you know what? With all my comedies — I think that what comedies in general all have in common — is they’re irreverent. So I go, ‘How do I do something irreverent, but f--- comedy? Oh I know, let’s take the comic book movie universe and turn it on its head with this.’ And so that’s really where that came from.”

Comedian and talk show host Bill Maher recently said pretty much the same thing.

“The most important thing that the Democrats can do to win the next election is to broom this element out of their party and stand up to the Twitter mob and the ultrawoke,” he told the New York Times. “And I don’t like the term 'woke,' because it implies I am asleep. I was woke before some of these people were born. I grew up in a household with two liberal parents who were ahead of their time. My father and mother told me about civil rights. I knew what the right thing was. The difference is that liberals protect people, and P.C. people protect feelings.”

Maher, an outspoken liberal, has long distanced himself from the politically correct wing of the movement because, as he says, it’s not about actually protecting people anymore; it’s about protecting their feelings. As for the “P.C. people,” Maher continues:



They don’t do anything. They’re pointing at other people who are somehow falling short of their standards, which could have changed three weeks ago. They’re constantly moving the goalposts so they can go, 'Gotcha!' For example, when I was growing up, the most liberal thing you could do is not see color. Well, that’s wrong now. You see color, always, so you can register your white privilege. But I grew up in the Martin Luther King era: Judge by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. I still think that’s the best way to do it. Not see it.



Twitter has changed the way we react to comedians, from Kevin Hart to ex- SNL hire Shane Gillis. Instead of letting entertainers explain themselves or apologize for some off-color jokes, some spectators aren't concerned with redemption. These days, Maher says, they only want to signal that they're on the right side.

“We live in an era where I don’t think people’s main focus is the truth and/or sussing out something valuable or teachable,” he said. “We live in a time in which people are more concerned with scalps and clicks.”