Tina Fey has always been on the forefront of progressive comedy. 30 Rock was about a woman trying to have it all in a man's world and slowly rising to power within that space. The first season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt told the twinned stories of women escaping from patriarchy in the most explicit ways: Ellie Kemper as the titular character, the victim of a kidnapping preacher who kept her in a basement, and Jane Krakowski as Jacqueline Voorhees, a Manhattan socialite trying to please her outrageously wealthy husband. "Females are strong as hell," the theme song declares.

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Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt's second season has now taken the next step. It is a show without any straight white males—or rather, in the first six episodes, only three SWMs appear, and only momentarily: one as an auctioneer, another as a boy toy, and the third as the traditional rich man in New York club. Almost every last scene passes the Bechdel test. While the first season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was anti-patriarchal, the second season is post-patriarchal.

The good news is that it's still very funny. For decades—for a generation, really—the fundamental assumption about comedy has been that it had to be offensive; it had to violate the norms of society. Only by stripping away the proprieties of polite society—and running deep into the racist, sexist, and homophobic underbelly of the psyche—could it be truly funny. That was how you made comedy that was "edgy," that wasn't just, you know, Bill Cosby telling stories about his kids.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has always played around the edge of political correctness just like Fey's previous sitcom, subverting and supporting it simultaneously. Titus Andromedon revels in a whole range of gay stereotypes for comic effect but then can switch to straight political satire. Perhaps the funniest bit of the last season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was when Titus discovered that he was less scary dressed as a werewolf than when he walked down the street as a black man.

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Season Two goes back and forth between these two modes of social commentary. When Titus stars in a one-man play as a geisha, the politically correct response is a hilarious parody of Internet outrage. If you freeze the screen, which is something you sometimes have to do with Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, you can read the commentary on a site devoted to "Respectful Asian Portrayals in Entertainment." (Spell it out.) "Has anyone else seen these posters for 'Kimono You Didn't' uptown?" one commenter says. "Some guy is dressing up like a geisha and it's super racist! This is exactly the kind of thing that our community should be mobilizing against. Also, anyone else know a good place to get my dog's nails trimmed?" A later commentator points out, "As my mother-in-law always said, and I quote, 'There's no excuse for rudeness.'"

Titus, of course, becomes quickly obsessed with the social media outrage machinery. "I was one of their top five Hitlers!" he screams. "Hitler wasn't even on the list." When confronted by a group of protestors from R.A.P.E., Kimmy notices a white guy among them, who announces, "I'm transracial, you dumb dick." After the group has been pacified by a beautiful performance, they sit around wondering, "What do we do now that we can't feel offended?" And one of their members, in confusion, confesses, "Yeah, it's weird. It's like I can't breathe. Wait a minute? I can't say that. I offended myself." Then she is taken up to heaven in a flash of white light.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt reframes comic edginess. For one thing, it has always combined a kind of dirty-minded gross-out humor—references to foot fetishism and using gas station bathrooms and last names reflecting family histories of bestiality—with the almost cloying sweetness of Kimmy herself. She is the kind of naif drifting through modernity that has been a comic subject since, at the very least, Voltaire's Candide. But the show also uses a kind of 360-degree satire that humiliates and supports everybody. It is refreshingly humanizing. Tina Fey has figured this out: In 2016, niceness is the one truly revolutionary act.

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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